The Religion Factor in the 2008 Election

Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner. A resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, he is also a Fox News contributor and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics, a reference work concerning U.S. governors and federal politicians published biennially by National Journal since 1971. He was a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report for 18 years and a member of the Editorial Board of The Washington Post for 7 years. He has traveled to all 50 states, all 435 congressional districts, and to 37 foreign countries. Barone is a graduate of Harvard University, Yale Law School, and the author of four books, including Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan (1990).

E.J. Dionne is a twice-weekly columnist for The Washington Post, writing on national policy and politics. Before joining the Post in 1990 as a political reporter, he spent fourteen years at The New York Times, covering local, state, and national politics, also serving as a foreign correspondent in Paris, Rome, and Beirut. He is currently a University Professor at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of Why Americans Hate Politics (1991), They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era (1996), and most recently Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right (2008).

Dr. John C. Green is the director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics and a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Akron. He is also a senior research adviser at the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, specializing in religion and American politics, American evangelicals and politics, the Christian right, religion and elections, and religion and presidential politics.Dr. Green has done extensive research on American religious communities and politics. He is co-author of The Diminishing Divide: Religion’s Changing Role in American Politics (Brookings Institution Press, 2000).

In addition to publishing his most recent book The Faith Factor: How Religion Influences American Elections (2007), Dr. Green 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). The Los Angeles Times described Dr. Green as the nation’s “pre-eminent student of the relationship between religion and American politics.”

He received his Ph.D. in political science from Cornell University.