David R. Bains teaches the history of American Christianity at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala.

Stephen McDowell is president and co-founder of the Providence Foundation in Charlottesville, Va. It says its mission is spreading liberty and justice among nations, and it uses the example of America’s founding to illustrate the relationship between theology and civil government.

In January 2006, Journal of Adolescent Health published a review of U.S. sex education policies and programs, concluding that the government’s push for abstinence-only education is “morally problematic” and threatens teens’ human rights to “health, education and life.”

Isaac Kramnick teaches government at Cornell University and co-authored The Godless Constitution: A Moral Defense of the Secular State (W.W. Norton, 2005). His 1996 American Prospect essay “Is God a Republican?” reflects on religious entanglement in partisan politics. Book co-author R. Laurence Moore teaches American studies at Cornell.

Jonathan D. Sarna is professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. He is co-author of Religion and State in the American Jewish Experience and author of American Judaism: A History, which won the Jewish Book Council’s Jewish Book of the Year Award in 2004.

David D. Hall specializes in 17th- and 18th-century American religious history at Harvard Divinity School and can talk about popular religion during the time of the founders.

The United States government’s principal agency for protecting the health of all Americans and providing essential human services.

Responsible for federal programs which promote the economic and social well-being of families, children, individuals, and communities.

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), for matching grants to states to provide abstinence education and, at state option, mentoring, counseling, and adult supervision to promote abstinence from sexual activity, with a focus on groups that are most likely to bear children out-of-wedlock.