The Great Divide: Religious and Cultural Conflict in American Party Politics.

By Geoffrey Layman. Power, Conflict, and Democracy: American Politics Into the Twenty-first Century. (New York: Columbia University Press, c. 2001. Pp. [xvi], 435. Paper, $22.50, ISBN 0-231-12059-1; cloth, $45.50, ISBN 0-231-12058-3.)

Political scientists have been almost immune to "catching" religion. When ethnocultural historians uncovered the bright religious mosaic of American party systems of the past, political scientists imagined a secular electoral order in the present. Only the shock administered by the Christian Right in the 1980s finally prompted a few to wonder whether Americans--some of the most religiously observant people in the Western world--still connected their faith and their votes.

Geoffrey Layman is a promising second-generation analyst of religion and electoral politics, and his first book, The Great Divide, is a genuine tour de force that combines a deep understanding of American religion and politics with unusual conceptual and methodological sophistication. Given the paucity of good religious measures in most national polls, including the hallowed American National Election Studies, Layman must work in painstaking fashion with limited data to demonstrate the religious underpinnings of contemporary American parties. In the end, he shows convincingly the complex ways that affiliation, belief, and commitment have restructured our electoral system since the 1970s.

No brief review can do justice to his findings. Layman begins with a theoretical overview of the relationship of religious and cultural change to the party system, elaborating clearly his measures of both. He then looks at party activists, examining how religious cleavages have modified the constituencies of both parties, creating cultural conflict between Republicans and Democrats and, to a lesser extent, within each party as well. Highly committed religious traditionalists, especially evangelical Protestants, form the core of the GOP, while religious modernists, religious minorities, and secularists make up the bulk of Democratic activists. Layman also considers the mass public, finding similar religious alignments among voters. Finally, he speculates about the likely sequence between changes in elite alignments and those in the mass public, arguing for the causal priority of cues given by elites. Layman concludes that "the religious and cultural polarization of the political parties quite likely will be an outstanding feature of American politics well into the new millennium" (p. 341).

Although his findings are remarkably clear, Layman never forces the data into prepared packages. His sensitivity to nuance and ambiguity are commendable. And although the book contains more than enough methodological paraphernalia to convince the most agnostic political scientist of the importance of religion, other readers should have no difficulty following Layman's lucid description of what his equations show. Historians of the South will be especially interested in his detailed analysis of the religious and other forces causing the massive migration of white southern evangelicals toward the Republican Party. But anyone concerned with the role that religion plays in American politics would find an arsenal for understanding in this fine work.

JAMES L. GUTH
Furman University