Read an April 5, 2006, article from Slate that analyzes factions and priorities among groups on the Religious Left.

See Beliefnet’s guide to leaders of the Religious Left.

Joe Wheeler is the author of 2008’s Abraham Lincoln: A Man of Faith and Courage and a general editor for Focus on the Family. He lives in Conifer, Colo.

Stewart Winger is an assistant professor of history at Illinois State University in Normal. His dissertation, written under Martin Marty at the University of Chicago, was titled Lincoln’s Religious Rhetoric: American Romanticism and the Antislavery Impulse. It was published as the 2003 book Lincoln, Religion and Romantic Cultural Politics.

John Turner teaches American history at the University of South Alabama in Mobile. He specializes in 19th-century American civil religion.

Chuck Queen is senior pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Frankfort, Ky. In 2008, he gave a sermon about the Christian directive to love one’s enemies, in which he used Lincoln’s choice of his Cabinet as a major example.

James Byrd Jr. is an associate professor of American religious history at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., where he has taught a class in religion and war in American history. He is also an expert on this story of Baptists and Methodists in the U.S. He has written two books about religion in early American […]

Robert Kraynak is a political science professor at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y. He is the author of Christian Faith and Modern Democracy: God and Politics in the Fallen World, which examines America’s civil religion and its government.

Julie Roy Jeffrey is a history professor at Goucher College in Baltimore. She has written about the religious landscape of the mid-19th century in relation to Lincoln’s presidency.