Progress in religion and politics research has been marked by fits and starts, plagued by wide variance in the inclusion of key concepts, diverse measurement strategies of key concepts, and frequent failures to test competing theories. In this book and others, however, we may be witnessing a seed of progress in our understanding of how some congregations come to be politically active. There is now evidence that politically active church communities become so through the interaction of individual predispositions of members, clergy inclinations, organizational resources, and environmental opportunities. It is particularly useful to discuss the political activation of churches as a dynamic process even if the data necessary to test this conception have proved elusive.

Eric McDaniel breaks this process down in to its constituent parts in the context of African-American denominations, examining when the call to become politically active is made; that facilitates the call; who makes the call; and who responds. Using a wide array of quantitative and qualitative data, McDaniel finds support for a multifaceted understanding of the political activation of churches.

Though McDaniel asserts this theoretical model as his own, Djupe and Gilbert (The Prophetic Pulpit) employed an almost verbatim version, and they built upon a similar formulation by Campbell and Pettigrew (Christians in Racial Crisis)—problematically, McDaniel cites neither of these works as establishing the foundations of this model. It is a shame that McDaniel did not engage more of this extant literature, because his project would have provided an opportunity for considerable refinement of the approach. On a related note, in the conclusion, McDaniel suggests that scholars look in to the connections of congregations with local interest groups, although this was a central focus of Paul Djupe and Laura Olson's recent edited volume (Beyond the Culture Wars: Religious Interests in Community Conflict). Nevertheless, the fact that a diverse range of scholars across so many decades, congregations, and communities find strong support for the interactive model of churches' political influence provides with considerable momentum to refine this model and offer a stronger sense of the weights to be applied to its components.

There is a reason why scholars have focused on a particular actor in much of the religion and politics literature, generally either the congregation or clergy: it is much more tractable. McDaniel, however, takes a different, potentially useful tack by examining political churches (churches that were already politicized when he did his research). This approach implicitly acknowledges the nested nature of political action in highly networked communities like congregations, and McDaniel clearly understands that the political implications of religion depend on capturing such interdependence. However, taking such an approach has numerous potential pitfalls. Using the church as an outcome necessitates defining exactly which actor is engaging in politics. The definition of a political church offered by McDaniel serves to obscure the mechanisms of involvement. His definition contends that “a political church is a church that holds political awareness and activity as salient elements of its identity” (11, 21), by which McDaniel seems to mean that a political identity must be established before a political church can be created (11). But it is not clear what the actual mechanism of engagement is for a political church. Is it the clergy, some organizational element of the congregation, the climate of opinion and action in the congregation, or some combination thereof? It is essential to define the actor because the particular mechanism in question accompanies different requirements for the theory of production of its politics, and we quickly encounter definitional problems. For instance, not all clergy activity requires a priori congregational input, nor is all clergy activity intended to represent the congregation in public. The assessment in chapter five makes no attempt to parse these differences out.

Relatedly, the unoperationalized use of identity leaves many questions over the same terrain, such as: To what extent is agreement on goals and processes necessary for a collective identity to exist? Is identity rooted in the evaluation of goals and processes, or in a more affective sense? Since churches slip in and out of the political involvement, is such an identity malleable over time? If it is malleable, is identity a necessary component of the model? Moreover, at times McDaniel suggests that congregations whose spiritual goals are satisfied allow for clergy politicking and thus the emergence of a political church, which does not suggest the formation of a political identity so much as passive acceptance, or even ignorance, on the part of congregation members.

Data to test a theory with so many moving parts is difficult to come by, and McDaniel is to be commended for gathering a good amount of his own. His qualitative study of several churches in Detroit and Austin, although rooted in a convenience sample, does include a broad array of political activity levels that offers some favorable comment on the model. His analyses of these data are clearly the highlight of the book. Still, a design that incorporated competing hypotheses more explicitly would have been most welcome. For instance, an essential question is whether church/clergy politicking is the result of intentional identity formation or a by-product of satisfying more primary needs. McDaniel mentions both alternatives but does not pit them against each other. The quantitative data presented here are less helpful for a variety of reasons; either they are unrepresentative or lacking questions relevant to test the model.

McDaniel has done quite a bit here with data that are generally ill suited to test such a sophisticated model of the political involvement of churches. Thus, this book encourages us to pursue this line of work, as it bolsters the model and findings of previous studies of quite different populations in different eras. The conclusion, in particular, is a smart delineation of important questions yet to be addressed, while it might have placed more emphasis on the interconnections of the congregation with a more nuanced enumeration of environmental forces. A final note is that the study included some description of the content of political activity, suggesting that the particulars of issue areas entail different grounds for negotiations among members of the congregation. This is a particularly interesting observation that deserves more sustained treatment.