Church, State, Morality, and Law.

What a difference a decade makes. In 1979, when I first taught a course on religion and politics, pertinent academic and general literature was rare. What little existed was often decades old and confined largely to law, church history, religious studies, social ethics, and sociology of religion. It was of marginal political sophistication and offered little guidance concerning the emerging Religious Right, the primary attention-getter in those days.

Years of feverish research and commentary followed, especially from 197984. Academics and pundits made "religion and politics" synonymous with "New Religious Right" or "New Christian Right," which more often than not was simply identified with the "Moral Majority" of the Reverend Jerry Fallwell. That preoccupation created its own set of perceptual distortions, so that even in 1984 few thought of the Reverend Jesse Jackson in the context of religion and politics.

By 1993, the American Political Science Association had formed a Religion and Politics Section, and keeping up with the literature now requires full attention and a substantial budget for books and journals. More importantly, the complete range of interaction has come into view, and breathless concern with the Religious Right has given way to sober and balanced analysis. The three works under review exemplify this development. Not only are Left, Center, and Right represented, but the discussions are deeply rooted in historical research, contemporary public debate, and academic discourse. This means, of course, that they are comprehensive, informative, and dull.

Best is the Cromartie volume, No Longer Exiles: The Religious New Right in American Politics. The Religious Right is now old enough for retrospection and projection. In 1990 the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a neoconservative Washington think tank sympathetic to, but not captured by, the Religious Right held a conference to assess its past and speculate about its future. Papers by four of the top students of the movement--George Marsden (church history), Robert Wuthnow (sociology), Booth Fowler (political theory), and Corwin Smidt (political science) drew responses from other scholars and Religious Right activists. The four primary contributions provide a capsule history of the movement (Marsden), solid assessments of its successes (Wuthnow and Smidt), and an iconoclastic argument that it failed (Fowler). No Longer Exiles, together with Matthew Moen's The Transformation of the Christian Right, provides an accessible, concise fix on the status of the movement.

The Left of the spectrum in this set of books is anchored by Robert H. Craig's uneven blend of historical storytelling and radical advocacy. As Craig remarks at the beginning, Christian hope is sustained by memory, and the memory of the radical Christian tradition in American culture and politics is presently dim. Religion and Radical Politics aims to recall seminal radical social activists inspired by and committed to the gospel. Craig begins the story with midnineteenth-century Christian labor movements and concludes it with the pacifism of A.J. Muste and Dorothy Day. Along the way, he tells the story of feminist agitators, sharecropper organizing, black preachers of social justice, and Christian socialists, including Jesse H. Jones, Frances Willard, Mother Jones, Reverdy Ransom, Howard Kester, and Claude Williams.

The strength and weakness of Religion and Radical Politics lie in the portraits of these individuals, their struggles of faith and conscience, clashes with other movement figures and with conventional society and church, and their organizing and protest activities. Yet Craig is a professor of religion and philosophy, not a historian. His narrative history is continually overlaid and interrupted by lessons to be drawn from the lives he recounts, lives that he reduces to vignettes in order to carry a moral lesson. Particularly telling is the longest and most appealing narrative, that of Claude Williams's efforts to organize miners and tenant farmers in Arkansas and elsewhere during the 1930s. Yet Craig interrupts this fascinating story with institutional histories. Finally, it simply peters out without a solid conclusion.

Just as the stories get interesting, Craig moves on to another historical figure who either succeeds or fails at recognizing the importance of racial inclusiveness in the movement, who illustrates the importance of acknowledging the primacy of class snuggle, or who anticipates a strong Marxist analysis of the oppression of workers and the political action necessary for their liberation. Craig contends that only a "constructive social ethics based upon historical knowledge and understanding can make an important contribution to ethical analysis. It connects a liberation tradition that has sought to be faithful to the demands of the gospel as good news for the poor with the aspirations of people for a democratic socialist future." Enough of such ideological freight will slow any narrative to a crawl. Religion and Radical Politics fails both as partisan history and socialist theory. It remains, however, worth browsing through to discover the shape of a neglected past, whose narratives can be followed up in the biographies he draws upon.

Church, State, Morality, and Law, attempts a particularly Catholic answer to the question of civic responsibility in the midst of religious-political pluralism. "How is a Catholic expected to vote on certain types of issues involving morality and law?" Hannon, professor of philosophy at Saint Patrick's College, Maynooth, wishes to answer this question for Irish and American Catholics, as well as for Christians generally. In doing so, he traverses basic moral philosophy, the natural law tradition, Vatican II's teaching on the church in the modem world, dissent and the magisterium, the 1960s Devlin-Hart debate on the legal enforcement of morality, and the roles of the laity and the hierarchy in applying Catholic moral theology in the policy marketplace.

These are all important matters, and Hannon hits the right notes, although without originality or verve. In the "culture wars" of Ireland and the United States, the fundamental philosophical question is how religious commitment and religious language can appear in public discourse without sounding alien and uncivil on the one hand, or conventional and commonplace on the other. The material Hannon brings to this question is pertinent, but his ultimate position is so right-down-themiddle and his review of the sources so unremarkable, that there is no snap to his discussion.

The Religious Right, Left, and Center alike grasp today for a firm hold on political reality. During the 1980s the Religious Right perceived itself simultaneously as inside and outside the American mainstream. For insider status it appealed to its perceived place within the dominant religious heritage of the nation and to its supposed influence with the Reagan and Bush administrations. Yet the Religious Right also saw itself as an outsider with respect to the secular cultural elites that it viewed as dominating education, the media, and popular culture.

After the election of Bill Clinton, the Religious Right has moved closer to the fringe. At the same time, however, it now possesses the opportunity to draw strength from formerly complacent traditionalist Christians, who must fight political and cultural battles without White House support. As Wuthnow and others in No Longer Exiles argue, this means that the focus for these contests will be local and state governments, not Capitol Hill. Locally the ground is cleaner, the troops more maneuverable.

Paradoxically, the same is true for the Religious Left. The local organizing described in Religion and Radical Politics is more challenging and effective than grand Christian socialist ideological movements. The Christian Left has always seen itself as an outsider with regard to American capitalism and materialist, consumer culture. It is too realistic to view itself as a Democratic party insider, though it does hope to find occasional welcome at the White House back door.

If the Christian Left is to be an insider at all, it must do so within the paradox of salvation history, understanding that despite all appearances, God is on the side of the poor, weak, and outcast. The only effective way, however, to be such an insider is to share the world of the poor where they live. In other words, to act locally.

This leaves the Center, often occupied by Catholics in their voting and politicalsocial attitudes. Having deserted the Democratic party in the 1980s, they returned to the fold in 1992. They are Center, however, less out of conviction than because they end up suspended between forces pulling to the Right (prolife, family values) and to the Left (economic justice). Catholic political thinkers and activists will discover no firm place among centfist Democrats or Republicans. Yet the Catholic Center, similar to their brothers and sisters on either side of the cultural war, just may find happiness in local action. What shape creative, centfist religious-political action may take in the local community has yet to be defined.