Celebrating 25 Years: A Discussion of Religion, Politics, and Culture in the United States in the Last Quarter Century
Date: Tuesday, October 28th
Time: 3 - 6:30pm
Location: Yawkey Center, 426 Murray Function Room
3 - 4:30pm: How Has the Relationship Between Religion and Politics Changed Over the Past Twenty Five Years?
Kim Daniels, Director, Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life, Georgetown University
Jonathan Laurence, Director, Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy, Boston College
Michael Sean Winters, Columnist, National Catholic Reporter; Center for Catholic Studies, Sacred Heart University
4:30 - 5pm: Break (coffee/drinks and light refreshments)
5 - 6:30pm: How Has Religious Practice in the United States Changed in the Last Quarter Century?
David Gibson, Director, Center on Religion and Culture, Fordham University
R. Marie Griffith, former Director, John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, Washington University in St. Louis
Michael Murphy, Director, The Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage, Loyola University Chicago
Panels Moderated by Mark Massa, S.J.
The Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life will host an afternoon event celebrating the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the Center at Boston College. The event will be structured around two panel discussions. The first panel discussion (3 to 4:30 pm) will address the question of how the relationship of religion to politics has changed over the past quarter century. The second panel (5 to 6:30 pm) will address the question of how religious practice in the United States has changed in the last 25 years. Both panels will be be comprised of scholars who direct academic centers at other universities analogous to BC's Boisi Center.
Kim Daniels, J.D., is the director of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University. She is a member of the Vatican Dicastery for Communication, and served in the 2021-24 Synod on Synodality as an expert participant, as a member of the Synod Communications Commission, and as the coordinator of one of the ten major Synod study groups, which focuses on the Church's mission in the digital environment. Daniels has served as a consultor to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee for Religious Liberty, and has advised other Catholic leaders and institutions on a broad range of issues where Church teachings intersect with public life, including immigration, human life and dignity, religious liberty, and care for creation. She is a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School and Princeton University.
David Gibson, director of Fordham's Center on Religion and Culture, arrived at Fordham University in 2017 after a long career as a religion reporter, author, and filmmaker. He began his journalism career at Vatican Radio in 1986 and after returning to the New York area in 1990 wrote for a variety of newspapers and magazines. He is the author of two books on Catholicism: The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism and The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World.
Marie Griffith is the John C. Danforth Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. She served for 12 years (2011-2023) as the director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics and the editor of the Center’s journal, Religion & Politics. Her research focuses on American Christianity, including the changing profile of American evangelicals and ongoing conflicts over gender, sexuality, and marriage.
Griffith is the author or editor of seven books. Her latest book, Making the World Over: Confronting Racism, Misogyny, and Xenophobia in U.S. History (UVA Press, 2021), urges a re-reading of the nation’s history that opens up greater complexity than our stock narratives.
Griffith is a frequent media commentator and public speaker on current issues pertaining to religion and politics. She is currently writing the first in-depth comparative history of the clergy sexual abuse crises within American Christianity, focusing on the U.S. Catholic Church and evangelical groups such as the Southern Baptist Convention.
Jonathan Laurence received a B.A., summa cum laude, from Cornell University, a C.E.P. at Sciences Po, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University. His principal areas of teaching and research are comparative politics and religion and politics in Western Europe, Turkey, and North Africa. Laurence's latest book is Coping with Defeat: Sunni Islam, Roman Catholicism and the Modern State (Princeton University Press, 2021). Previously, The Emancipation of Europe's Muslims, was published by Princeton University Press in 2012, and received awards for Best Book in religion and politics and migration and citizenship from the American Political Science Association. His first book, Integrating Islam: Religious and Political Challenges in Contemporary France, co-authored with Justin Vaïsse, was published by Brookings Institution Press (2006) and Odile Jacob (2007) and named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Magazine. Laurence is an affiliate of the Center for European Studies at Harvard. His Ph.D. thesis in political science (Harvard, 2006) was awarded the American Political Science Association's Harold D. Lasswell Prize in 2006, as the best dissertation in public policy completed in 2004 or 2005. He is a former fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, Wissenchaftszentrum Berlin, Transatlantic Academy at the German Marshall Fund, Fafo Institute/Norwegian Research Council, LUISS University-Rome, Sciences Po-Paris and the Brookings Institution (nonresident, 2003-2018).
