The John C. Danforth Center on Religion & Politics will be hosting a forum Monday afternoon to discuss the role of religion in last week’s midterm election. Students and professors across campus are curious as to what will be discussed, as many perceived minimal influence of religion in the most recent election.

“It’s not clear to me what they’re going to say about the role of religion in this election. It’s being downplayed right now,” said Randall Calvert, the director of the American Culture Studies program, who is also on the Center’s executive committee. “It’s not like there aren’t candidates out there who take a strong religious stance, it just hasn’t been the main thing that people are reading and talking about.”

Gerald Early, director of the Center for Humanities, will host the forum, which will take place in room 200 of the Charles F. Knight Center at 4 p.m. The panel will consist of three leading scholars of the relationship between religion and politics: Shaun Casey, associate professor of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary; Melissa Rogers, director of the Center for Religion and Public Affairs at Wake Forest University’s divinity school; and Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Calvert said he has noticed only in the past one or two years what might be the beginning of a coalition shift, turning the focus away from contentious social issues, where debate about religion was once perhaps more prominent. Now, he said, economic issues have taken the forefront.

“Ironically, as we talk about the current election and the issues that are most important in it, the social issues have played a smaller role than in the last several elections,” Calvert said.

Religious studies professor Daniel Bornstein, who is a member of the center’s executive committee, shares a similar view.

“One of the things that seemed less prominent has been the use of religion particular to pass judgments on social issues. I’ll be curious what the panel has to say because I had the impression that religion didn’t play a very big part in this election,” he said.

Damion Talcott, a freshman who plans to attend the forum, said he detected more discontent and anger in the recent political climate toward the government as a whole than specifically religious debate. While Talcott considers religion to have profound importance on the political decisions of individuals, he doesn’t know how much salience the issue has had in the public lately.

“My personal values based on my religion affect my ideals and what I decide on certain issues,” Talcott said, “but as a whole, I don’t think religion had a huge effect on this election, as it has in the past.”

Despite some confusion and curiosity about what exactly will be addressed at the forum, there is widespread support for the initiative taken by the new Center on Religion & Politics to explore and compare the two, a pursuit that, according to many, has been absent on this campus in the past.

According to Bornstein, one of eight religious studies faculty members at Wash. U., there is no professor whose work is focused on religion in America. He hopes that the five new faculty members the center intends hire with its $30 million endowment will bring diversity to the program and other departments of the University in that respect.

“This won’t be a duplication of resources that we already have on campus but will in fact give us something new and very much needed,” Bornstein said.

Washington University professors and students alike seem optimistic and supportive of the initiative to open the dialogue about the relationship between religion and politics, which Calvert said has developed somewhat of a stigma.

“There’s been an increasing incivility to political discussion, particularly in areas that touch on religion and politics, where some religious leaders have asserted that certain political positions or policies are right,” Calvert said. “The idea is that this has damaged political discussion and made it less legitimizing or less integrating than it should ideally be.”

There are high hopes on campus that the Center on Religion & Politics will take steady steps in a positive direction to overcome the barriers of stigma associated with the topic, both on the Washington University campus and in the public discourse, beginning with today’s forum.

“People are speaking not just as scholars, but also on matters of current political importance,” Bornstein said. “The hope is that the center will do something more than just chase the news cycle, thinking in longer terms and creating a forum in which people can talk civilly about matters of great civic importance.”