Mormonism and American Politics

The Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University is bringing historians, political scientists, philosophers, legal scholars, award-winning journalists, documentary filmmakers, and noted public intellectuals from a variety of faith traditions to discuss the contested intersection between religion and American politics as this issue is playing out currently on the national stage with regards to Mormonism.

The two-day conference will be held on November 9-10 in 222 Bowen Hall on the Princeton University campus (a map designating Bowen Hall is here: The conference is free and open to the public. No advance registration is necessary.

Hosted by the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, this conference is also sponsored by Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton’s Center for Human Values, the Charles Redd Center, and the Religious Studies Program at Utah Valley State College.

The event begins at 8 p.m. Friday, Nov. 9, and continues until 5 p.m., Saturday, Nov.10. A complete conference schedule is given below.

Free parking is available on the Princeton University campus in the parking garaged and parking lot (Lot 3) adjacent to Bowen Hall. For directions and travel information click here. Members of the news media interested in attending should RSVP no later than noon Wednesday, Nov. 7 by e-mailing csrelig@princeton.edu.

About the Conference:

Mitt Romney’s run for the White House raises perennial questions about the place of religion in the public square and offers scholars an interesting occasion to reconsider the relationship between religion and American politics. The media has made much of Romney’s religion and so have some sectors of the American public. What can we learn from public attitudes about Mormonism? Are the religious beliefs of a political candidate relevant to serving in office, and if so, how? Are there political implications to Mormonism? Do the careers of other Mormon politicians shed any light on this question? In what ways is Mormonism politically comparable to other religious groups?

Four separate panels will explore 1) the earliest encounters of Mormonism and American politics, 2) Mormonism as a case study for church/state issues 3) Mitt, Mormonism, and the media 4) the role religious identity plays in the public square.

Participants include Richard Bushman, Richard Land, Kathleen Flake, Philip Barlow, Marci Hamilton, Alan Wolfe, Helen Whitney, Mark Silk, Noah Feldman, Sarah Barringer Gordon, Stephen Macedo, Thomas Griffith, Melissa Proctor, Robert George, Russell Arben Fox, Chris Karpowitz, David Campbell, John Green, and Francis Beckwith.

Please see brief bios of participants below.

About Center for the Study of Religion:

Founded in 1999, Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University encourages greater intellectual exchange and interdisciplinary scholarly studies about religion among faculty and students in the humanities and social sciences. The Center aims to facilitate understanding of religion through an integrated program of support for Princeton faculty to pursue research and teaching on thematic projects, awards for Princeton graduate students to complete dissertation research, interdisciplinary seminars, undergraduate courses, public lectures, and opportunities for visiting scholars to affiliate with the Center.

Other upcoming events at the Center for the Study of Religion include:
11/12/07 “The Impact of Faith in Public Service,” a lecture by Congressman Frank Wolf, Virginia.

11/19/07 "The Protocols of the Elders of Greenwich: The Secret American Plot to Rule the World," a lecture by Walter Mead, Council on Foreign Relations.

For more information, contact:
Center for the Study of Religion
5 Ivy Lane
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08540 USA
--
Phone: 609-258-5545
Fax: 609-258-6940
E-mail: csrelig@princeton.edu
www.princeton.edu/~csrelig

About the Participants

Philip Barlow has recently departed Indiana and Hanover College to become the Leonard J. Arrington Professor of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University , which is launching a new initiative in the study of religion.  He is the author of Mormons and the Bible: the Place of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion (1991) and the New Historical Atlas of Religion in America (with Edwin Scott Gaustad, 2000).  With Mark Silk, he is the editor of Religion and Public Life in the Midwest : America 's Common Denominator? (2004).  He is currently contemplating secularity, religion, and the concept and experience of “time.”

