A Matter of Faith is a declarative title, not a question. David Campbell has assembled a group of political scientists who have reason to argue that religion played a prominent role in the 2004 presidential election. Yet the contributors largely reject the breathless punditry that interpreted the election as a pitched battle in a religion-based culture war. While acknowledging the importance of the intersection of religion and “moral values” in 2004, the authors demonstrate that the electoral mobilization of religious believers is much more complex than a reflexive response to moral preferences.

Collections of this sort often lack coherence around central themes, but A Matter of Faith generally avoids that trap. Campbell sets up a key organizing idea in the opening chapter by claiming that the 2004 presidential election reflects 30 years of the political re-ordering of religion in the United States. Politically speaking, the ethno-religious affiliations of the past matter less today than shared religious beliefs and behaviors. “The salient religious divide in America,” as Campbell puts it, “is no longer defined by denomination but by devotion” (8). It should be noted that there is some imprecision in the term “devotion,” which occasionally is used as a rough synonym for “traditionalism,” even though the terms have different connotations. Moreover, as David Leege points out in his expansive and helpful tour through middle-level theory in the concluding chapter, our measures of devotionalism might suffer from an evangelical bias. Still, Campbell's overall claim is indisputable: The religious divide is rooted in something more than affiliation.

The rest of the book is a diverse set of empirical explorations of this central claim. In Chapter 2, John Green and colleagues begin with one of their now-familiar surveys of the voting behavior and partisan breakdowns of various religious traditions and traditionalisms. Chapter 3 shifts from mass to elite behavior. Using a survey of party convention delegates, Green and John Jackson reveal interparty religious divides on issues and ideology, as well as some pronounced differences between mass constituencies and party elites, especially on issues like abortion. Their most probing conclusion is that religion has helped to create ideological coherence and cohesion within the parties — and therefore greater separation between the parties. Given the role of religion in reinforcing elite-level partisan differences, I was left wondering whether the authors also see religion as a factor in the drift of the mass electorate away from traditional partisan loyalties.

Subsequent chapters focus on morality politics and the mobilization (or lack thereof) of specific religious groups in the 2004 campaign. Sunshine Hillygus examines the electoral role of morality and media coverage (Chapter 4); Scott Keeter (Chapter 5) and Geoffrey Layman and Laura Hussey (Chapter 10) analyze the voting behavior and partisanship of evangelicals; Quin Monson and Baxter Oliphant explore the Republican Party's efforts to “microtarget” religious conservatives (Chapter 6); Eric McDaniel takes a fresh look at old political coalitions in black churches (Chapter 12); and Barbara Norrander and Jan Norrander investigate stem cell research as an election theme (Chapter 8). Campbell and Quin Monson's conclusion about the electoral significance of same-sex marriage in 2004 is an apt summary of these other chapters as well: “while gay marriage may not have mattered much to most voters, it mattered a lot to a few voters” (121). Their point is that even though religion and morality were largely important “at the margins” of the mass electorate, the margins are precisely where candidates and parties piece together winning coalitions.

An interesting question raised in the book is how to mobilize religious voters when it is difficult to disentangle their religious identity from other factors. Several chapters point to the difficulties of identifying and activating ethno-religious voting blocs. Matthew Wilson (Chapter 9) and David Leal (Chapter 11), respectively, ask whether we can even speak of a “Catholic vote” or “Latino vote” (and, in the case of Latinos, whether and how religiosity helps define them as voters). In Chapter 13, Lyman Kellstedt and colleagues attempt to identify a religious left, and discern several obstacles to the left's effective mobilization as a counter to the religious right. This latter group is particularly understudied, and Kellstedt and colleagues provide some useful springboards for future research.

In the final analysis, A Matter of Faith makes an effective case for what its title declares. But it also raises a question: Was 2004 an exception to a rule? As I write this review in the wake of the 2008 presidential election, it is difficult to consider the book apart from the campaign waged between Barack Obama and John McCain. In fact, the occasional speculations about the 2008 election in A Matter of Faith invite the comparison. The authors of the book could not have predicted pre-election market meltdowns, the dramatic emergence of Obama (who is mentioned, in passing, only once in A Matter of Faith), or the other twists and turns of 2008. It is precisely those circumstances in 2008, however, that set up a comparative test of A Matter of Faith's key contentions. The continuities (such as the evangelical vote, which stayed firmly in the Republican column in 2008) and differences (such as the Latino vote, which favored Obama much more heavily than it did John Kerry) between the two elections are intriguing, but a book review is obviously not the place to conduct a thorough comparative test (thankfully!). It is enough to commend A Matter of Faith for generating the question.