J. Matthew Wilson's new edited volume, From Pews to Polling Places, makes a nice addition to the literature on religion and politics. The major strength of the volume is its inclusion of religious groups that often are neglected in empirical analyses. When political scientists use widely available national surveys to examine religion and politics, they often face the “small N” problem when it comes to examining the political behavior of minority religious groups; thus, the field largely ignores important, though small, religious traditions or lumps individuals from such groups together in a broad “other” category — neither of which is a sufficient strategy. Indeed, the edited volume here relies on an impressive array of national surveys specifically designed to analyze the political behavior of such religious minorities as Mormons, Jews, and Muslims.
Many of the chapters break new ground. For example, Laura Olson asks why it is that no Religious Left has emerged to challenge the Religious Right in the public square. She identifies the challenges inherent in the development of “religiopolitical progressivism.” While elite-level religiously progressive organizations, such as Sojourners, do exist, a mass-level movement of self-identified religious liberals is difficult to organize because religious liberals attend church less frequently than conservatives, are members of churches with declining memberships, and are less likely than conservatives to approve of political activism undertaken by their denominations.
Also very timely is Melissa Harris-Lacewell's chapter examining how two black theological traditions affect African Americans' political engagement. First, she finds that Black Liberation Theology — now made famous as the guiding doctrine of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Senator Barack Obama's former pastor — has a positive impact on the willingness of African Americans to participate in politics. Second, her analysis of an increasingly influential theology endorsed by many black mega-churches, the “prosperity gospel,” which views Christ as instrumental in providing African Americans the “route to financial and personal fulfillment,” shows that such a belief perhaps leads to less political engagement.
The chapters that empirically examine minority religious groups are also compelling and provide some surprising findings. For instance, while David Campbell and J. Quin Monson's study of Mormons explains that the LDS Church's hierarchy actively advocates political neutrality when it comes to partisanship. Paul Djupe's time-series analysis of Jewish political behavior reveals that during the early to mid 1980s, there was some significant movement by Jews away from the Democratic Party. For example, 39% of Jews voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984. However, Djupe argues that the rise of the Religious Right within the Republican Party stifled any growing shift in Republican Party identification among Jews, and Jews have returned to voting consistently for Democrats since 1988.
Paul Djupe and John Green's chapter on American Muslims, utilizing 2001 and 2004 Pew Forum surveys of Muslims, shows that Muslims in America have higher rates of college education and socio-economic status compared to most Americans, which helps to explain their relatively high rates of political participation. Muslims tend to be liberal on economic policies and conservative on social issues. Republicans seemed poised to do well among Muslim voters after 2000 (when they gave a plurality — 48% — of their votes to George W. Bush), those hopes were dashed in the wake of September 11, 2001. Just 7% of American Muslims report voting for Bush in 2004.
Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio make an important contribution to the volume by focusing on one of the fastest growing segments in American religion — seculars. More specifically, they further examine “anti-fundamentalist” voters, whom they argue have become their own force in American politics. They identify 12% of the population as seculars and they find that hostility toward Christian fundamentalists is a significant predictor of vote choice against Republican presidential candidates. Bolce and De Mario's analysis of voters, combined with their discussion of the growing religious split among party elites (Republican Party Convention delegates are much more religious than the general public and Democratic Party Convention delegates are much more secular than the general public), showcases how knowledge of religion and politics is crucial to understanding the current dynamics of party politics in the United States.
While this edited volume hangs together better than most, some chapters are a bit weaker in terms of new research. For example, the introductory chapter by Clyde Wilcox and Carin Robinson provides little new for scholars of religion and politics; however, it would serve as an excellent primer on religion and politics for undergraduates or political behavior scholars who might know little about religion. Corwin Smidt's chapter examines the two religious groups most frequently written about by scholars of religion and politics — evangelical and mainline Protestants. Again, while it breaks no new ground, the chapter does offer a good introduction to the subject.
There are a few additional weaknesses in the volume. First, the chapters routinely ignore how religious groups have grappled with major developments in recent American politics. For example, an intriguing finding in Stephen Mockabee's chapter about the changing political behavior of American Catholics is that in the 2004 elections, the Iraq war played a far more important role in the vote choice of Catholics than did views about abortion or social welfare issues. More emphasis on how each of the religious groups profiled in the study have grappled with the war in Iraq, and its subsequent impact on their political behavior, would have been a valuable addition to the volume. Another issue area left relatively unexplored is immigration. Louis DeSipio's chapter on religious Latinos and Djupe's chapter on Muslims touch on this important issue, but one wonders how larger blocs of religious voters, such as evangelicals, mainline Protestants, and Catholics, view this potentially divisive issue.
Perhaps the biggest weakness of the volume is that there is often too little direct comparison of religious groups in terms of political behavior, although several chapters do make some comparisons, such as Smidt's chapter on evangelicals and mainline Protestants and Campbell and Monson's chapter on Mormons (which used Southern Baptists and Catholics as reference groups). It would be useful to compare the political engagement and public opinion of the various religious minority groups studied, especially Muslims, Jews, Latinos, and African Americans, not only with the other religious groups profiled here, but also with the American public more generally. Nonetheless, these points are relatively minor when one considers the many strengths of the volume. From Pews to Polling Places is a solid and well-written volume, providing much insight into current trends in religion and politics. Both students new to the field and current scholars have much to gain from the work.
