In a June 9, 2011, interview at Patheos, evangelical Warren Cole Smith answered the many  critics of an earlier column he wrote explaining why he and other evangelicals should not support a Mormon candidate. A blog post at The Salt Lake Tribune parses the original column and provides links to alternate views.

Read a June 21, 2011, story at CNN’s Belief Blog about Jon Huntsman’s Mormonism.

Read an Oct. 3, 2011, column by Michael Gerson in The Washington Post. The piece, in which Gerson says that “A portion of conservative Christianity is unhinged in its condemnation, regarding Mormonism as a dangerous, secretive cult,” ran several days before pastor Robert Jeffress’ recent comments about the LDS church.

Read “Why Do Southerners Call Mormonism a Cult? A brief history of anti-Mormonism,” an Oct. 10, 2011, interview at Religion Dispatches with Patrick Q. Mason, a leading scholarly expert on anti-Mormonism.

Barbara Brown Zikmund is a historian and a fellow at the Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Her research and writing has focused on the role of women in the church, the evolution of 20th-century Protestant denominations (with special attention to the United Church of […]

Jane Iwamura is the chair of the religious studies program at the University of the West in Rosemead, Calif. She specializes in Asian-American religions, race and popular culture. She co-edited Revealing the Sacred in Asian & Pacific America.

Carolyn Chen is an associate professor in the ethnic studies department at the University of California, Berkeley, whose research interests include religion, ethnicity, immigration and sociology of work.

Michael O. Emerson is a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has written several books on race and religion, including People of the Dream: Multiracial Congregations in the United States and Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America.

Michael Leo Owens is an associate professor of political science at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga. specializing in urban politics; state and local politics; political penology; governance and public policy processes; religion and politics; and African American politics. He is the author of the 2007 book God and Government in the Ghetto: The Politics of […]