Robert Wuthnow's newest book is an ambitious effort chronologically analyzing the role of religion in shaping Kansas and its politics from the 1850s, when its violent settlement by whites from free and slave states foreshadowed the Civil War, to the 2009 murder of late-term abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in his church on a Sunday morning in Wichita, KS.

Using a historian's perspective, Wuthnow's analysis focusses on texts, diaries, church and government documents, census and agricultural statistics, county voting data, and newspaper accounts. His effort is to move beyond more polemical analyses that conclude that religion is being used by Republicans to distract working-class voters from their political–economic interests to a more detailed and nuanced understanding of the way in which religion has almost always been woven into the political fabric of Kansas. To be sure, sometimes religion and politics produce very bold and aggressive patterns (abolition, prohibition, and abortion), while in other periods they are weak and subdued. However, it is precisely this variation, noted by Wuthnow, which makes his study both illuminating and, for the most part, on target.

The focus of this book is appropriately on Methodists, Catholics, other mainline Protestant religions, and, later in the twentieth century, the growth of conservative Protestant religions in urban Kansas. Wuthnow does a masterful job of detailing how each religious denomination approached the settlement of Kansas and the strategies they used to expand their respective flocks as settlers arrived and pushed development westward. He accurately describes the interplay between religion and politics in the early years of statehood, particularly as it applies to the development of the Republican Party as the dominant political force. He adeptly portrays the debate and passage of prohibition and the role of Methodists and their affiliated temperance groups in promoting, maintaining, and enforcing temperance laws. His chapter on “Redefining the Heartland” is a must-read for any self-deprecating Kansan who may be embarrassed to tell a stranger in an airport where he/she is from.

Chapter 4, detailing the centrist role of religion in communities and politics in the 1950s, and chapter 5, which covers the important period of transformation during the civil rights and Vietnam War era, are two chapters that apply to almost every state outside the American South. Somewhat surprisingly, Wuthnow ignores some of the more colorful historical interactions between religion and politics related to the “open-saloon” laws in Kansas. Characters like Reverend Richard Taylor and Attorney General Vern Miller and temperance groups like the United Dry Forces did their best to keep Kansans away from liquor from the 1950s to the 1980s. In the process, they too gave Kansas a black eye in the national press, as Miller boarded passenger trains to prevent riders from drinking their cocktails as they sped across the state.

The chapters on the rise of the religious right, the abortion protests in Wichita (Summer of Mercy) in 1991, and the transformation of the religious right to a more broadly based conservative political movement should be familiar stories to those who follow politics in Kansas or have read What's the Matter with Kansas (2005) by Thomas Frank (published in Europe as What's the Matter with the US). However, compared to Frank, Wuthnow brings this history up to date and his treatment is scholarly and objective.

Some of Wuthnow's observations hit the nail on the head. For example, he notes the combination of prohibition, competition, social class, partisanship, and ethnicity that led to an uneasy, but mostly subdued, tension between Methodists and Catholics. He also puts Thomas Frank in his place, noting that the economic welfare of Kansans has improved even as the religious right has grown in prominence.

On the other hand, some of Wuthnow's final observations are troubling. For example, one of his core conclusions is that “religion and politics in Kansas cannot be understood as conservatism in one era dictating the conservatism in the next” (363). He adds that the “Religious Right cannot be explained apart from the demographic shifts [urbanization] that assisted in elevating to prominence conservative Protestant churches that had been of minimal importance throughout the state's history” (366). His own careful study contradicts these points.

Throughout the 1800s when Methodism was spreading in the towns and hamlets of Kansas, it was a revivalist conservative Protestant religion, with a strong message focussed on temperance. Methodists, with their basis in rural communities, strongly promoted the use of government power to enforce their moral order on others. This came in the form of the prohibition movement.

Fast forward to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As noted by Wuthnow, families who trace their roots to the rural countryside now live in the growing urban centers around Kansas City and Wichita. Methodism, however, is no longer a revivalist conservative church. Nor are most of the other traditional Protestant religions that were viable alternatives to Methodism in the nineteenth century. Rather, these traditional Protestant denominations are now part of the mainstream, transformed by cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. As rural folks migrated into the urban centers, the transformation of the traditional Protestant religions created a religious vacuum, which was filled by more dogmatic conservative denominations.

Wuthnow concedes that Kansans have a historical penchant for conservative politics (364) and associational democracy (365), yet he seems to want to ignore that Kansans also have proclivities toward conservative religious denominations. Moreover, similar to the Methodists in the nineteenth century, these twenty-first-century conservative denominations promote using government power to enforce their version of moral order on others. Regulating and ultimately outlawing abortion is one of their goals. Maybe conservatism of the past does not “dictate” that of the future, but there are some strong echoes.

Wuthnow also concludes that the “Religious Right erred” when it focussed on Tiller and that “Tiller was interchangeable” (368). Neither statement matches the thrust of Wuthnow's analysis. As he notes, Tiller was a late-term abortion provider practicing in a religiously conservative community in middle America. For his part, Tiller was a willing and able foil. Not only did Tiller endure a bombing, daily protests, and harassment for years, and being shot in both arms, he also bore the burden of helping to pay for the expense of numerous lawsuits, all to keep his clinic open and operating in Wichita. His practice was a lightning rod for abortion protesters long before Operation Rescue's Randall Terry decided to unleash the Summer of Mercy in 1991 and long after Terry left Wichita for other targets.

The Summer of Mercy itself became a springboard for the institutionalization of the religious right in Kansas politics, leading directly to the religious right fighting for control of the Kansas Republican Party and the institutions of state government.

Protest movements need periodic sustenance to keep vibrant and alive and to recruit new foot soldiers. For almost three decades, most of the protest activities and legal wrangling pointed at Tiller's clinic generated the headlines needed to accomplish this end. It was old news that never grew old. But for Tiller, the religious right would not have become the force that it now is in Kansas and I doubt if Wuthnow would have written this book.

My criticisms of this book should not be taken as a recommendation against it. Wuthnow's work is a good piece of scholarship that will stir much discussion. Indeed, this book has a little bit of something for almost everyone. Historians of religious and political history will appreciate the book's monographic framework. State and local scholars will enjoy the book's focus on communities and state institutions and how they adapt to religiously based issues and positions. Students of Kansas and the rural state development will savor this book's breadth and depth of analysis, covering as it does over 150 years of state history. And for those of you who have been sold on the idea by Thomas Frank that Kansas is the epitome of Americana, you will continue your fascination with this state of less than three million people situated smack dab in the middle of America.