Abstract
As the authors of these essays cogently argue, religion and American politics have always been intimately related. And historians were far ahead of political scientists and sociologists in systematically addressing that relationship. During the 1960s and 1970s, an entire school of ethnocultural historians delineated the complex ways in which religious identities, beliefs and behaviors influenced American electoral politics, a question that did not engage most social scientists until the rise of the Christian Right in the 1980s.
Here Sutton and Dochuk have brought together scholars from a promising new generation of historians and religious studies experts to address a broader range of interactions between religious actors and political institutions. They group sixteen essays into sections focusing on religion and political institutions, religion and public policy, and, finally, the impact of politics on American religion. Their charge to the authors was to examine “a contemporary issue, controversy, or policy through a deep historical lens,” in order to help scholars and citizens better understand “how issues of faith and issues of policy now intersect, differently from and similarly to what came before, with anticipation of what may likely come next” (p. 4).
Does the effort succeed? In some ways, but not in others. On the positive side of the ledger, all the essays present truly interesting information or fascinating arguments—or both, typically drawn from each author's recent research. Despite the high quality of all the entries, the reader often wishes that they were fewer, but longer and more detailed. Nevertheless, as it is the book provides a kaleidoscopic view of the work of some outstanding young and mid-career scholars, but doesn't permit full explication of some arguable propositions. Just to pick on the editors, Darren Dochuk's provocative arguments on the “religion of oil” beg for much more supporting evidence than he can provide in a short essay—and more consideration of alternative perspectives. In the same vein, Matthew Sutton's assertion that Billy Graham's apocalyptic rhetoric “help justify American intervention abroad” in the George W. Bush administration (p. 247) fails to consider a mountain of scholarly evidence contradicting that conclusion.
In other instances, the research provides valuable historical insights, but does not really provide much added understanding for contemporary politics. Indeed, often the “relevance” asserted is a real stretch and the observations about contemporary politics seem “tacked on,” rather than an integral part of the essay. For example, Allison Greene's excellent history of private and public welfare in the Mississippi Delta in the 1930s has only a tenuous connection to contemporary welfare politics. The same may be said of Jennifer Graber's heroic effort to connect American policy in the Indian Wars of the 1800s and the Obama administration's drone warfare. And Edward Blum's story about Revolutionary War era petitions for freedom by Massachusetts slaves would stand better on its own without any claim of major relevance for today's civil rights politics.
Most of the essays are careful to observe the norms of objective scholarship, an ethical imperative when dealing with controversial questions entailing both religion and politics. Nevertheless, in other cases the authors’ sentiments about religious actors and institutions are a little too clearly on display. Mark Chancey's chapter on the treatment of religion in Texas textbooks provides a very useful overview of the development of textbook politics, but his own stance as a protagonist clearly biases the narrative. Other authors evince their lack of sympathy for conservative religious forces, and very few exhibit the insights that might be derived from a certain sympathetic familiarity with the movements and leaders described. Indeed, Andrew Preston's admirable chapter on American foreign policy illustrates the advantages of a more empathetic, if still critical, understanding of actors on all sides of major political and religious divides.
Finally, the volume might elicit a more general caveat about professional parochialism. Although American academia has traveled far down the road of professional hyper-specialization, those who work at the intersection of contemporary disciplines ought to resist that trend. Although a few essays here cite the work of political scientists and sociologists, for the most part the authors seem unaware of the massive literatures on religion and politics in both those disciplines. This is especially apparent in the efforts to connect the historical “cases” to contemporary American politics. Although many chapters make assertions about religious voting, the influence of religion on party alignments, or religious impact on public policy, the evidence cited is usually from journalists or raw public opinion polls. For instance, several chapters comment on the “faith-based” initiatives of the Bush and Obama administrations, but none cite any of the fairly extensive political science literature on the topic. Social scientists certainly need to read history to understand religious politics, but historians might be encouraged to read social scientists when they address the contemporary era.