Religion, culture, and politics in the twentieth-century United States

the long version

Anyone who seeks to understand the dynamics of culture and politics in the United States must grapple with the importance of religion in its many diverse and contentious manifestations. With conservative evangelicals forming the base of the Republican Party, racial-ethnic communities often organised along religious lines, and social-political movements on the left including major religious components, many of the countrys key cultural-political debates are carried out through religious discourse. Thus it is misleading either to think of the US as a secular society in which religion is margina.