U.S. Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., was appointed to the Senate in May 2011 to fill the vacancy left by Sen. John Ensign’s resignation. Heller previously represented Nevada’s 2nd District in the U.S. House, and before that, he served many years in state government.

U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, is a member of the LDS church who has run for president. In the 2000 presidential primaries, he encountered anti-Mormon sentiment in the Midwest and ultimately withdrew from the race.

U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, is a member of the LDS church.

Rodney Stark is the author of The Rise of Mormonism, a collection of essays. He is Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Stark has frequently delved into the historical aspects of Christian origins, in books such as The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History and Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity […]

Sarah Barringer Gordon is a professor of constitutional law and history at the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in church-state conflicts and American religious history. She is the author of The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America and The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America. 

Noah Feldman is a professor at Harvard Law School whose specialties include the relationship between law and religion. He gave the keynote address, “Persecution and the Art of Secrecy: An Interpretation of the Mormon Encounter with American Politics,” at a 2007 conference on Mormonism and American politics. He also wrote a July 22, 2007, essay in The New […]

Damon M. Cann, an assistant professor of political science at Utah State University in Logan, conducted a 2008 study titled “Religious Identification and Legislative Voting: The Mormon Case,” in which he concludes that Mormon representatives are no more unified in their voting behavior than any randomly selected set of legislators.

Read a Pew Forum analysis (updated in February 2011) titled “Faith on the Hill: The Religious Composition of the 112th Congress.” It finds that Mormons are better-represented in Congress than they are in the U.S. population.

John Rustin is president and executive director of the North Carolina Family Policy Council, based in Raleigh. The council focuses on a variety of faith-related issues, including conversion therapy and gambling.