Michelle Goldberg is an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. She is also the author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, which discusses “dominion theology,” which links Christianity and political governance.

Albert J. Raboteau specializes in African-American religious history at Princeton University.

Vincent Phillip Muñoz teaches religion and and public life at the University of Notre Dame. He focuses on the founders and religious freedom.

Tim LaHaye, co-author of Left Behind, the apocalyptic novel series, also wrote Faith of Our Founding Fathers: A Comprehensive Study of America’s Christian Foundations.

James H. Hutson is chief of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress and author of The Founders on Religion: A Book of Quotations (Princeton University Press, 2005). Manuscript Division holdings include a rough draft of the Declaration of Independence in Thomas Jefferson’s own handwriting. Hutson has taught history at the College of William and Mary […]

Gordon S. Wood is a professor of history at Brown University in Providence, R.I., specializing in the American Revolutionary era. He wrote Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (Penguin Press, 2006). In it he argues that the founders had a clear vision of the life of a nation as a matter of moral progress.

A Stateline.org story. The U.S. government continues to increase funding for abstinence-only education and requires states to teach abstinence only in order to receive funds. In November 2005, Maine joined California and Pennsylvania in rejecting thousands of federal dollars in favor of teaching comprehensive sex education.

Brooke Allen, a cultural and literary critic, is the author of Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers. Allen joined the faculty at Vermont’s Bennington College in 2011.

Read an interview with Daniel Sack, author of Whitebread Protestants: Food and Religion in American Culture (St. Martin’s Press, 2000) and associate director of the Material Religion Project.