Mike Murphy is a Republican political consultant with Navigators Global who has advised candidates, including John McCain, Jeb Bush, former Michigan Gov. John Engler and Romney. In February 2006, Murphy stepped away from Romney’s campaign.

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 roundup of how Mormon candidates and legislators fared in the 2008 election from the website By Common Consent.

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.

E.J. Dionne Jr. is a senior fellow for governance studies at the Brookings Institution. His books include, as co-editor, What’s God Got to Do With the American Experiment?

Americans United for Life describes itself as “the first national pro-life organization in America.” Charmaine Yoest is president of the Chicago-based group.

The American Life League promotes anti-abortion legislation. Judie Brown is president and co-founder of the organization, which is based in Virginia.

Ravi Batra is an economics professor at Southern Methodist University and author of The New Golden Age: The Coming Revolution Against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming January 2007). Batra says journalists should investigate such issues as how political corruption creates poverty and how politicians exploit religion to get elected and then adopt policies to benefit […]