Read “Pre-Election Analysis: Politics in the Pulpit” from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Read a briefing on the rules regarding charities, churches and politics.

Read the full IRS rules for charities on political and lobbying activity.

Read the Internal Revenue Service’s rules on tax exemption for religious groups.

Greg W. Hamilton, president of the Vancouver, Wash.-based Northwest Religious Liberty Association, supports the idea of faith-based initiatives with an important qualification: He does not support government-funded faith-based groups discriminating in their hiring practices or offering sectarian programming. Hamilton is an ordained minister of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and a scholar of church-state issues.

Jimmy Dorrell is co-founder and executive director of Mission Waco, a ministry to empower the poor, mobilize middle-class Americans and address systematic social injustices. He is pastor of Church Under the Bridge and also teaches classes at Baylor University and Truett Seminary in Waco.

Charles Marsh is a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia and director of the university’s Project on Lived Theology, which aims “to understand the way theological commitments shape the social patterns and practices of everyday life.”

Read “New Hampshire’s Social Service Contracts with Faith-Based Organizations,” an April 2004 report from the NH Center for Public Policy Studies

Peter Dobkin Hall is a lecturer in public policy and a senior research fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He does research on social welfare policy and civic engagement and has held a teaching appointment in the Divinity School.