Francis J. Beckwith is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies, Baylor University , where he teaches in the departments of philosophy and political science as well as the J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies. A 2002-2003 Visiting Research Fellow in Princeton's James Madison Program, his books include Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice (Cambridge University Press, 2007), To Everyone An Answer: A Case for the Christian Worldview (InterVarsity Press, 2004), and The New Mormon Challenge (Zondervan, 2002), a finalist for the Gold Medallion Award in theology and doctrine. He earned his PhD in philosophy from Fordham University and a Master of Juridical Studies degree from the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis .

 

Richard Bushman is Gouverneur Morris Professor of History emeritus at Columbia University and author of Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2005). He has been appointed Visiting Professor of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University for 2007-2008. Among his books in early American history is a study of material culture, The Refinement of America : Persons, Houses, Cities (1992).

 

David E. Campbell is the John Cardinal O'Hara, C.S.C. Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, as well as a research fellow with Notre Dame's Institute for Educational Initiatives. His recent book Why We Vote: How Schools and Communities Shape Our Civic Life (2006) demonstrates how schools can foster a sense of civic responsibility in adolescents that, in turn, leads to a lifetime of civic engagement. He is also the editor of the recently-published volume A Matter of Faith: Religion in the 2004 Presidential Election (2007) and a co-author of two other books: The Education Gap : Vouchers and Urban Schools (2002) , and Democracy at Risk: How Political Choices Have Undermined Citizenship and What We Can Do About It (2005). Along with Paul Peterson, he has edited the book Charters, Vouchers, and a Public Education (2001) .  In addition to these books, he has published articles in a number of scholarly journals on such subjects as schools, young people, religion, and civic engagement.

 

Currently, David is collaborating on a book with Harvard University 's Robert Putnam, provisionally titled American Grace: The Changing Role of Religion in American Civic Life . David has a B.A. from Brigham Young University , and both a M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University .

 

Noah Feldman specializes in constitutional studies, with particular emphasis on the relationship between law and religion, constitutional design, and the history of legal theory. Professor of law at Harvard Law School , he is also a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Before joining the Harvard faculty, Feldman was Cecelia Goetz Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. He was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2005. In 2004 he was a visiting professor at Yale Law School and a fellow of the Whitney Humanities Center . In 2003 he served as senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq , and subsequently advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of the Transitional Administrative Law or interim constitution. From 1999 to 2002, he was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University . Before that he served as a law clerk to Justice David H. Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court (1998 to 1999) and to Chief Judge Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (1997 to 1998). He received his A.B. summa cum laude in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 1992. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar, he earned a D.Phil. in Islamic Thought from Oxford University in 1994. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1997, serving as Book Reviews Editor of the Yale Law Journal. He is the author of three books: Divided By God: America's Church-State Problem and What We Should Do About It (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2005); What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building (Princeton University Press 2004); and After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2003).

 

Kathleen Flake is Associate Professor of American Religious History, Vanderbilt University Graduate Department of Religion and Divinity School.   Her subject area expertise is in the area of adaptive strategies of American religions and constitutional questions of church and state.   She recently published The Politics of Religious Identity: the Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle with University of North Carolina Press .  Flake practiced law for fifteen years in Washington, D.C., litigating civil rights and tort actions on behalf of the federal government.  Frequently invited to comment on Mormonism in the news, she is also a panelist for the Washington Post/Newsweek' s "On Faith" blog.

 

Russell Arben Fox is assistant professor of political science and director of the Political Science program at Friends University in Wichita , KS . He received his Ph.D. in Political Theory from Catholic University of America. He has published articles on religion, education, American political thought, East Asian political thought, communitarianism, and nationalism in Polity , The Review of Politics, Philosophy East and West , American Behavioral Scientist , Theory and Research in Education , and The Responsive Community . He has been an active participant in Mormon internet symposiums and blogging since 2003.”

John Green is a senior fellow in religion and American politics at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. He also serves as director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics and Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Akron.

