An August 2005 Pew Forum poll examines the attitudes of various religious groups, including Catholics, toward politics and salient issues.

A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll conducted in late June 2006 about voter views on the religious affiliations of possible presidential candidates showed that 10 percent of respondents would not vote for a candidate who was Roman Catholic. Yet that figure is much lower than the 21 percent who said they would not vote for an evangelical Protestant, […]

Chris Soper is a professor of political science at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., and the author of Evangelical Christianity in the United States and Great Britain: Religious Beliefs, Political Choices.

The Rev. Russell Johnson is senior pastor at Fairfield Christian Church in Lancaster, Ohio. He and the Rev. Rod Parsley of World Harvest Church in Columbus have been accused by other Ohio pastors of using their churches as political platforms to advance conservative policies and Republican candidates.

Kevin Phillips, former Republican strategist, is a political and economic commentator. He is the author of American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (2006), in which he describes the Republican Party as “the first American religious Party” in America. Contact via Laura Tisdel.

Peter Wehner is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a former deputy assistant to President George W. Bush. Wehner wrote a Dec. 31, 2007, National Review article titled “Among Evangelicals, a Transformation.”

Jimmy Carter is a former president of the United States and a Southern Baptist. In his book, Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis, he writes of an “unapologetic crusade underway to merge fundamentalist Christians with the right wing of the Republican Party.” Contact through Tony Clark at the Carter Presidential Library.

Mark Rozell is a professor of public policy at George Mason University in Arlington, Va., and co-editor of Religion and the American Presidency, Religion and the Bush Presidency and The Values Campaign?: The Christian Right and the 2004 Elections.

Randall Balmer holds the John Phillips Chair in Religion at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. He is an expert on American religious history and especially American evangelicalism and the role of religion in American presidential politics. He is the author of Evangelicalism in America, Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter and God in the White House: How Faith […]