Judith Lynne Hanna's latest book is nothing if not provocative. Hanna, an anthropologist of dance, attempts in Naked Truth to rehabilitate the image of exotic dance, seeking to locate it within the realm of dance and art rather than that of pornography and the obscene. Hanna's work is timely, given its situation within the efflorescence of scholarship on the religious right over the past couple of decades. She places her examination in the context of the Culture Wars, and figures it as a battle over First Amendment interpretations between the religious right and those who favor a stronger church–state divide. Her first two chapters are a brisk exploration of the Christian right (CR, as she abbreviates it) – its perceived Dominionist origins; its firmly patriarchal worldview; and the implications these have for its stance on the body, nudity, desire, and dance. She then looks at the CR's “battle strategy” in its fight against strip clubs. She next moves to an extended definition of exotic dance, in the third chapter, suggesting that it is both legitimate dance and also a complex production of fantasy or theater art, in which the everyday is stylized; she additionally looks at the personal and social benefits of strip clubs. The fourth chapter extends this into an exploration of nudity and touch, arguing that these are not the sole domain of exotic dance, but are also common in mainstream non-stigmatized arts. The fifth and sixth chapters are case studies of how CR opposition to strip clubs played out in two communities: as a witness who testified on behalf of the artistic merit of exotic dance, Hanna is arguably well placed to describe the proceedings. She next explores exotic dancers’ working conditions, in an effort to demonstrate that they are not exploited, then argues against the CR charge of adverse secondary effects, and – in the last chapter – examines how the industry defends itself.

Naked Truth has a daring thesis, and Hanna is particularly persuasive in her defense of exotic dance as both dance and art; scholars working in those fields will doubtless find these aspects of her work a helpful addition to the current literature. However, Hanna's book has deep and troubling cracks marbling its treatment of American religion, which unfortunately makes up a significant proportion of the book in and of itself, and is ineluctably bound up with the rest of the content as well. In particular, the portrait of Christianity that she draws often veers into inaccurate and broad-brush caricature. She cites particular (generally Pauline) biblical verses – verses about which religious scholars have argued vigorously for almost two millennia – and then interprets them for us in a paragraph or two in the manner of an imagined hypothetical member of the religious right. The notion that there is one perspicuous and correct Christian conservative interpretation of biblical passages on modesty or submission will doubtless come as a surprise to American religious conservatives of all stripes, who presumably may now cease heated disagreement on these verses posthaste. Hanna's analysis of power within evangelicalism, especially in her sections on female submission, is particularly egregiously one-note. She suggests that the Christian right “expects women to stay home, be submissive and responsive to the husband,” who exercises “domination over women and children”; in short, “both home and church are bastions of male privilege” (27). This type of reductive analysis not only ignores scholarly work on evangelical women and the power of submission (e.g. that of R. Marie Griffith), but also denies evangelical women the type of agency that Hanna is so eager for us to extend to the exotic-dancer protagonists in her tale. Her approach leads to profoundly simplistic blanket statements throughout her book about American conservative Christianity and its relationship to sexuality and the body: for instance, she asserts that “the CR views nudity as sinful, rather than sacred or natural” (39), and that “sexual repression” is a “foundational tenet of fundamentalist Christianity” (33).

Hanna's broader portrait of the religious right parses similarly. Reminiscent of Michelle Goldberg in Kingdom Coming (2007), Hanna locates in Dominionism the heartbeat of the CR's repression, but arguments to support this thesis are thin on the ground in her book. She dedicates about half a page in the first chapter to a very brisk jog through Rushdoony and the Chalcedon Foundation (19), but rather than argue for their significance in setting the agenda of the religious right, she apparently expects the reader to take it on trust. Dominionism then reappears, unsubstantiated, as a bogeyman at various intervals throughout the book, but it is used more as a scare word than as an actual descriptive term, and arguments to support its instrumental role in either the ideology or the politics of the religious right are not forthcoming.

Hanna plays similarly fast and loose with other aspects of her delineation of the religious right, in a manner that might give a less courageous historian serious pause. There is virtually no confessional articulation in her description of the religious right: various Christian denominations are summarily mentioned at the outset, in a blithe breathless jumble, and then quickly melded into a shadowy “CR-Activist,” who becomes our mythical and larger-than-life antagonist and dominates the remainder of the book in his “efforts to impose a theocracy” (245). As Hanna would have us believe, historic enemies – Baptists and Pentecostals, Anabaptists and Catholics – all now march in perfect totalitarian lockstep against the liberating forces of artistic freedom. We get no sense of the delicious improbability of their co-belligerency, given their histories, nor of the tensions remaining between these denominations on many religio-political issues, even as they cooperated on some concerns. Even brief mention of – for instance – the general Protestant opposition to federal funding for Catholic parochial schools, or of differing broader moral visions between these groups, would help texture and add vibrancy to what is in Hanna's book an unrealistically flat image of America's religious landscape. While one has to admire the chutzpah of the seemingly genuine comparison she draws between the religious right and the Nazis and the Taliban (14), details like this also do not inspire confidence that the book's handling of religion is marked by appropriate scholarly nuance. Similarly, Hanna's cheap shots at religion – for instance, her suggestion that pedophilia scandals within some Catholic and other denominations should render Christians ashamed to speak out against strip clubs (235–40) – do not reassure the reader that the content of Naked Truth is history rather than polemic.

Additionally, given her professed concern for situating her book within church–state scholarship, and given that many of the cases she discusses were located in the Sunbelt, it is especially curious that Hanna does not have more to say about the Baptists in particular. They would have served as an interesting bellwether for a tale about Christian political polarization around moral issues. Roger Williams might roll in his grave to know that there is no mention of the long Baptist history of church–state separation, or of the late 1970s conservative coup within the Southern Baptist Convention, or of the subsequent continuing internecine wars within the Convention between those who favor the Baptists’ traditional support for a strong interpretation of the First Amendment and those theological Young Turks who would forsake this in a Hail Mary bid to reinstate moral decency in a post-sexual-revolution America perceived to be going rapidly to hell in a hand-basket.

The sum total of all of the foregoing criticisms is that Hanna's ahistorical and journalistic take on her subject blinds her from viewing the concerns of the religious right in broader perspective, and her lack of knowledge of the long history of the movement leads her to portray it with a striking lack of understanding or intellectual charity. One comes away from Hanna's work with through-the-looking-glass vertigo: as Hanna would have us believe, the religious right are the aggressors in the Culture Wars, transgressing unprovoked on moral high ground that irenic liberals had long held. There is little sense in her text of the profound social dislocation that the disintegration of the pan-Protestant consensus caused, nor of the impact of the genuine – and, for many Christians, shocking – erosion in public moral norms that occurred during the 1960s and the 1970s. The liberalizing or abolishment altogether of the Cornstock Laws and other obscenity prohibitions indeed created a moral brave new world for many Christians, and any discussion of the religious right and the Culture Wars must be seen in light of many Christians’ struggle to reckon with the frightening new sexual dispensation under which they found themselves. None of this historical complexity surfaces in Naked Truth, except reduced to brief triumphalist rhetoric.

Less charitable readers might well be tempted to dismiss Hanna's argument out of hand as pure academic spin: in spite of (or perhaps because of) Hanna's too-clever-by-half case for exotic dance as art rather than pornography, the famous words of Justice Potter Stewart come to mind. Nevertheless, Hanna's thesis has the potential to be something enjoyably contrarian – something that illuminates that fine line between art and the obscene, and what the broader implications of this are for issues of church–state separation. Unfortunately, its lack of a long and informed perspective on the American religious right means that Naked Truth proves far more adept at raising these important questions than at answering them.