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.

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.

At least three of Greeley and Hout's stories, I think, make important, distinctive contributions to our understanding of U.S. conservative Protestants today. The first is the existence of a big cleavage along social class lines within conservative Protestantism. Wealthy and less wealthy evangelicals turn out to be quite different from each other politically. In fact, three out of five working-class conservative Protestants tend to vote Democratic, a higher proportion than working-class mainline Protestants. While most everyone interested in religion and politics these days seems to focus on "moral values," the reality is that family income very powerfully influences voting behaviors along egalitarian/libertarian lines, and does so more powerfully among conservative Protestants than among most other American voters. American conservative Protestants actually appear to be internally quite divided politically by social class.

The second groundbreaking story (to all except those who read the related 2001 article by Hout, Greeley, and Melissa J. Wilde in the American Journal of Sociology, which is to say: nearly everyone) concerns the sources of conservative Protestant church growth over the 20th century. Most of the numerical growth in conservative churches—like the decline over the same period in mainline Protestant churches—appears to be due not particularly to new faith conversions or the popular appeal of liberal-versus-orthodox theology. Rather, it appears mostly driven by the accumulated effects of different fertility rates. That is, mainliners adopted birth control sooner in the last century than conservative Protestants did, and so had fewer children with which to replace themselves in the pews as the decades wore on. Secondarily, conservatives did somewhat better at retaining their larger number of offspring. But Greeley and Hout believe these fertility differences are evening out and hence that the conservative growth trend is coming to an end.

The third newsworthy story in this book concerns evangelical-Catholic relations. The last decade has seen signs of a possible rapprochement between these historically antagonistic traditions. Some evangelical and Catholic leaders may see such a strategic ecumenical alliance as both possible and valuable. But Greeley and Hout reveal significant anti-Catholic sentiment lingering among ordinary conservative Protestant believers, who tend more than other Americans to believe that Catholics are not allowed to think for themselves, that Catholic statues and images are idols, and so on. Perhaps the Reformation is in fact not yet over.

This book is not lacking points with which to argue. I for one am not sure that the authors really understand the diversity within conservative Protestantism around biblical inerrancy, infallibility, and so on, or on the necessity (or not) of a personal "born-again" experience for authentic evangelical faith. I don't find their writing about the relationship between the Reformation and fundamentalism clear and spot-on. I would like to see how the numbers on conservative Protestants look when those who attend church rarely or never are dropped from the analyses. And I always feel more comfortable when survey data are combined with interview data to help interpret the meanings and complexities of survey answers. But none of those concerns mar the book or undermine its real value and significance. Especially as the 2008 election approaches, this is a work of importance, which any who hope to comment intelligently on religion, politics, and culture should read.

Which brings me to my last point. Will this book change anyone's mind? In particular, will it change the thinking of the cultural and political despisers of conservative Protestantism? I hope that I am wrong, but I fear it will not. And here is the scrumptious yet exasperating irony. One of the major charges leveled by many American liberals and secularists against conservative Protestants—particularly in these days of much fighting over Intelligent Design—is the latter's allegedly closed-minded, anti-scientific mentality, amounting—so it is said—to a flat-out refusal to face up to the reality of the empirical discoveries of science. At the same time, here we have a book and a sizable related body of high-quality, empirical, social scientific research showing that most of the negative beliefs about American conservative Protestants held by their antagonists are in fact inaccurate, simplistic, overblown, and badly stereotyped if not blatantly bigoted. But I have yet to see any indications that this accumulated body of empirical findings has put the least dent in the anti-evangelical views of many liberals and secularists. (See, for instance, James Rudin's The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right's Plans for the Rest of Us, Michelle Goldberg's Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, and Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century.)

Indeed, it appears that those who want to dislike and misrepresent fundamentalists and evangelicals are simply proceeding as if this body of published research does not exist. Their attitude seems roughly to resemble that expressed by President George Bush, Sr., early in his presidency, about crimes committed in the Iran-Contra affair: "I don't care what the facts are, I will never apologize for the United States." The facts be damned—full speed ahead with what we already know. And what we surely already know about conservative Protestants is that they are deplorable and dismissible because, among other reasons, they won't pay attention to the authority of scientific facts. Now, I am aware that sociology doesn't have quite the scientific prestige of biology and cosmology. But I also know that Greeley and Hout are at least as smart and analytically capable as, say, Dawkins and Dennett. Nevertheless, when push comes to shove on conservative Protestants, ideology and prejudice seem to win out over social scientifically discovered facts—precisely in order to sustain the charges of evangelicals' anti-scientific obscurantism. Go figure. Was it St. Augustine who taught that the human will is more powerful than the human mind?

So, is Greeley and Hout's The Truth about Conservative Christians a waste of time? I think not. One has to believe that our best understanding of the truth of reality is worth learning and stating, whatever it might be, even if others who may most need to know it do not pay attention. At the very least, sociologists today are creating data for future historians to research when it's all finally become history. Meanwhile, conservative Protestants have a lot to learn, both encouraging and challenging, by reading sociological analyses about themselves. And one may even continue to hope that some of the evangelically averse knowledge class will read Greeley and Hout and a few other related books. It might do them, and the nation, some real good.

Christian Smith is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame and the author of Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want (Univ. of California Press, 2000).

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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