This is a superb work of social science. David Campbell, John Green, and Quin Monson make exhaustive use of numerous surveys conducted by the Pew Forum and Gallup, and a half-dozen surveys which they designed and conducted themselves, to produce about as detailed and revealing a look at the political preferences and peculiarities of the members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the official name of the Mormon church) in America as probably any group of scholars ever could. While some of the information that the authors make use of has already been reported in American Grace (2010) (a sociological study of religion in America which Campbell co-authored with Robert Putnam), here that information is packaged alongside numerous other scholarly insights, resulting in something that stands entirely on its own.

Seeking the Promised Land is arranged into three broad sections, looking at “Mormons as an Ethno-Religious Group,” the “Political Behavior of Mormons,” and “The Consequences of Distinctiveness.” The fundamentals of the authors’ overall argument are sketched out in the first section. American Mormons, they argue, have to a significant degree resisted the ideological sorting that has characterized the political journey of other white religious groups in America (the Mormon population in the United States is overwhelmingly Caucasian), thus maintaining a level of “subcultural” distinctiveness such as was once typical of many Christian groups in the United States—Irish Catholics voting Democratic, for instance—but which now is nearly nonexistent. While it is obvious to anyone who has even a passing familiarity with American Mormons that a large majority of them vote Republican, the authors insist that political behavior is not (or at least isn’t fully) the result of the same trends that have, for example, brought about a cultural alliance between white evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics in recent decades. On the contrary, they believe that American Mormons by and large follow a distinctive ethno-religious logic when it comes to their political beliefs and actions. They possess, in the authors’ view, a “sacred tabernacle,” within which moral and political distinctions are propagated, even as larger trends invariable sweep along the nation as a whole.

It should be noted that the larger historical and sociological factors behind this sweep, and the reason why the Mormon “sacred tabernacle” stands out politically, are mostly unexamined in Seeking the Promised Land. But that is, I think, a reasonable omission, since the factors in question—intermarriage and social mixing among the white Protestant, and later generally white Christian, American population from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, resulting in the shaping of Caucasian identities more around public opinion than around ethnicity or religion—will likely be well understood by the majority of scholars and students of American religion who may read this book. That America offers religious liberty to individuals is manifestly true, but so is the fact that such liberty pressures distinct cultural groups to politically conform. Most eventually did–and certainly Mormons have as well. Yet their accommodation to America’s liberal pluralism, according to the authors, is not entirely complete.

The moral and political content of this tabernacle is the focus of the second section of the book, which charts the rise of partisanship among American Mormons. The authors recognize that the socialization that takes place within the Mormon tabernacle is not entirely separate from overall demographic tendencies in America: While Mormons identify with politically conservative preferences at a much higher rate than does the American population as a whole, still there are more male Republican Mormons than female Republican Mormons, more white Mormons voting Republican than Hispanic Mormons voting Republican, more higher-income Republican Mormons than lower-income Republican Mormons. The only notable demographic distinction reported by the authors is that there are (comparatively speaking) more younger Mormon Republicans than older, which is obviously the reverse of the general population.

Those caveats given, the research of Campbell, Green, and Monson identifies two key points that, they affirm, play a crucial role in shaping Mormon political distinctiveness–specifically, American Mormon views about the U.S. Constitution and about gender roles within the family. In regards to the first, the authors review both official and folk doctrines within the church, noting that “Mormons are the ‘most exceptionalist’ of any religious tradition in the country,” with 94% agreeing with the statement “the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights are divinely inspired” and 72% believing that “the United States has a special role to play in world affairs and should behave differently from other nations”; they conclude that “[i]t is only a short step from Mormons’ reverence for the Constitution . . . to an originalist interpretation,” which—as they point out—is an article of faith among most political conservatives in America (pp. 109–12). In regard to the second, nearly three-fourths of American Mormons maintain that “[i]t is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family,” far outscoring the next most conservative Republican-voting religious group in America, evangelical Protestants, of whom less than 40% agreed with this statement. The authors, observing some movement in American Mormon attitudes toward mothers who work outside the home (today, only a little more than half agree that mothers harm their children by taking a job, down from 70% 30 years ago), rather tartly observe that “we would expect Mormon attitudes towards working mothers in 2020 to be roughly the same as what the rest of the population thought in the 1980s” (pp. 114–15).

In short, according to the data presented in this book, it seems that while such hot-button topics as abortion and same-sex marriage have clearly played at least some role in shaping American Mormonism’s distinct conservatism, what is most firmly and decisively communicated within the Mormon political tabernacle is the uniqueness of America’s culture and history, and—presumably—the vital place that a kind of 1950s heterosexual domesticity has come to play in that culture and history.

How this set of teachings will endure or change over the next couple of generations, and what that will mean for American Mormon voting habits and perceptions, is an underlying theme in the final, somewhat rueful, section of the book. In discussing Mormons on the level of presidential politics, the authors point out that the “strong intrareligious bonds of the sacred tabernacle mean fewer inter-religious bridges,” and thus that “Mormons are viewed with greater suspicion than members of most other religious traditions” (p. 184). After exhaustively reviewing the different strategies of all the major Mormon candidates for president (George Romney, 1968; Morris Udall, 1976; Orrin Hatch, 2000; Jon Huntsman, 2012; and Mitt Romney, 2008 and 2012), the authors observe that while “in the heyday of ethno-religious alliances, denominations and parties were intertwined,” today “it is entirely rational for a voter who leans Democratic to oppose a Mormon candidate in the absence of any other information,” and that, they conclude, “should give Mormons pause” (p. 251). The prospect of American Mormons being “fully welcomed into the coalition of religious conservatives” would necessarily require “partisanship to seep into the religious aspects of Mormonism” to an even greater degree than it already has (pp. 259–61), and the authors express their hope that such would not be the path taken by the Mormon tabernacle.

Still, the authors also recognize that the tension of maintaining a subculture can create its own kind of longings. Hence, their somewhat sad, but surely accurate, conclusion that the “promised land” of American Mormons is a clumsily divided one: the aspiration to be “in the world, not of the world—but also accepted by the world” (p. 253). This perhaps is an unavoidable desire for a small, distinct, Christian subgroup to feel, but a peculiar one all the same.