Pulling out my dog-eared copy of Rediscovering the Religious Factor in American Politics, I was reminded just how important this work was to my own career in political science and to the discipline. Lyman “Bud” Kellstedt, one of its co-authors, gave me the book in 1997 during a summer program at Wheaton College that he hosted along with two other members of the estimable “Gang of Four,” Jim Guth and Corwin Smidt (their longtime collaborator John Green was unable to attend). The summer program at Wheaton provided Ph.D. students with an interest in religion and politics an amazing opportunity to learn from some of the pioneers of the subfield and to network with other young scholars.
For me personally, both the Wheaton College seminar and the work featured in Rediscovering left an indelible mark. My doctoral program at the time had no faculty who specialized in religion and American politics—I am guessing this was standard practice even by the mid-1990s—so meeting like-minded scholars who were curious about how religion impacted American political life gave me reassurance that this question mattered. The work of the scholars featured in the volume, more importantly, gave political scientists relatively new to the subfield concrete tools with which to measure religious concepts empirically, allowing the discipline to advance beyond the common perception that religion's relationship to American politics was best conceived as an ethno-religious one.
Rediscovering is a seminal work in the field for several reasons. First, the measurements regarding religion that it introduced to its readers are situated in the larger scholarly context. Readers of the book not only came away with ideas on how to operationalize religious concepts more specifically, but they also learned a lot about other theories developed by political scientists to explain political behavior, whether they involved group consciousness or political socialization—and why such theories are incomplete without an understanding of religion. Its work in several chapters on the political role of churches and pastors—building on the path-breaking scholarship of Ken Wald and others—added an important contribution to the burgeoning field of contextual studies of politics and continue to inform our understanding of the importance of social networks in explaining political behavior today.
Second, this work laid the groundwork for future scholars to consider how religious tradition (or “belonging”), beliefs, and behavior impact numerous facets of political behavior—what later became known collectively as the “three Bs model.” These pillars have been a mainstay of the work of religion and politics scholars while also shaping the broader public's understanding of religion's relationship to politics. These buildings blocks have been fine-tuned over the years, to be sure. For instance, scholars have improved upon how we measure religious tradition precisely, including Brian Steensland and his co-authors (as applied to the General Social Survey) and Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks (as applied to the American National Election Study). But the religious categories that we now take for granted as the first steps many of us use in our empirical analyses really began with the group of scholars featured in this formative book.
As useful as these concepts remain today, however, there are limitations with the tools developed in Rediscovering, as the discipline needs new approaches to grapple with unforeseen developments in American politics and America religion. I wll list three major challenges.
First, the rapid expansion of secularization, particularly among the Millennial generation, caught most religious observers off guard. While understanding why this trend has occurred is important, I worry more that our current social science measures of what it means to be secular are insufficient. The survey questions used in the development of the three “B”s approach paints this broad and growing group with similar brushstrokes, which is problematic given that some initial work shows that these so-called “nones” are quite a diverse lot, often spiritual but not “religious.” We need better measures of this group to understand how their spirituality (or lack thereof) may impact American politics.
Second, while political scientists demonstrate that media consumption exacerbates partisan polarization in the mass public, we know relatively little about how religion factors into this equation. While Rediscovering examined the impact of religious television consumption on politics, such findings are very dated given the new media environment in which we live. We need to extend our religious lens to social media and partisan media news outlets given that both forms of media usage are indelibly linked to public opinion, partisanship, and other forms of political behavior. The traditional survey questions as used in Rediscovering may be a start, but we need more rigorous approaches that also include experimental research designs.
Finally, the 2016 election raises all sorts of new, unexpected questions that could not have been predicted by Rediscovering. How could white Evangelicals embrace Trump so strongly given his personal moral failings? How do the politics of resentment intersect with religion in the age of Trump? How does religion shape voters’ feelings about nationalism, populism, and race relations going forward? Given President Trump's unorthodox presidency to date, we also need to consider how or if religion can inform Americans’ understanding of democratic norms and civility. More generally, we need better measures of how social location, including class, race, and gender, intersects with religion to inform Americans’ political choices. Rediscovering the Religious Factor in American Politics was an important first step in helping to articulate ways that religious variables matter to politics, but as recent events demonstrate, we still have much to learn about religion's impact on politics.