Michael P. Murphy is director of Loyola’s Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage. His research interests are in theology and literature, systematic theology, and the literary/political cultures of Catholicism—but he also thinks and writes about issues in eco-theology, media ecologies, and social ethics. Mikes' first book, A Theology of Criticism: Balthasar, Postmodernism, and the Catholic Imagination (Oxford), was named a "Distinguished Publication" in 2008 by the American Academy of Religion. His most recent scholarly work is Tinderization and Transcendence: Girard, McLuhan, and the Apocalyptic Imagination in Theological Discourses on Social Media (Routledge, 2025). Mike has appeared on CNN, BBC, NPR, Fox, and PBS and his shorter pieces have been published in America, NCR, and First Things, among other venues. He is currently at work on a monograph entitled The Humane Realists: Catholic Fiction, Poetry, and Film 1965-2025.
Michael Sean Winters is a columnist at the National Catholic Reporter. He is also the U.S. correspondent for the Tablet, the London-based international Catholic weekly. He is a fellow at the Center for Catholic Studies at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. Winters is the author of two books: Left at the Altar: How the Democrats Lost the Catholics and How the Catholics Can Save the Democrats (2008, Basic Books) and God’s Right Hand: How Jerry Falwell Made God a Republican and Baptized the American Right (2012, Harper One).
Cox, Daniel A. “The Democratic Party’s Transformation: More Diverse, Educated, and Liberal but Less Religious.” The Survey Center on American Life, July 28, 2022. https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-democratic-partys-transformation-more-diverse-educated-and-liberal-but-less-religious/.
Haberman, Clyde. “Religion and Right-Wing Politics: How Evangelicals Reshaped Elections.” The New York Times, October 28, 2018. https://retroreport.org/articles/religion-and-right-wing-politics-how-evangelicals-reshaped-elections/.
Nadeem, Reem. “Modeling the Future of Religion in America.” Pew Research Center, September 13, 2022. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/modeling-the-future-of-religion-in-america/.
Perry, Samuel L. “American Religion in the Era of Increasing Polarization.” Annual Review of Sociology 48, no. 1 (July 2022): 87–107. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-031021-114239.
Perry, Samuel L., Ryon J. Cobb, Andrew L. Whitehead, and Joshua B. Grubbs. “Divided by Faith (in Christian America): Christian Nationalism, Race, and Divergent Perceptions of Racial Injustice.” Social Forces 101, no. 2 (December 2022): 913–42. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soab134.
Witt-Swanson, Lindsey, and Daniel A. Cox. “Faith after the Pandemic: How Covid-19 Changed American Religion.” The Survey Center on American Life, January 12, 2023. https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/faith-after-the-pandemic-how-covid-19-changed-american-religion/.
Lauren Jackson’s article for The New York Times titled “America Wants a God” discusses the recent pause in a decades-long trend in America towards secularization. Jackson explains that beginning in the 1990s, the population in the United States began a mass exodus from Christianity, with 40 million Americans leaving the church over the last few decades. Up to thirty percent of Americans have identified as having no religion in a trend that many predicted would lead to the end of American Christianity. Jackson notes that this is now changing. She cites a major 2025 Pew Survey that found that secularization is now on pause, with the number of religious believers increasing and people no longer leaving Christianity at the same rate as prior decades. The survey also found that since the pandemic in 2020, the number of people who say they attend religious service weekly has remained consistent at forty percent, with 92% of Americans saying they hold some sort of spiritual belief. These trends are not only noticeable in the general American public, but have also begun to express themselves at the governmental level. More than half of Americans believe that the U.S. should be a Christian nation, and the Supreme Court has had the highest number of pro-religion justices since the 1950s. This sudden shift in religiosity has stunned scholars as they attempt to explain this change. Jackson posits that the turn to religion may be caused by a lack of plausible alternatives to organized religion. When Americans originally turned away from religion, many turned to forms of spirituality; however, the pandemic seemed to awaken many Americans to their dissatisfaction with individualized spiritual expression, sparking a return to religious communities. One-quarter of Americans reported that the pandemic strengthened their faith, which appears to be the beginning of a new demand for religion in U.S. society. At the 25th Anniversary event, leaders from centers at various universities dedicated to exploring religion and American life will join us to discuss how the relationship between religion and politics has changed over the past quarter century.
