Commission to sponsor talk about religion's role in politics, public life

The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Commission will sponsor a discussion on the role of religion in politics at 7 p.m. Thursday in the Council Chambers at City Hall, 401 N. Morton St. The event is titled "What Would Dr. King Do? -- On the Role of Religion (Conservative and Progressive) in American Politics and Public Life."\nThe meeting will give the community a chance to discuss the issue of how much influence religion should have on politics and the separation of church and state, said Craig Brenner, special projects coordinator for Bloomington Community and Family Resources. The panelists can use Martin Luther King Jr. as an example of a person who had to balance his religion with politics, he said.\nHow much influence religion should have on politics is a very important and prominent issue today, said Daniel Conkle, moderator of the meeting and a professor at the IU School of Law. America has an openly religious president, and many of the most controversial issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage, intersect with both religion and politics, Conkle said.\nThe three panelists are Sheldon Gellar, a visiting scholar for the Workshop in Political Theory and Political Analysis at IU, Valerie Grim, associate professor and interim chair of the IU Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies and the Rev. Tom Ellsworth, senior minister at Sherwood Oaks Christian Church.\nThe forum will provide civil discussion about the issues, emphasized Beverly Calender-Anderson, director of the Bloomington Safe and Civil City Program.\n"People will have a safe place to express their beliefs," she said.\nThe panel will discuss Martin Luther King Jr. because he was a religious man who used his religious values to think about issues and help bring about change, Conkle said. King is also important because he shows that religion and politics are not limited to the sole domain of conservatives.\nMany topics deemed "liberal," such as war, peace and poverty, are also religious issues, Conkle said. When King was alive, the conservatives were those who said religion should be out of politics, and liberals combined the two, Conkle said.\n"It doesn't matter what side of the fence you happen to be on," he said.