This book might be described as an intellectual genealogy (in the Foucauldian sense) of the conservative religious coalition that has exerted so much gravitational pull in the last forty years of American history. Young argues that the electoral coalition often described as the “Religious Right” was no monolith; rather, it was the result of a thousand small gives and takes among the three primary camps he locates within that coalition: conservative Roman Catholics, evangelical Protestants, and Mormons. Indeed, Young's careful delineation of distinctions and disjunctures almost persuades me that there is no Religious Right at all, merely a series of shifting alliances pivoting and reforming on issue after issue.

The fragmentary nature of the Religious Right is for Young perhaps its most telling feature. Rather than simply a coalition of Christians of various stripes who happen to share opposition to the sexual liberation of the 1960s and 1970s, Young believes that the Religious Right was also advancing an alternative way to think about the American public sphere. The Religious Right's most important opponent was neither Roe v. Wade, nor the legal sanction of homosexuality; rather, most fundamentally, it was the ascension of liberal Protestant ecumenism—the “civic virtue of religious inclusion and equality”—as the preferred language of the American public square (2).

Indeed, Young points out that the three traditions which composed the Religious Right are the same which were least given to the ecumenical movement of the mid-twentieth century, a sort of inverted coalition standing against the famous Protestants, Catholics, and Jews of Will Herberg's “American way of life.” This is an obvious but too-little considered point, and it underlies how he describes the entry of these groups into politics. For conservative Catholics, Mormons, and evangelicals, entry into the public square was premised not upon the notion that politics was an ecumenical area in which theology should be sublimated into a common language of technical expertise; rather, for them politics was an imperative premised upon their foundational identity: that truth could be learned through theology, divine inspiration, and sacred texts. This is why, Young points out, the movement has earned such opposition, not only its positions but its premises seemed to ecumenicists objectionable.

The story Young tells, then, begins not when most histories of the Religious Right do: the Supreme Court cases of the 1960s which struck down prayer and Bible reading in schools, or with the active mobilization of Catholics against abortion or evangelicals against the Carter administration in the 1970s. Rather, the seeds of the Religious Right were planted when conservative Catholics, evangelicals, and Protestants began recoiling from the ecumenical language and religious style of the 1950s. Of course, such criticism was, paradoxically, directed at each other as much as at ecumenists: evangelicals viewed Catholics and Mormons as marginally Christian at best, and both Mormons and Catholics insisted upon their faith's sacramental exclusivity. And yet, in their reactions to Vatican II, to those Supreme Court cases, and to abortion, these groups came to see that anti-ecumenism itself was a theological and political positions worth cooperating over.

One reason why I like this book is that it takes theology seriously. Young's story about the rise of the Religious Right is less a story of organization and mobilization than it is a story about theology and intellectual experimentation. Generally, historians of the movement emphasize the innovative grassroots political efforts of people like Phyllis Schlafly and Richard Viguerie, or the organizational talents of a Jerry Falwell or Ralph Reed. For Young, though, the story is about how these groups came to prioritize certain religious ideas—about sexual morality and the role of the nation in God's plan—over those which had previously kept them apart. Theological developments, like Vatican II, the counter-cult movement, and Mormon correlation thus played far more important roles than has been previously recognized. Young gives us granular analysis of all of these things, teasing out the simultaneous attraction and inherent repulsion each group felt for each other while they slowly drifted into alliance.

Young's prose is clean; the book, though, is probably too long. It reads like a dissertation, sometimes delving more deeply into the weeds than his argument requires, to give deep background and exhaustively unpacking its analysis. For instance, on pages 68–69, he offers up a several hundred word long history of school prayer in America from the early republic through the 1960s. This is done to preface his discussion of Engle v. Vitale, but it feels somewhat like overkill. Young repeats himself often as well; each chapter opens and closes with a thesis statement and conclusion, respectively, which are sometimes useful and sometimes simply rehearse earlier language. Frequently his prose circles his argument, slowly tightening in winding statements and restatements until it seems he finally hits on the precise words he desires.

It's also odd that, in such a dense study, some things feel missing. There is a chapter on Vatican II and glancing mention of John Paul II and rapid Mormon growth overseas, but I wonder to what extent the international bodies of these churches influenced their behavior in the United States. More, it seems that, given the players in his story, the 2012 election felt irresistible to Young. After spending 200 plus pages and six chapters moving slowly from 1950 to 1980, he rushes from Reagan's inauguration to Mitt Romney's nomination in the last sixty pages. This left me gasping a bit for breath, and more, gives the impression that the last thirty years of American history merely reenacted the patterns laid in the previous thirty. Young's narrative thus somewhat peters out rather than ascends to a denouement; his argument always provisional within each case he discusses. This may, though, reflect the simple fact that his protagonists are themselves persistently uneasy about their accomplishment.