Bob Graham Center for Public Service

David Campbell, political scientist and award winning author, brought his years of research and insights on the role of religion in American politics during a public presentation on Feb. 13 at the University of Florida’s Bob Graham Center for Public Service in Pugh Hall.

The program was co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science. As a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame and founding director of the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy, David Campbell has distinguished himself as an expert on religion and politics, and as a leader on civic engagement. His talk, titled “Why Religion Still Matters in American Politics,” examined such issues as the influence of the Christian right on public policy platforms, the role Mitt Romney’s Mormonism played in the outcome of the last election, and changing religious demographics in the U.S.

In 2010, Campbell co-authored American Grace: How Religion Divides and United Us with Harvard professor and mentor, Robert Putnam. The book was described as “intellectually powerful” and “urgently relevant” by the New York Times. The San Francisco Chronicle called it, “the most successfully argued sociological study of American religion in more than half a century.” American Grace received the 2011 Woodrow Wilson Award from the American Political Science Association and the Wilbur Award from the Religious Communicators Council for the best non-fiction book of 2010.

Campbell is also the author of Why We Vote: How Schools and Communities Shape Our Civic Life and was the editor for A Matter of Faith: Religion in the 2004 Presidential Election. Campbell has been featured on numerous media outlets, including the New York Times, Economist, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, CNN, NPR, Fox News, and C-SPAN.

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