This is an ambitious volume. The editors' introduction explains that it aims to identify the intersection between religion and race in the construction of an American national identity to a greater degree than previous works in the field. “Race is not simply an additive factor to religion (and vice versa)” the editors contend; “the categories of race and religion in American political life are often defined through and against each other” (p. 17). The introduction makes the volume especially amenable to review because it both clearly states its central premise of the “co-constitution” of religion and race and provides a standard for judging the book's success.

The essays in Faith and Race in American Political Life advance a remarkable distance toward meeting this standard in an impressive variety of ways. Perhaps the collection's most common topic is the way that significant political actors have subtly and bluntly used religious ideas to justify past and present racial discrimination and exclusion. Carlos Figueroa's essay details how Hicksite Quaker Albert K. Smiley's well-meaning efforts to temper imperialistic attitudes toward newly acquired overseas territories by organizing the Lake Mohonk Conference (LMC) backfired. Too concerned with alienating those with strong discriminatory views due to Smiley's Quaker-inspired concern with peace and consensus, the LMC became an outlet for the propagation of disturbing racial views. Gerald Webster and Jonathan Leib's contribution documents how advocates of official uses of the Confederate flag continue to invoke the flag as a symbol of the Christian heritage of the United States in order to override its historic association with segregation and slavery.

Other essays focus on the opposite side of the coin by insightfully examining how the American fixation with race has shaped views of minority religions. These essays also reflect the praiseworthy effort of the collection to extend its treatments to religions besides Christianity and to racial groups other than whites and blacks. Sangay Mishra explains that discrimination against Sikhs following 9/11 was not merely a result of mistaken identity but of the “long history of racialization of immigrants as strangers and outsiders” (p. 240). The origin of this behavior, Mishra contends, can be traced back to mainstream culture's lumping together of early immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, whether Sikh, Muslim or Hindu, into the religious-racial category of “Hindoos.” Likewise, Susan Gordon recounts that early-twentieth-century mainstream culture regarded Jews as members of the “Hebrew” race; it also regarded Armenians as Europeans due to their Christian heritage but Turks as Asiatic, even though Turkey is west of Armenia.

American Jewish scholars such as Horace Kallen, Gordon continues, reacted to these mainstream efforts by categorizing Jews as an ethnic rather than a racial group, thereby securing the advantages of mainstream culture while maintaining their cultural distinctiveness. The success of attempts by dominant groups to use religion and race to limit the possibilities of minority groups has remained only partial, we are reminded, because minorities have been creative in flexing their autonomy in responding to them. This creative adaptation is also on display in Catherine Paden's powerful evocation of the way in which the Nation of Islam has historically provided a political outlet and source of identity for low-income African Americans relatively ignored by other political movements. The collection thus successfully avoids depicting minorities as mere victims of discrimination.

In all these ways and more, the chapters fully validate the editors' ambition to show that religion and race are significant causal factors in each other's constitution. The reader cannot but agree, for instance, that racial discrimination in American political life would have been very different in a multitude of negative and positive ways without the influence of religion.

It is a bit less clear, though, that religion and race are causal factors that are as primary or significant in each other's constitution as the volume occasionally make them out to be. The introduction's first paragraphs suggest that the intersection of religion and race is the primary reason why some of the public criticized President Barack Obama's defense of Muslims while praising his predecessor's defense of Muslims, and for the pernicious meme that the president is a Muslim. The former instance, though, might be equally as well explained by the fact that partisanship is currently greater and more rancorous on the Right, while the false claims of the president's religious otherness may have as much to do with the time he spent in Indonesia as a child as with his race.

Attempts to control for alternative causal factors besides race or religion could have been a bit more robust in other instances. Robert Jones and Robert Francis's admirable article provides evidence that moral-values issues related to religion are of more importance for white evangelical voters than for black Protestants. Moral values, though, tend to be less salient for all voters in times of economic crisis (see, e.g., Alan Wolfe, “The Culture War that Never Came,” in James Davison Hunter and Alan Wolfe, eds., Is There a Culture War? 2006). Given the economic disparities between whites and blacks, it might be the case that class rather than race is primarily responsible for the different voting behaviors of black Protestants and white evangelicals.

Determining the primacy or significance of religion as a causal factor of racial discrimination also requires a comparison of the attitudes of religious and nonreligious white Americans. If research indicated that the nonreligious are as apt to display prejudice as the religious, this might suggest that religion was a tool affecting the particular style or content of racism rather than the engine driving discrimination.

Indeed, there is some historical and contemporary evidence suggesting that such a comparison might indicate that the religious are less likely than the nonreligious to hold problematic racial views. Edward Larson's account of the Scopes trial in his Summer for the Gods (1997) provides evidence that supporters of Darwinian evolutionary theory were often more supportive of imperialism than were religious fundamentalists like William Jennings Bryan, who opposed it. Christian Smith and Melissa Denton's more recent empirical research (Soul Searching, 2005) suggests that highly religious teenagers personally care more about “equality between different racial groups” than do other teens.

To the collection's credit, two chapters do recognize the possibility that religion can play a role in preventing racism among whites. Tobin Miller Shearer tells the little-known story of how leaders of the Mennonite Church in the late 1960s and early 1970s were willing to at least engage with Black Power advocates and their demands in a way that few other white Americans at the time would consider. Nancy Wadsworth's essay recounts the “racial reconciliation” efforts of prominent conservative evangelical groups like the Promise Keepers. These groups' members are more open to acknowledging the sins of slavery and segregation than are other white neoconservatives who ignore the past and present impact of race. Still, the comparisons in these chapters are more implied than expressed, and do not directly engage the question of whether religion on the whole has tempered or spurred racism, or simply been used as a tool by discriminators motivated by other ends.

These foibles, however, should not trump this volume's achievement. The occasional omissions of Faith and Race in American Political Life do not mean that its more thought-provoking and ambitious claims are wrong, but rather that they await additional support from the efforts of the many scholars likely to be inspired by it.