It's to the best of our knowledge from PRX.

In the late 1960s, the great scholar of religion, Elaine Pagels, had a religious experience she's still thinking about.

It was at a Billy Graham rally.

Was it religion? Was it Christianity?

What is it about that that was so powerful? And anyway, who was

Jesus? And what do we know about him? How did the movement start? I'm Anne Strain Champs. And if you strip

away the doctrine, the dogma, the rules for how to live, what actually is religion?

I'm interested in the kind of experiential sources of religion.

You're talking about that, what people actually experience that then later turns into a codified

sense of religion.

I'm sort of interested in religion before it becomes religion.

This hour, the roots of religion, in personal experience and in forgotten secret histories.

It's to the best of our knowledge from PRX.

I'm Anne Strange, Champs.

Have you ever had an experience so unlikely, so dramatic, so trippy, that you struggle to explain it to yourself, let alone to other people.

I had just pulled into the parking lot of my Houston synagogue

with my four-year-old and my two-year-old sons in the car.

It had been a beautiful late summer day up until that point.

When the sky just opened up and the storm just came out of nowhere.

For Elizabeth Crone, it happened in an instant.

She tells the story in her memoir, it changed in a flash.

I told Jeremy, my four-year-old, to get out and run to the building. There was an awning there

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