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.

Kristen Day is executive director of Democrats for Life of America, an organization that works toward the election of Democrats who oppose abortion.

Amy Sullivan is a contributing writer for TIME magazine and a former editor for Washington Monthly, where she wrote of the Democrats’ need to reclaim religion from the Republican Party. She is the author of The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats are Closing the God Gap (Scribner, 2008).

Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics 2012. He has said Americans increasingly vote as they pray or don’t pray.

Corwin E. Smidt is a research fellow at the Paul B. Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics and a professor of political science at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich. He is author, editor or co-author of books on religion and public life, including In God We Trust? Religion and American Political […]

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).

Geoffrey Layman is chair of the political science department at the University of Notre Dame and co-editor of the journal Political Behavior. He wrote The Great Divide: Religious and Cultural Conflict in American Party Politics.

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.

Richard R. Gaillardetz is the Joseph Professor of Catholic Systematic Theology at Boston College. He is also the author of By What Authority? A Primer on Scripture, the Magisterium, and the Sense of the Faithful (Liturgical Press, 2003).