Elaine Kamarck is a lecturer in public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. She was a senior policy adviser to the 2000 Gore campaign for president and worked in the Clinton-Gore administration.

Samuel Abrams is a political science professor at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. He is the author of Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America.

Read an essay by Melissa Harris Lacewell ( Harris-Perry)posted on the Martin Marty Center website about African-American religion and its relationship to politics and voting.

Melody Barnes is vice provost for global student leadership initiatives at New York University. She previously served as President Barack Obama’s domestic policy adviser.

Melissa Harris-Perry is a professor of political science at Tulane University in New Orleans, host of MSNBC’s “Melissa Harris-Perry” and author of Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2004).

Bruce David Forbes is a professor of religious studies at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, specializing in religion in America and religion and popular culture. He is co-editor of Rapture, Revelation and the End Times: Exploring the ‘Left Behind’ Series. Forbes also co-edited the book Religion and Popular Culture in America.

Russell Arben Fox is a political science professor at Friends University in Wichita, Ks. On In Medias Res, a blog of his writings, he has written that the Democratic Party has abandoned religious progressives. He has called for transformation of America’s political and party system.

Charles C. Haynes is the founding director of the Religious Freedom Center at the Freedom Forum Institute. He writes and speaks extensively on religious freedom and faith in public life, specializing in church-state conflict related to public schools.  

Eugene Volokh teaches law at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has written extensively about religious exemptions, freedom of speech and religious accommodation law.