Thomas Frank must wonder how the title of his bestselling book became one of the most popular tropes of our time. Upon its release in 2004, What's the Matter with Kansas? struck an instant chord with readers (liberal ones especially) for the way it condensed the nation's red-blue divide to one concern: why did a heartland state once known for its left-leaning populism abandon its politics of economic equality for a culture-wars agenda cleverly crafted by the right-wing elite? Frank had his answers, Robert Wuthnow has his. In Red State Religion: Faith and Politics in America's Heartland, Wuthnow thanks Frank for drawing attention to this illustrative place (Wuthnow's home state), but also points out where the journalist got it wrong. Kansas has never leaned decisively left or right, he asserts, but always found comfort in the middle. And this, he adds, is precisely why it deserves scholarly attention. Kansas is a helpful bellwether of history because it has consistently operated at the center of American religion and politics, and rarely succumbed to the sharp left-right strains witnessed elsewhere. “My argument,” he states clearly, “is that the Republican Party and the centrist conservatism of the state's two dominant religions—Methodism and Catholicism—actually deterred radical religious and political movements from gaining much ground during most of the state's history” (xii). When the state's citizens have drawn their attention to either political pole it has usually been for a short time in exceptional circumstances, and served only to broaden the Republican base.

This is not to say that changes of the kind Frank observed have not transpired in recent years. Wuthnow demonstrates that a potent Religious Right surfaced in Kansas amid the tumultuous 1960s, when locating let alone holding the middle was impossible, and accelerated in subsequent years as non-indigenous denominations (for example, Southern Baptists) staked out their turf. From the 1970s forward, Kansas became a testing site for right-wing activism of all kinds. While some warriors focused on schoolhouse matters—lobbying against evolution, fighting for vouchers—others sought tighter legislative rulings on bedroom concerns—homosexuality, gender equality, and sex education. Kansas's anti-abortion crusaders, however, were the most determined. In great detail, with absorbing prose, Wuthnow charts the rise of pro-life organizations that used in-state protests to awaken national constituents. No act was more attention grabbing than the murder of Dr. George Tiller. Tiller, “one of the region's few providers of legal late-term abortions,” was working as a church usher on a Sunday in 2009 when a gunman shot him through the head. The violent act marked the end of anti-abortionists' “holy war” on the clinician. For years they “had bombed his clinic, blockaded it, glued its doors shut, tried to murder him, threatened his staff, harassed his patients, picketed his home, and invaded is church” (267). Now, finally, they had slain the enemy.

In one way, Wuthnow's account of this tragedy reinforces Frank's point about Kansas's striking rightward turn, yet it also comes packaged in important correctives. Even as he highlights Tiller's murder and similarly aggressive right-wing acts, he does so to underscore their strangeness in relation to the overriding norm. He notes that Tiller's murder came at the tail end of a decade of restructuring on Kansas's Religious Right, and that by 2009 the movement was “unable to enlist the active support of most Kansans” (314). Of course it takes only a handful of energetic activists to stir up a storm, and Kansas has always had those. But what is more important to the story, Wuthnow insists, is that Tiller's adversaries had to work extra hard to tap a Kansas evangelicalism that was hardly predisposed to their anger or ambition. Wuthnow, in sum, wants his readers to measure Kansas's most recent right-wing outbursts with an eye to context and proportion, current and historic. On the latter score it is worth noting that his discussion of the Religious Right only filters through the last two chapters of his text. This makes sense considering the text's long chronology. But it also serves Wuthnow's bigger purpose, which is to show that the bulk of Kansas religious history, hence the bulk of his book, has very little to do with rise of the Religious Right or the colorful antics of an animated few.

And this is the true strength of Red State Religion. Through his first five chapters Wuthnow carefully outlines Kansas's most important religious and political developments, as they unfolded together but also separately. Religion and politics “came together on numerous occasions to shape policies and public perceptions,” he acknowledges, but his historical subjects more commonly regarded them as best left to their own devices (x). “Piety influenced elections in unexpected ways, promoted moral conservatism decade after decade, and yet kept a sufficient distance from politics that its role could never be easily predicted” (4). Even in a Red State, religion anywhere at anytime is much too complex to be reduced to politics, and Wuthnow wants scholars and pundits alike to take that to heart. Through thick description, grounded in an impressive array of local sources, some acquired through his personal ties to the state, he thus devotes most of his energy to detailing Kansans' attempts to build strong families, churches, and communities, and erect voluntary agencies that could support them through the region's most difficult times (of which there were many). Methodism especially helped guide this enterprise, but over time Catholics and other mainline denominations pitched in as well, both on their own and in cooperation. Kansas religion, in this context, was essentially about “helping people mourn and celebrate” the “ups and downs of daily life” and “forging social ties that reminded them to be decent citizens” (9). And though operating on its own terms, Kansas politics was generally about the same thing: maintaining peace and order and nurturing a civic ethos that encouraged people to take care of themselves and their neighbors.

One might think that a long history of quiet centrists and the seemingly nondescript space they inhabited would offer little inspiration; surely there are more exciting people and places to write about. Wuthnow proves otherwise, however. In his skilled hands the story of Kansas unfolds in surprisingly dramatic fashion. Constantly moving from one compelling character to another—Charles Parham in one instance, Dwight Eisenhower in another—and always eager to pause on state developments that altered the nation's (none more significant than Brown v. Board of Education, triggered by events in Topeka), Wuthnow convinces the reader that Kansas's centrality has always been about more than geography. To be sure, Kansans themselves have often felt marginalized because of their modesty, embattled because of media coverage of the loud dissenters among them, and anxious to be relevant, but Wuthnow shows that their encounters with modern religion and politics, and daily life, is very much the American majority's encounter with modern religion and politics, and daily life.

On this count he also proves the value of doing state history, yet another of his book's major contributions. In the rush to extract meaning from the grassroots to explain happenings at the national level, recent scholarship has tended to glance over the profoundest trajectories of change, those that transpire at the state level, where political activists usually focus most of their energy, and parishioners live out their strongest desires for social belonging and a better life. Whether states other than Kansas, Middle America's true core, can offer as much insight remains to be seen. Those who want to test this point would do well to follow Wuthnow's brilliant model.