In 2016, a majority of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in the general election. Although misgivings about his personal life likely kept many from supporting him throughout the primaries, most would “come home” to the Republican nominee in November. A pair of recent books pitched at the intersection of religion and politics help to explain how religious elites may have aided in the process of sending white evangelical Protestants to the polls to vote for Trump, and they shed light on some of the possible consequences that may stem from the widespread perception that being religious necessitates voting for Republican candidates. Although these works are very different in terms of their approach to the subject, they both break new methodological and theoretical ground and, in doing so, add a great deal of nuance to our understanding of the ways in which religion has shaped the American political landscape in recent years and has, in turn, been influenced by politics.

In Decoding the Digital Church, Stephanie Martin takes a look at the rhetoric employed by evangelical Protestant religious leaders throughout key time periods (e.g., in the aftermath of the great recession and during the run-up to the 2016 presidential elections), with particular attention to how these religious elites dealt with the topics of gender and race relations. After outlining a brief history of evangelical Protestantism in America, Martin goes on to describe the approach that she uses to study how many religious elites who might be considered to be affiliated with conservative evangelical Protestantism engaged with various social or political topics. Rather than observe one or two congregations, as is often done in ethnographic work in this area, Martin took advantage of the opportunities afforded by the fact that many churches make their services available on the internet in order to analyze a large number of sermons over a long time horizon.

Her key finding, particularly with regard to how it came to be that large numbers of white evangelical Protestants ended up casting their ballots for Donald Trump, is that conservative evangelical Protestant ministers engage in what she terms “active-passivism.” In other words, rather than drilling their flocks to the polls to vote for Republicans to the steady drumbeat of rhetoric surrounding the primacy of social issues such as abortion or same-sex marriage, Martin finds that most of the evangelical religious elites that she observed both encouraged their parishioners to go to the polls—to be active in civil society—and at the same time emphasized that the outcome of the race was ultimately in God’s hands.

Rhetoric of this nature, in Martin’s view, has the likely effect of encouraging conservative evangelical Protestants to vote as they please and in line with their partisan commitments given that they have effectively been absolved of the consequences of doing so. This perspective stands in stark contrast to a view of white evangelical voting patterns popularized by Thomas Frank in What’s the Matter with Kansas (2004), which sees evangelical Protestants as having been principally influenced by moral issues. Although certainly present in some of the sermons that Martin chronicled, evangelical ministers were not using hot-button moral issues to mobilize the people in the pews (and those watching on the internet) for political action on behalf of Republican candidates. Instead, the peculiar combination of invocations to be politically involved coupled with assurances that the outcome of the election—and by extension, any policies that resulted from the selection of one candidate over another—was entirely out of their hands.

Attention to how such messages were received by the typical (presumably nonacademic) observer of such overtures necessarily fell outside the purview of Martin’s investigation, however. Similarly missing is any sense that the sermons that Martin observed are at all representative of what the typical churchgoer experienced upon walking into a conservative evangelical Protestant church that wasn’t broadcasting its services around the globe. Finally, in spite of an explicit emphasis on how the “homiletic reality of evangelicals…takes shape and how it may influence the personal, social, and political commitments of believers” (p. 7), there are times when it is difficult not to come away from Martin’s analysis thinking that conservative evangelical Protestant elites are strategic actors who provide precisely the kinds of arguments necessary to direct their flocks to vote for Republican candidates. Martin writes, for instance, that “Faced with a candidate like Trump, what conservative Protestant voters needed were warrants that let them do what they already wanted to do—vote for the GOP. The rhetoric of active-passivism provided exactly that” (p. 12). This certainly sounds like a why as well as a how.

In contrast to Martin’s focus on some of the most religious voices on the American social and political scene—and religious elites in particular—David Campbell, Geoffrey Layman, and John Green’s Secular Surge draws attention to those Americans who adopt a secular orientation toward the world. The analysis in the book is pitched primarily at the mass level, but it carries clear implications for political elites (see, in particular, chapters 6–10). Consequently, Campbell, Layman, and Green go to great lengths to develop and validate a measure of secularism that goes beyond the catch-all category of “religious none,” toward which much of the existing literature has gravitated.

After detailing their new measure of secularism—and its correlates—they go on to point it toward several long-standing questions in the field. Existing work, for instance, has often sounded the alarm surrounding the possible civic consequences of the “rise of the nones” given the role that churches and other religious institutions are believed to play in promoting social and political engagement among the faithful. Campbell, Layman, and Green find, however, that secularists are just as politically active as religionists. Pure religious “nones” (that is, the unaffiliated who score low on measures of secularism), on the other hand, are less involved in both civic and political affairs. Using a mix of survey and experimental data, Campbell and colleagues also document how rising numbers of those with a secular orientation toward the world are influencing intraparty politics in the United States, and how candidates who profess to be nonreligious or secular are received by voters. They find—not surprisingly, given that many minority groups within its coalition express high degrees of religious commitment—that rising secularism may pose more of a challenge for intraparty harmony among Democrats going forward than it does for the Republican Party. Campbell, Layman, and Green also show, using a series of innovative experiments, that voters are not necessarily turned off by candidates who profess to be secular.

The analyses detailed in Secular Surge therefore break new ground on a variety of fronts. In terms of contributions to an ongoing scholarly discussion, however, one part of the book stands apart from the rest: their investigation into whether the rise in secularism that they note is being driven, at least in part, in response to the mix of faith and politics often championed by the religious right. A number of recent studies have found that some Americans are leaving organized religion (e.g., becoming “nones”) because of a perceived connection between faith and conservative politics, but Campbell and colleagues are the first to tie the rise in secularism to politics. Using original panel data and an innovative experiment, they present solid evidence that there is a backlash against the combination of faith and religion and politics that is causing a rise in secularism. Taken together with the other analyses that are reported within the book’s pages, these experimental results put Secular Surge on the cutting edge of the discussion surrounding the interplay between religion and politics in America.

Although illuminating, some of the experimental treatments that Campbell and colleagues employ present study participants with statements from faith leaders that—if Martin’s observations are representative of the kinds of rhetoric that religious elites use when addressing political issues—may overstate the extent to which politics is ordinarily front and center in such settings. If most religious leaders engage in active-passivism, or other similarly covert forms of political messaging, then it stands to reason that a relatively few examples of overt politicking among religious leaders—precisely the sort that are used in the experimental studies detailed in Secular Surge—have an out-sized effect on public perceptions of the extent to which conservative politics is being mixed with religion in churches across America. Are a handful of high-profile instances of conservative evangelical ministers intermingling faith and politics shaping the images of organized religion that are held in the American public mind? What effect, if any, is there of exposure to active-passive rhetoric surrounding politics and civic engagement on personal secularism or religious behavior? These are crucial questions, and future work in the vein of Secular Surge would do well to incorporate insights gleaned from research typified by Martin’s examination of the rhetorical styles on display among religious elites from the conservative evangelical Protestant tradition.