This fine book has many dimensions. It is a work of understated yet pointed historiography-challenging assumptions about “Red” states. It masterfully illustrates how and why political culture emerges and persists. Inherent in its historical narrative is a commentary on the enduring social and political significance of organized religious life. Above all, it is the result of a labor of love on the part of its native Kansan author. Robert Wuthnow meticulously leverages his career-long emphasis on culture and change to answer (without normative innuendo on his part) the question “What's the matter with Kansas?”
Wuthnow's central endeavor is to examine the past to understand why Kansas today appears so unyieldingly conservative. He shows that Kansas was not founded as a bastion of conservatism; instead, from the start, Kansas was a place where moderation prevailed. This moderation was sustained by the centrism of the state's historically dominant religions: Methodism and Catholicism. The Republican Party has held great sway in the Sunflower State since its inception as well, but Kansan Republicanism is rooted not in ideological extremism but in the values of neighborliness, reasonableness, and practicality. “By many indications,” Wuthnow writes, “an inquiry into the connections between faith and politics in Kansas would begin and end with arguments about the self-perpetuating power of conservative ideas and leaders in the nation's heartland … But that story is too simple and is not the one I tell in this book” (3). The real story as Wuthnow tells it is one of the cultural endurance of “thrift, self-sufficiency, and wholesome living,” values institutionalized by Kansas's founders and perpetuated by generations of Kansans who prioritized hearth and home, church and farm (111).
It was in the context of these core values that a moral issue — Prohibition — emerged as a “principal wedge issue” early in Kansas's history (74). Led by Methodists, the Protestant majority strongly favored temperance, so Kansas was a dry state from 1881 (after its state constitution was amended) until 1948 — 15 years after the passage of the 21st Amendment repealing Prohibition. Nonetheless, some Kansans strongly favored religious tolerance. Catholic enclaves were viewed with suspicion, but cooperation across Protestant denominations was common. Holiness and fundamentalist movements gained little traction in Kansas, maintaining the state's moderate religious culture in spite of its stern insistence on temperance.
Moderation also characterizes Kansas's Republicanism. As a free state from the start, it was on the Union side of the Civil War and ever loyal to the party of Abraham Lincoln. Founded just seven years apart, the state and the party essentially grew up together. However, growing up together does not always result in remaining friends for life. Kansas suffered mightily during the Great Depression and the dust bowl. Its population dwindled. Some of its youthful optimism turned to cynicism. Increasingly, Kansas was portrayed as a wasteland by outside observers. Kansans rejected the Republicans in 1932 and “cautiously followed Roosevelt's lead because there was no other, … [but] in the meantime, [knew that] the only way to survive was to work hard and spend as little as possible” (150). Before long, farmers came to resent Roosevelt's agricultural policies, and many saw him as a spendthrift, out-of-touch, eastern snob.
Kansas's alienation from Washington grew after World War II. “Towns became more precious as centers of daily interest and focal points of nostalgic longings for a simpler time” (170). No longer the frontier, by now Kansas was a state where several generations of the same families had lived, worked, and worshiped. The Kansan way of life seemed increasingly incompatible with the national political scene. Even the Republicans in Washington were “not quite as responsive or effective as [they] should be … [and there was a prevailing sense] that the nation was moving in a new direction and leaving the heartland behind” — notwithstanding the presence of a Republican Kansan, Dwight Eisenhower, in the White House (171). Meanwhile, churches, the vast majority of which remained theologically and ideologically moderate, played essential roles in community life, drawing “people in and [making] them feel good about participating in a way that politics seldom did” (193).
By the 1970s, changes were afoot in Kansas that challenged the moderation of previous generations. Small towns were dying, taking their moderate Methodist congregations with them. An influx of migrants from Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas brought evangelical Protestant influences with them. Evangelical churches were planted in growing suburban settings, and private Christian academies soon followed out of fear that public “schools were debasing traditional family values” (295). Many Kansans found themselves longing for and attempting to recapture a part-real and part-imagined past. At precisely the same time, abortion was ascending the public agenda. Evangelical growth gave the nascent Religious Right easy access to Kansan politics, and the diminishing stigma around being Catholic gave pro-life evangelicals ready political allies. “Laypeople, Catholic and Protestant alike, connected abortion with permissiveness, self-interest, materialism, and worse … Underneath it all was the desire to live in a community that upheld both goodness and mutual respect” (351–353). Kansas today is not just a pro-life state; it is a deeply pro-life state. The summer of 1991 witnessed a massive and sustained anti-abortion protest in Wichita, which in 2009 became the site of the murder of late-term abortion provider Dr. George Tiller. Since Kansas has always embraced “faith in associational grassroots democracy,” it is hardly surprising that outrage over abortion has precipitated sustained activism (365).
Nevertheless, as Wuthnow shows, Kansas's moderate core persists. Conservative Republicans do not win every election. Restrictive public policies are sometimes overturned, as has been the case in Kansas's ongoing tussle about the teaching of evolution in public schools. Wuthnow shows us in nearly every detailed sentence of Red State Religion that caricatures painting Kansas as the intolerant, culturally backward center of “flyover country” are vastly oversimplified and unfair. Without ever hitting the reader over the head, Wuthnow allows the real story of Kansas to develop organically. He is not building new theory per se; instead, he is explaining in tremendous depth. This is a book that deserves a close and careful reading by every political scientist interested in religion, state politics, political culture, or electoral politics.