Panel 1 Participants (left to right): Mark Massa, S.J., Kim Daniels, Jonathan Laurence, and Michael Sean Winters.
Panel 2 participants (left to right): Mark Massa, S.J., David Gibson, R. Marie Griffith, and Michael Murphy
On October 28th, 2025, the Boisi Center welcomed a series of distinguished guests to celebrate the Center’s 25th Anniversary through a discussion of religion, politics, and culture in the United States in the last quarter century. The event was divided into two panels: the first discussed how the relationship between religion and politics has changed over the past twenty-five years, and the second reflected on how religious practice in the U.S. has changed over the last quarter century. Kim Daniels of Georgetown University, Jonathan Laurence of Boston College, and Michael Sean Winters of Sacred Heart University sat on the first panel, fostering an engaging conversation about the role religion played in politics at the turn of the century, and how that has evolved into the current situation. David Gibson of Fordham University, R. Marie Griffith of Washington University in St. Louis, and Michael Murphy of Loyola University Chicago sat on the second panel, reflecting on religious practices in Catholic and Protestant contexts and how the nature of religion in America has changed over the past twenty-five years.
On the first panel, Daniels began by reflecting on how conservative Catholic engagement in public life has evolved. She argued that the increased use of the Catholic identity as a political interest harms the faith itself, as young Catholics leave the Church because they view it as being captive to politics. They perceive the Church as being further from the Gospel and closer to power, distorting the Church's message and muting Catholic voices. Daniels suggested that in response to this, Catholics must stand with victims and defend the rule of law, embracing principled dialogue and pluralism. Laurence focused on the role of Islam in the Middle East and U.S. intervention in the region over time. Although at the turn of the century there was hope for stability in the region, this temporary stability was tested by terror attacks that exposed the instability of the post-colonial world. This led to a flurry of policies and war-making that put the U.S. back at the center of the conflict, despite electing isolationist presidents in 2000 and 2024. After Laurence, Winters discussed the failures of the Catholic left, arguing that they have gone from exhausted to sectarian. He suggested that Christians must understand why Catholics are more likely to gravitate towards the right, noting that liberal Catholics have been slow to respond to this growing trend of right-wing Catholicism. He argued that liberal Catholics must bring back the cultural aspects of faith, as faith that fails to generate culture is a dead religion. Overall, each speaker focused on a different intersection of religion and politics, exploring the ways in which they have evolved over the past quarter-century.
On the second panel, Gibson began by suggesting that religion today has become secularized, making it into a political ideology rather than a specifically Christian one. He proposed provocatively that today’s evangelicals are yesterday's Catholics. While evangelicals used to be advocates of the separation of church and state, they are now integralists, using democracy to achieve a certain end. Griffith discussed how the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention has centered communities around the patriarchal authority of a male pastor over his church. She noted how the rise of “mega churches” and perceptions of clerical infallibility have led to growing conformity, groupthink, and a shunning of accountability. This has caused many young evangelicals to leave the church, disenfranchised by extremely conservative members with an intolerance for dissent. Lastly, Murphy spoke about the reckoning that Catholics must make in the public square. He notes that given the religious pluralism in the U.S., one would expect a diversity of spiritual concerns in the public square. Unfortunately, this is not the case. American Catholics favor the prosperity gospel, making Christianity into an opportunist proposition and abandoning the true character of the gospel message. Instead of conforming to culture, Catholics must return to the values that make them uniquely Catholic. On the whole, all three speakers provided insightful reflections on how religious practice has changed in the U.S. over the past twenty-five years.
At the end of each panel, the speakers engaged in lively Q&A sessions. Following the first panel, an audience member asked about the international implications of Christian Nationalism and what the Pope can do in response. Daniels responded by reminding the audience that American Catholics make up only six percent of world Catholics, and that we have a global Church that is called to serve the voiceless and vulnerable. Following the second panel, an audience member asked Griffith about the idea of religion becoming secularized. She noted how the corporate models Protestant churches are producing have resulted in a complete lack of separation between work, family, and church, to the detriment of the well-being of ecclesial communities. Overall, both panels offered rich conversation and insights about religious practices and politics over the past quarter-century.