John has done extensive research on American religious communities and politics. Before joining the Pew Forum, he enjoyed a long association with it and other projects supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts. Since 1990, the Trusts have supported his widely cited surveys, conducted in presidential election years, on the political fault lines running through America 's religious landscape. John is also co-author of The Diminishing Divide: Religion's Changing Role in American Politics (Brookings Institution Press, 2000), with Andrew Kohut, president of the Forum's parent organization, the Pew Research Center, and Scott Keeter, the Center's director of survey research.

In addition to publishing his most recent book The Faith Factor: How Religion Influences American Elections (2007), John is also the co-author of The Values Campaign: The Christian Right in American Politics (Georgetown University Press, 2006), The Bully Pulpit: The Politics of Protestant Clergy (University Press of Kansas, 1997), and Religion and the Culture Wars (Rowman & Littlefield, 1996). In addition he has published more than 60 scholarly articles and more than 35 essays in the popular press. He is widely known as an observer of national and Ohio politics, and is frequently quoted in the press, including The New York Times , The Washington Post , Newsweek , Time , NPR, CNN, ABC and CBS. The Los Angeles Times described Green as the nation's "preeminent student of the relationship between religion and American politics."

Green received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Cornell University in 1983 and his B.A. in Economics from the University of Colorado in 1975.

Thomas B. Griffith was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in June 2005. He graduated from Brigham Young University in 1978 and from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1985. Judge Griffith was engaged in private practice from 1985 through 1989 in Charlotte , North Carolina , where he was an associate at Robinson, Bradshaw and Hinson, and from 1989 through 1995 and again in 1999 and 2000 in Washington , DC , where he was first an associate and then a partner at Wiley, Rein and Fielding. In private practice, his primary areas of emphasis were commercial and corporate litigation. From 1995 through 1999, Judge Griffith was Senate Legal Counsel of the United States , the chief legal officer of the United States Senate. In 1999 and 2000, Judge Griffith was General Counsel to the Advisory Commission on Electronic Commerce, a congressional commission created to study the interplay between tax policy and electronic commerce. In 2002 and 2003, Judge Griffith was a member of the United States Secretary of Education's Commission on Opportunity in Athletics, which was charged with examining the role of Title IX in intercollegiate athletics. From 2000 until his appointment to the United States Court of Appeals, Judge Griffith was Assistant to the President and General Counsel of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Judge Griffith is a member of the Executive Committee of the American Bar Association's Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative.

 

Sarah (Sally) Barringer Gordon , Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law & History at the University of Pennsylvania , teaches in the areas of church and state, property, and legal history in the law school, and American religious and constitutional history in the history department. Sally is the author of The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), which won the 2003 Best Book Awards from both the Mormon History Association and the Utah Historical Society, and is currently at work on a twentieth-century book on law and religion called The Spirit of the Law , to be published by Harvard University Press. She is also a co-author, with Professor Kathryn Daynes of Brigham Young University , of Inlaws and Outlaws , a book-length study of the social history of prosecutions of polygamists in territorial Utah , to be published by the University of Illinois Press . Sally is a regular commentator on radio and television on law and religion. She serves on the boards of Vassar College , the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, and the Mormon History Association, and is actively involved in the American Society for Legal History, American Historical Association, the Western History Association, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the Organization of American Historians.

Marci A. Hamilton is one of the United States ' leading church/state scholars, as well as an expert on federalism and representation. During the academic year 2007-08, she is a Visiting Professor and the Kathleen and Martin Crane Fellow in the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University .

Professor Hamilton holds the Paul R. Verkuil Chair in Public Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University, and is the author of God vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law (Cambridge University Press 2005; paperback 2007), and How to Deliver Us from Evil: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children (Cambridge 2008). She is also a columnist on constitutional issues for www.findlaw.com, where her column appears every other Thursday.

