504: Professor David Campbell on Politics, Religion and Mormonism

Mormon Stories Podcast

Dr. John Dehlin

Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 5.2K Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2014

⏱️ 72 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode of Mormon Stories, J. Nelson-Seawright interviews David Campbell, Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame and the founding director of the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy, about his celebrated research on religion and politics in America. Professor Campbell argues that the current partisan environment, in which religious people mostly support the Republican Party and less religious people the Democratic Party, is a recent development --- and he explains how this pattern can help explain America's recent rise in irreligiosity.

Campbell also discusses his work on Mormonism and politics. He explains his research about how Mormon identity is different in American context: stronger, more collective, more integrated, and with stricter boundaries. He discusses implications for how Mormonism interacts with politics, and also for the identity and religious options of liberal and disaffected Mormons.

Transcript

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0:54.6	Hello and welcome to Mormon Stories. I'm Jane Elcensi, you're our guest host for
0:58.6	today and with me is David Campbell, Professor of Political Science at Notre Dame
1:02.9	University, founding director of the Rooney Center for the Study of American
1:06.1	Democracy. For our purposes he's most notable as one of the leading scholars of
1:12.0	religion and politics in America. Two books he's written that are relevant for
1:16.2	us with Robert Putnam, he wrote American Grace, How Religion Divided and
1:19.6	Unites Us and with John Green and Quinn Monson seeking the Promised Land,
1:23.7	Mormons and American Politics. David, welcome to Mormon Stories.
1:27.2	Well thank you, I'm looking forward to this. So I wanted to talk with you today
1:31.6	about these questions of how religion fits in politics in America, how Mormonism
1:37.4	fits in politics and also how politics plays inside Mormonism. You've
1:41.0	written about all three of these dimensions. So let's start out in the most
1:45.9	general way, looking at the American political religious landscape. I'm going to
1:51.0	do a little bit of political science inside baseball. One of the things we all
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