Faith matters a lot when it comes to electoral politics in America these days, and in scrutinizing the political characteristics of the country's salient religious groups the authors have contributed much to our understanding of how the country works. Be warned: These political scientists make recourse to multiple regression analyses from time to time. Mathematically challenged readers of this journal should not be put off, however; a little empirical analysis is good for the souls of even the most humanistically inclined. And for the most part the volume avoids the dreary assumption of all too many political science treatments of religious phenomena that a single data set, sufficiently manipulated, can do the work of narrative and “qualitative” assessment. This is a valuable book, though not without a major weakness.

Among the most valuable chapters is Stephen T. Mockabee's portrait of change and continuity in the political behavior of white Catholics. This segment of the population, which once upon a time could be singled out as a highly coherent voting bloc, now bids fair to defy generalization; but Mockabee is able to make some hay with a generational analysis. What matters to white Catholics as a whole, however, is not what most people think. Indeed, given the amount of public attention paid to the importance of abortion for Catholics, it is little short of stunning to learn that, after demographic factors from age to income are taken into account, a candidate's position on abortion makes no difference in the way white Catholics vote.

Let me move quickly through some of the volume's more noteworthy accomplishments. David E. Campbell and J. Quin Monson make a fine argument for the powerful but episodic role of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the mobilization of Mormon voters. Melissa Harris-Lacewell undertakes a heroic, if not entirely successful, effort to assess African-American political activism by differentiating adherence to black liberation theology and the prosperity gospel. Louis DeSipio provides a reliable guide to Latino politics based on religious affiliation, while Paul A. Djupe offers as good a short account as I know of the persistence of Jewish Democratic voting patterns. Djupe and John C. Green's portrait of American Muslim politics nicely traces the evolution of that buffeted community in the wake of September 11, 2001.

Of particular importance, the book concludes (before a short wrap-up) with a chapter by Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio on the voting patterns of the non-religious: secularists and anti-fundamentalists, as they are termed here. Over the past generation, in reaction to the rise of the religious right, this segment of the population has increasingly understood itself as voting against a religious agenda. And, as the authors point out, a trend that first manifested itself at the level of political activist or elites has now worked its way down to the rank and file. Put together the tendency of the more religious to vote Republican and the less religious to vote Democratic, and you've got the most salient divide in American politics—a religion gap (or more popularly, a “God Gap”) wider than the well-known gender gap ever was. It is, to be sure, a little odd to treat this gap in a chapter on the non-religious—inasmuch as it was the drift of the religiously committed toward the GOP that, more than anything else, brought it about. But this is a volume long in the gestation, and one gets the sense that the importance of the subject became clear relatively late in the planning stages.

The book's major disappointment—and it is no small one—is Corwin E. Smidt's account of evangelical and mainline Protestants. Together, these two groups constitute 40 percent of the American electorate, and over the past generation evangelicals have been the biggest story in American party politics. Under the circumstances, it is beyond me why they should not have been accorded a chapter all their own. It is particularly problematic that Smidt relies for the bulk of his analysis on a survey conducted in the early months of 2000—before the election of George Bush. An immense amount of water has poured over the dam since then; compared to the other chapters in the volume, this one is badly out of date. Although the breakdown of the 2000 and 2004 presidential votes by religious tradition are shoehorned in at the end, it barely conveys the extent to which white evangelicals mobilized for President Bush and the GOP after the attacks of 9/11, nor does it call attention to the drift of mainline Protestants—and notably the most religious among them—toward the Democrats.

But any edited volume will have its strengths and weaknesses, and it is in the nature of such volumes that the weak do not detract from the strong.