 

Professor Hamilton is frequently asked to advise Congress and state legislatures on the constitutionality of pending legislation and to consult in cases involving important constitutional issues. She is the First Amendment advisor for victims in many clergy abuse cases involving many religious institutions, including the federal bankruptcies filed by the Portland Archdiocese, Spokane Diocese, and San Diego Diocese. She also advises cities and neighborhoods dealing with the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. She was lead counsel for the City of Boerne, Texas, in Boerne v. Flores , 521 U.S. 507 (1997), before the Supreme Court in its seminal federalism and church/state case holding the Religious Freedom Restoration Act unconstitutional.

 

Professor Hamilton clerked for Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor of the United States Supreme Court and Judge Edward R. Becker of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. She received her J.D., magna cum laude , from the University of Pennsylvania Law School where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review . She also received her M.A. in Philosophy and M.A., high honors, in English from Pennsylvania State University , and her B.A., summa cum laude , from Vanderbilt University .

 

Richard Land: Princeton (A.B., magna cum laude) and Oxford (D.Phil.) has served as president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission since 1988. During his tenure as representative for the largest Protestant denomination in the country, Dr. Land has represented Southern Baptist and other Evangelicals' concerns in the halls of Congress, before U.S. Presidents, and in the media.

 

In 2005, Dr. Land was featured in Time Magazine as one of “The Twenty-five Most Influential Evangelicals in America .”As host of For Faith & Family , For Faith & Family's Insight , and Richard Land Live!, three nationally syndicated radio programs, Dr. Land speaks passionately and authoritatively on the social, ethical, and public policy issues facing our country. The For Faith & Family Broadcast Ministry is heard by listeners each week on over 600 radio stations across the country and throughout the world on the Internet.

 

Dr. Land's latest book, The Divided States of America ? What Liberals and Conservatives are Missing in the God-and-Country Shouting Match! is published by Thomas Nelson.

 

Stephen Macedo is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human Values and, since 2002, director of the University Center for Human Values. He writes and teaches on political theory, ethics, public policy, and law, especially on topics related to liberalism and constitutionalism, democracy and citizenship, diversity and civic education, religion and politics, the family and sexuality, and the political community and globalization. His current projects include immigration and social justice and the impact on domestic democracy of involvement with multilateral institutions. As founding director of Princeton's Program in Law and Public Affairs (1999-2001), he chaired the Princeton Project on Universal Jurisdiction, helped formulate the Princeton Principles on Universal Jurisdiction, and edited Universal Jurisdiction: International Courts and the Prosecution of Serious Crimes Under International Law (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). He was vice president of the American Political Science Association and the first chair of its Standing Committee on Civic Education and Engagement; with other members of that committee he wrote a monograph, Democracy at Risk: How Political Choices Undermine Citizen Participation, and What We Can Do About It (Brookings, 2005). His other books include Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2000); and Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism (Oxford University Press, 1990). He is co-author and co-editor of American Constitutional Interpretation , with W. F. Murphy, J. E. Fleming, and S. A. Barber (Foundation Press, 4th edition forthcoming). His edited volumes include Educating Citizens: International Perspectives on Civic Values and School Choice (Brookings, 2004). Macedo has taught at Harvard University and at the Maxwell School of Citizenship at Syracuse University. He earned his B.A. at the College of William and Mary, an M.Sc. at The London School of Economics, an M.Litt. at Oxford University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. at Princeton University. He was on leave during the academic year 2006-7, at the Institute for International Law and Justice at the New York University School of Law.

Melissa Proctor is visiting Lecturer in Ethics at Harvard Divinity School during 2007-2008. She holds a master's degree from Yale Divinity School and will receive her Ph.D. in Religion and Critical Thought from Brown University this year. Her research interests include religion and politics, feminist theory, women, gender, and sexuality, religious and philosophical ethics, and Mormonism. Last year she was at Princeton University 's Center for the Study of Religion working on a dissertation entitled Equality, Agency, and Moral Identity Formation: Boundary Negotiation and American Mormon Women. She is the organizer of the “Mormonism and American Politics” conference.

