Few scholars have had such an influence on the study of American religion as Robert Wuthnow. A sociologist of religion at Princeton, Wuthnow has written widely on the American religious experience since the Second World War. His books have covered a wide array of subjects, from the growth of religious diversity to the rise of new spiritualities. Probably his most notable and enduring scholarly contribution is his landmark 1988 book The restructuring of American religion, which established a sophisticated interpretive framework for understanding faith and institutional religion in modern American that has been widely accepted and adopted by historians, political scientists, sociologists and anthropologists alike. In all his scholarly endeavours, Wuthnow has been interested in documenting and explaining how religion intersects with both politics and identity. His most recent book, Red state religion, continues those themes by examining the evolution of religion's political influence in the state of Kansas. After explaining much of the dynamic between religion and politics in post-war America, Wuthnow both widens and narrows his perspective in Red state religion: more broadly, he has extended his chronological focus back to the Civil War and up to virtually the present; but more narrowly, he focuses solely on his home state of Kansas rather than the United States as a whole. This simultaneous widening and narrowing allows him to use Kansas, an exemplary state in many ways but unusual if not unique in others, as a prism through which to examine national trends. Kansas, Wuthnow notes, once led the nation in progressive politics, whereas now it seems synonymous with the kind of conservative religious extremism that fuels the Christian Right and the culture wars. If this sounds familiar, it is. In his enormously influential but controversial 2004 book What's the matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank, another native Kansan, began from a similar starting point to argue that increasingly conservative religion led Kansans – and, by extension, many other Americans – to prioritise cultural and social political issues over economic ones. This, Frank said, explains why lower-income but culturally conservative Americans voted in favour of the Republican Party and therefore against their own economic interests. Contrary to Frank, Wuthnow argues that religion in Kansas – especially the healthy competition between the state's two largest denominations, Methodists and Catholics – has led to pragmatic rather than ideological politics. Kansans have almost always voted Republican, but it was a more flexible and moderate party than we normally realise. Moreover, Wuthnow argues that the adoption of strong positions on incendiary issues like same-sex marriage and abortion has been the result of more contingent factors than observers like Frank allow. Elegantly written, passionately argued, and deeply researched, Red state religion challenges our basic assumptions about the influence of the Religious Right in particular, and the role of religion in American politics more generally.