Corwin Smidt starts his book, Pastors and Public Life: The Changing Face of American Protestant Clergy, by explaining why we should care about the role of Protestant clergy in American culture and politics. He argues that they are strategically placed at the intersection of religion and public life; clergy are the interpreters of religious doctrine and serve as strong cue-givers on social, moral, and political issues for their parishioners. Smidt's book is the first to examine clergy and their attitudes over time and is a strong testament to the fact that clergy consciously work to augment their influence. The book concludes, however, with the caveat that Americans’ trust in organized religion and the clergy in general has declined significantly over the past 20 years. This begs the question of whether this careful and precise book is delineating Protestant clergy attitudes at the last gasp of their cultural and moral influence.

This book is a fitting capstone to a career spent closely observing and analyzing the role of religion in political life for voters and political activists, especially those whose weekly role in the pulpit or congregation make religious belief and community a foundation of their political attitudes and behavior. As part of the growing sub-discipline in political science, Smidt helped revolutionize the study of religion in American politics over the past four decades. Long the director of the Paul Henry Institute at Calvin College, Smidt used that position to both help scholars on their way to a better understanding of religion in politics and help people of faith better understand how politics impacted their lives and their ability to pursue religious and social goals in their communities. So a book on clergy and how they interact both with their parishioners and with politics is a great way for those unfamiliar with his work to see Smidt's special insights at work.

Based on surveys of pastors in seven mainline and evangelical Protestant denominations over two decades, the book reports on the political and social opinions and perspectives of these clergy, as well as the activities they undertake to impact the members of their churches and the wider society. Building on several books that examine the findings of earlier incarnations of these surveys, Pastor and Public Life benefits from the long attention of a scholar who recognizes that the role and influence of these leaders will change over time, both because of changing contexts and because of changes within the people themselves.

The book paints a picture of an older, more female, and more non-traditional group of clergy. Perhaps the most striking change that Smidt finds over time is the aging of the clergy. This is not simply due to a reduction in the attractiveness of the profession for younger people, but to a significant growth of pastors who come to their calling later in life, as a second career. So, while 30% of pastors in the 1989 study were under 40, only 13% were in 2009. This pattern is true for both evangelical and mainline Protestant clergy. With these changes have come attendant shifts in both theological and social perspectives. Protestant clergy are, in fact, more conservative theologically and politically than 20 years ago, but still less conservative than their congregations. Across the board, however, clergy reveal the same trends of partisanship and polarization we find among citizens in general over the last two decades.

The heart of the book is Chapter four, which examines the respondents' social theology. “Social theology contributes to differences in political orientations beyond that which occurs by means of theological orthodoxy” (18). Smidt delineates between those clergy that are individualistically oriented and those that are communally oriented. While there is not a large difference over time in these measures, Smidt finds that these attitudes are mediated by a more polarized politics. He says, “… the theological orientations of clergy have become more closely aligned with their ideological orientations and partisan identifications” (204), reducing the relative importance of theological orthodoxy in explaining party identification and voting behavior. This is an interesting and important finding because it highlights the change and continuity of the political and social views and actions at the core of this book.

Perhaps uniquely among studies of clergy, the series of surveys on which the book is based has asked about both the attitude toward politics and the direct activism of clergy in their communities both within and outside of their religious roles. Smidt finds that while pastors' knowledge about and interest in political and social issues has increased, their reported cue-giving to their congregations has remained the same. Again, this result is strongly mediated by partisanship, with Republican clergy less comfortable with direct action beyond cues and Democratic clergy more so.

As with all the research built on these surveys of clergy, this book suffers a bit from the narrowness of its respondents. While the study engages a range of Protestants, it is problematic that it does not examine one of the largest Protestant groupings, that of the non-denominational Protestant church. Finding that category of respondent would surely be costly, but would also add much to the findings by covering the clergy that minister to large numbers of evangelicals in the United States. It would also have been interesting to see how particularly social theology and contemporary issue positions would be approached by Black protestants.

Written in a precise and informative style, each chapter in Smidt's Pastors and Public Life provides a wealth of data on Protestant clergy and their attitudes and behaviors. While many of the chapters will be useful on their own to political scientists and sociologists of religion, the book as a whole provides a composite picture of these clergy, their relationship with their congregations, and the commitments and ideas that inform their political goals and activism. The whole is certainly more than the sum of its parts, and the reader is left with a greater understanding of politics in Protestant churches and how that may change in the coming years.