Robin H. Rogers-Dillon is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Queens College , City University of New York (CUNY) and the CUNY Graduate Center . She received her Ph.D. in Sociology form the University of Pennsylvania in 1998. Her primary areas of research have been poverty, politics, and social policy. From 1998- 2000, Dr. Rogers-Dillon was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at Yale University . In 1995-96, she served in Washington , D.C. as a Congressional Fellow on Women and Public Policy. She is the author of The Welfare Experiments: Politics and Policy Evaluation (Stanford University Press, 2004) and articles including, “Hierarchical qualitative research teams: Refining the methodology?” (2005), “Qualitative Research and Federal Constraints and State Innovation?” ( Journal of Policy Analysis and Management , 1999). In 2008 Dr. Rogers-Dillon joins the Editorial Board of Society . She will spend her year at Princeton University conducting research on the shifting boundaries between religion and the state in the United States , particularly in social welfare programs.

 

Mark Silk is director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life and Professor of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College , Hartford . He is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II , Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America , and (with Andrew Walsh) the forthcoming One Nation, Divisible . He edits the Center's magazine, Religion in the News .

Amy Sullivan is the nation editor for TIME magazine, where she directs political coverage and the magazine's polling operation. Her book on Democrats and religion, The Party Faithful , will be published in February 2008 by Scribner. Sullivan's work has appeared in publications including the Los Angeles Times , The New Republic , The New York Times , and The Washington Post , and was included in The Best Political Writing 2006 . She is a frequent guest on radio and television talk shows.

 

Previously, Sullivan served as editor of The Washington Monthly , and as editorial director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. She holds degrees from the University of Michigan and Harvard Divinity School .

 

Helen Whitney is a filmmaker with thirty years of experience in producing dramatic features and documentaries primarily for network television. Her subjects have stretched across a broad spectrum of topics: youth gangs in the South Bronx ; a portrait of the 1996 Presidential candidates, Clinton and Dole; a Trappist monastery in Massachusetts ; the McCarthy Era, a three hour biography of John Paul 11; and the work of the photographer Richard Avedon. Her most recent documentaries were the two hour PBS special about the aftermath of 9/11; “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero” and the four hour prime time series, “The Mormons,” for WGBH's Frontline/American Experience. Her dramatic features have appeared on PBS and ABC. She has worked with a variety of actors: Lindsay Crouse; Austin Pendleton Blair Brown; Kathleen Turner, Teresa Wright, David Strathairn, Rip Torn, Estelle Parsons among others. Her work has been recognized by such awards as the Peabody, the Emmy, the Alfred I. Dupont, the Sundance Institute and an Academy Award nomination. She is currently at work on a two hour PBS special about forgiveness that will air in 2008.

 

Alan Wolfe is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College . His most recent books include Does American Democracy Still Work? (Yale University Press, 2006); Return to Greatness: How America Lost its Sense of Purpose and What it Needs to Do to Recover It (Princeton University Press, 2005); The Transformation of American Religion: How We actually Live our Faith (Free Press, 2003); and An Intellectual in Public (University of Michigan Press, 2003). He is the author or editor of more than ten other books including Marginalized in the Middle (1997); One Nation, After All (1998); Moral Freedom: The Search for Virtue in a World of Choice (2001); and School Choice: The Moral Debate (editor, 2002). Both One Nation, After All and Moral Freedom were selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year.

 

Wolfe currently chairs a task force of the American Political Science Association on “Religion and Democracy in the United States .” He serves on the advisory boards of Humanity in Action and the Future of American Democracy Foundation and on the president's advisory board of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. He is also a Senior Fellow with the World Policy Institute at the New School University in New York . In the fall of 2004 Professor Wolfe was the George H. W. Bush Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin .

 

A contributing editor of The New Republic , The Wilson Quarterly , Commonwealth Magazine , and In Character , Professor Wolfe writes often for those publications as well as for Commonweal, The New York Times, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post , and other magazines and newspapers. He served as an advisor to President Clinton in preparation for his 1995 State of the Union address and has lectured widely at American and European universities.