ABSTRACT
When we and two colleagues sat down to write a book chapter titled “Faith Transformed,” we had been studying religion and American politics for almost three decades, ignoring the ubiquitous maternal advice never to discuss the two in polite society. Although religion was largely ignored by political scientists when we did our graduate training in the 1960s and 1970s, we all had a personal interest in the subject. Two of us (Smidt and Green) were “preacher’s kids,” we were all active in Protestant churches, and we had all grown up in the Midwest, with its amazing smorgasbord of religious groups. Thus, we suspected that political scientists were missing something important by ignoring religion’s impact on voting.
