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Ever since Jerry Falwell made his political debut in the late 1970s, public interest in American fundamentalism and evangelicalism has grown dramatically. Many Americans want to understand better who and what U.S. conservative Protestants are, although some seem more intent on berating fundamentalists and evangelicals than on genuinely understanding them. Widespread reports after the 2004 Presidential election claiming that "moral values" had trumped policy issues in determining voting—a spin on the results now contested by a number of scholars—and the conclusion that evangelicals were primarily responsible for re-electing President Bush further heightened many Americans' focus on and worry about conservative Protestants.
The Truth About Conservative Christians: What They Think and What They Believe
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In response to this general interest, since the 1980s a number of fair-minded sociologists have produced a variety of enlightening studies about American conservative Protestants. Most of these studies reveal them to be a large, complicated, internally diverse, often inconsistent and ambivalent, and frequently misrepresented group—less extremist and unified than their cultural despisers normally assume them to be, and less coherent and exceptional than their own leaders might like them to be. Andrew Greeley and Michael Hout have now contributed to this literature a new and valuable book extending our sociological knowledge about American conservative Protestants (what they mean by "conservative Christians," sidestepping the fact that many non-Protestant Christians are also conservative). Greeley and Hout are both Roman Catholics and both open-minded sociologists of high regard in the discipline who specialize in the analysis of survey data. Both authors know the U.S. General Social Survey (a reputable, nationally representative survey fielded regularly since 1972) inside and out, and use its data to corroborate the findings of previous scholarship and to add new and important insights of their own.
Consistent with prior scholarship, Greeley and Hout find that conservative Protestants are not that much more Republican than mainline Protestants; are more internally divided politically than most people realize; comprise a lot of diversity in their views on social issues; are only marginally different in social demographics from other Americans; are less distinct from most other Americans on issues of sexual morality, family, and gender relations than stereotypes suggest; and are among the happiest of Americans. The authors also helpfully underscore the lack of necessary connection between conservative theology and conservative politics, as demonstrated in the United States by the close similarity of white and black Protestants on the former and large differences between the same on the latter. Belief in an infallible Bible, hell, and the personal working of God in one's life, in other words, does not necessarily lead to support for George W. Bush and Republican conservatism. That is a helpful reminder.
But Greeley and Hout do not merely repeat what previous studies have already shown. Some of the book's specific statistics, if correct, are genuinely fascinating. For instance, although fundamentalists, evangelicals, and other heirs of the Reformation officially downplay the authority of the institutional church vis-à-vis the Bible, it turns out that—by a whopping 20 percent margin—U.S. conservative Protestants are more likely than Catholics to say that the teachings of the church are "very important." When it comes to federal taxation policy, conservative Protestants also turn out unexpectedly to be significantly more "progressive" than Catholics! And get this: half of U.S. conservative Protestant adults do not believe premarital sex is always wrong, and the majority of never-married conservative Protestant adults are in fact not sexually celibate in any give year. There's fodder for preachers.
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