What about online communities seething with resentment against feminism, whose true believers threaten rape, beheading, and shooting so persistently and credibly that terrified women have to cancel public appearances or flee their homes, forcing other women to silence themselves lest they, too, be made to fear for their lives?
Ledgerwood's panel guests included Ali Eteraz, whose Native Believer returned my mind to a prevailing theme of the day – the Muslim experience in America.
The language of faith ("advocates," "believers," "supporters," "devotees") has been transformed into the slogans of commerce (you can just imagine a company whose logo reads "Believers in people, ideas and things!").
A neutral observer would like to be more encouraging to those legions of true believers whose emotional well-being swings with the Bears' fortunes each Sunday.
Haiti's political opposition consists of an assortment of career politicians, ideologically promiscuous opportunists and occasional true believers whose commitment to democracy is questionable.
And the lure of the strongman is particularly powerful for those believers whose theology was somewhat Trumpian already — nationalistic, prosperity-worshiping, by turns apocalyptic and success-obsessed.
And I suppose that my friends and I sought it out among Christian preachers rather than among ecstatic Hasidim precisely because of the sharp doctrinal difference: as Jews, we might have seen ourselves as part of a continuum with Hasidic believers whose basic tenets were as distant from us as pastrami on white with mayo.
She is a challenge, on the one hand, to those who believe that religious influence on politics is pernicious and illegitimate; and, on the other hand, to those believers whose main contribution to public life is to promote their own church rather than being driven by their faith to fight for justice and peace.
The war on terror, according to Ms. Mayer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, was a "political battle cloaked in legal strategy, an ideological trench war" waged by a small group of true believers whose expansive views of executive power she traces from the Nixon administration through the Iran-contra scandal to the panicked days after 9/11.
But thousands of Orthodox believers, whose leaders in Moscow oppose the pope's visit, have tried unsuccessfully to barricade this country against what they regard as a Roman Catholic intrusion as they struggle to define their spiritual identity in the wake of the Soviet collapse a decade ago.
