Anna Grzymała-Busse is the Ronald and Eileen Weiser Professor of European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Michigan, where she also directs the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies. Her academic reputation is based on two important books, one on party system institutionalization and one on state formation, focused on post-communist East-Central Europe (Rebuilding Leviathan: Party Competition and State Exploitation in Post-Communist Democracies and Redeeming the Communist Past: The Regeneration of the Communist Parties in East Central Europe). In her third book, Nations Under God, she moves outside her previous focus on post-communist transformations and develops a bold argument on why Churches have different records in affecting policy outcomes in Europe and North America.

Grzymała-Busse explains the ability of churches to attain desired policy outcomes based on what she calls “institutional access,” essentially a privileged position in establishing policy in areas of importance to the church. Such institutional privilege gives churches “access … [to] write constitutions and everyday legislation … direct input into policy making and policy enforcement, vetting secular state officials, and even running … hospitals, schools … and so on” (8). It is effective because it gives the leaders of the religious hierarchy shared sovereignty with secular elected leaders, and allows them to bypass direct appeals to the electorate or working through affiliated political parties to affect policy outcomes.

Attaining such institutional access is a rare thing in politics, and Grzymała-Busse specifies the set of conditions in which it is most likely to occur. This is not a question of piety but of the connection between religion and nationalism. In cases where religion acted as a defender of the nation and a force for national cohesion, such access can occur. In cases where religion asserts itself against the nation, or as an outright opponent of state formation, such power is hard to obtain.

Grzymała-Busse uses a mixed-methods research design, which is quite predominant in contemporary comparative politics. She presents both a formal model and a set of regressions to support her theory. However, the real meat of the book, the material that makes her cases most strongly, is a set of paired country comparisons that allow her to demonstrate the causal mechanisms she asserts in great depth. She compares the “Catholic Monopolies” of Ireland and Italy, the post-communist cases of Poland and Croatia, and the religious pluralism of the United States and Canada. In each of the paired case chapters she uses the method of structured-focused comparison, using a similar narrative and analytical structure to determine whether her causal logic accounts for the variation across cases.

Each case begins with a historical overview of church-state relations prior to the contemporary era and then investigates church influence in policy areas that usually draw a great deal of attention from religious authorities — education, abortion, divorce, stem cell research and assisted reproduction, and same sex marriage. Although all six cases are selected for their relatively high levels of religiosity, she uncovers substantial variation, and her theory goes far in explaining the outcomes.

Ireland and Italy are overwhelmingly Catholic, and have been quite pious historically, yet she demonstrates strong differences in the influence of the church on policy. At least until the present period, Ireland experienced much more direct church influence. The explanation for why Italy, the seat of the Vatican itself, has seen less of this goes back to her insight on the connections between religion and nationalism. In Ireland, under British domination, Catholicism and Irish identity became strongly intertwined, as the church remained the one institution that remained under the control of the Irish. In stark contrast, in Italy, that fusion never occurred, because the Vatican opposed the creation of a unified Italian state. Thus, the church in Italy never had the kind of direct access to the policy-making process that the Irish Episcopate had under De Valera and (future) Archbishop McQuaid. Whereas Irish churchmen directly participated in the writing of the constitution and social legislation, the Italian bishops had to organize support in the political sphere to push their political agenda with far less success. The stark differences between institutional access and normal politics remained at least until the moral authority of the Irish church was substantially weakened by the pedophilia scandals of the 1990s.

In Poland and Croatia, Catholicism remained strongly fused with national identity due to religious opposition to communism and state persecution of the Church and believers. In Poland, the Church used this to develop powerful institutional access and secured its social agenda. It is a rare Polish politician that risks alienating the Church, due to its continuing moral authority. In Croatia, the high moral authority of the Church was squandered by its close association with the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), the party of the first president of newly independent republic, Franjo Tuđman. This close association and the declining fortunes of the HDZ ultimately diminished the moral authority of the Church and its privileged position in politics.

The chapter comparing the United States and Canada explores cases, which have much more diverse and pluralistic religious environments. Religious actors have had much more influence in the former. Grzymała-Busse attributes this to the reformulation of American national identity during World War II and beyond in which an invented and pluralistic Judeo-Christian “civic” religion plays a key role. Americans may have different beliefs, but being religious, she argues, is a core component of being American. While the influence of religious leaders is not nearly as strong as in Ireland before the 1990s or contemporary Poland, where interdenominational political alliances have been strong, religious influence on policy outcomes has been substantial. Still this requires an engagement in normal politics as opposed to the kind of universal institutional access discussed in the aforementioned examples. In contrast, in Canada there was no fusion in religious and national identities (except in Quebec and this began to breakdown in the 1960s). Thus in Canada, religious leaders must try to appeal directly to voters and, as a result, have had less influence in attaining traditional policy goals.

With Nations Under God, Anna Grzymała-Busse has again produced a book that deserves a careful reading by a wide audience. The theory is well argued and she marshals a wealth of evidence that makes a very convincing case. The one question that remains is how generalizable is the theory, or does it only pertain to those parts of the world for which a set of more narrow scope conditions pertain — largely Christian (or perhaps at least substantially Catholic) states in Europe and North America. Even within Europe, there is a set of cases that would stretch the bounds of the theory. There are several states for whom Protestantism was an integral part of identity formation (the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Scandinavia) in which secularism is perhaps strongest in Europe. And what are we to make of states that have strong sectarian divides that fracture national identity? And are the notable insights that she draws here of use in making sense of religion and politics in places that do not have hierarchical and monotheistic forms of religion? It is, of course, unfair to ask that much of any single book. But it does raise such questions, and it is my hope that those who try to take up these issues, do so with the same skill that she does in this important and timely work.