Book Reviews

These quibbles aside, this is a book that should be valuable reading for
courses on Middle Eastern studies and collective memory. I recommend
this book to readers in sociology, history, cultural studies, anthropology, and
Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, as well as Israeli studies.

Nations under God: How Churches Use Moral Authority to Inuence Policy.
By Anna Grzymala-Busse. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Pp. xvi1421. $95.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).

Wade Clark Roof

University of California, Santa Barbara

How nation-states and religion relate is complex, particularly so if by this we

also mean how and under what circumstances churches might inuence
moral values and national policies on controversial issues like abortion, gay
rights, stem-cell research, and the like. Anna Grzymala-Busse tackles this
difcult issue within democratic societies where typically religion operates
more freely, but in order to exert signicant inuence, she argues, religious
authorities must nd entry into, and navigate skillfully within, political sys-
tems. A political scientist, she explores this possibility by comparing six Chris-
tian democracies paired carefully as follows: Ireland and Italy (Catholic monop-
olies), Poland and Croatia (postcommunist divergence), and the United States
and Canada (religious pluralism).
In all these situations, the inuence of organized religion on policy de-
pends less on the populations religiosity than on the moral authority reli-
gious communities gain by working with the political order. While religious
belief and observance correlate with religions efforts to inuence politics, it
is not because voters necessarily insist upon it; indeed, Grzymala-Busses
evidence suggests that churches often have their greatest political advan-
tage by appearing to be above petty politics, with their leaders working
covertly in the back rooms of parliament, Congress, or another political
assemblies. Without strategic politicking of this sort, religions inuence
politically would be far less visible. The name of the game for religious
leaders then is not just gaining institutional access but also cultivating the
skills necessary for working with, and within, political structures and espe-
cially with inuential leaders at all levels.
The author goes further: A churchs ability to enter these quiet corri-
dors of power depends on its historical record of defending the nation
and thus gaining moral authority within society and among politicians
(p. 2). Religious identication with the nation-state is crucial, as is sorting
out particular policy domains where inuence is most likely and then chan-
neling the authority that has been gained into those policy domains. Favor-
able demographics and cultural similarities facilitate the process, but like-
minded religious and political gures, often working together, must take
advantage of political opportunities. It is important that religious and politi-

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 American Journal of Sociology

cal identities reinforce one another by means of shared myth and narrative,
ideally such that the sense of belonging to the group and confession are fused
and the moral issues of the groups history tend to be coded in religious
language, according to Charles Taylor (A Secular Age [Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2007, p. 458]). She points to three indicators of the
depth of this fusion: one, how many people share in the meshed popular
identity as measured by the polls; two, the historical role of the churches in
the rise of the nation-state; and three, the degree of mutual reference be-
tween religion and nation when invoking their identities. It helps if major
policy domains such as education, welfare, and health care are fused with
mythic content. Shared religious identities on the part of both religious and
political leaders as in Ireland and Italy enhance possibilities of religious in-
uence. The earlier communist era in the postcommunist countries solidi-
ed religious and national identities and thus left the churches with consider-
able moral authority, although this proved to be more effective in Poland than
in Croatia.
In the American case, national identication meshed early on with Re-
form Protestantism, and as the country became more diverse, the religious
canopy expanded with an invented Judeo-Christian conception of na-
tional unity. The latters mythic and symbolic content, reinforced by the
countrys appropriation of it in its own view of itself, for example, as the
New Israel and a chosen people, assured a strong religiously based
moral authority and one that was loaded politically. Denominational plu-
ralism encouraged coalitions among religious bodies and parachurch groups
with moral and political crusades. Grzymala-Busse discusses the evangel-
ical revival and political alliances in recent times but does not mention that
evangelical Christians are backing off from a Judeo-Christian view of na-
tional identity and favoring instead one more distinctively Christian, which
has resulted in a polarization between religious conservatives and religious
progressives, precisely at a time of expanding religious (and nonreligious) plu-
ralism when the country is in need of a broader religiopolitical identity.
In contrast, Canada has neither a strong fusion of national and religious
identities nor a strong heritage of religion inuencing politics. Franco-
phone and Anglophone communities ourished historically with religion as
a source mostly of informal regional identity. The moral authority of re-
ligion is weak by comparison with that of the United States. Public policy
debates are seldom framed in religious terms; even abortion has not been a
major religious or political issue as has been the case in the United States.
The author concludes, No religion or inter-denominational alliance can claim
to inuence Canadian politics, at either the provincial or federal level, whether
through a partisan coalition or institutional access (p. 297).
For political scientists and sociologists Nations under God is engaging
and provocative because of both its singular, well-developed argument and
the authors disciplined comparative methodology. By pairing two countries
that are roughly alike in religious heritage and/or political circumstances,
comparing the several pairs, and focusing on the importance of the fusion of

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 Book Reviews

religious and national identity, the author sets up a framework for rigorous
analysis (she also includes a sophisticated statistical appendix that offers sup-
port of the inferences she draws from the comparative study). And in the
concluding chapter she notes briey that national and religious fusion helps
to explain why religious monopolies often are so vibrant and lasting, thus
posing a challenge to supply-side theorists who emphasize the importance
of religious pluralism and its inherent dynamic of competition as the critical
source of religious fervor. For sure, that is another project, but just raising
that possibility underscores the importance and potential far reach of her
theoretical contribution. Grzymala-Busses analysis is an exemplary case of
comparative study.

Durkheim, the Durkheimians, and the Arts. Edited by Alexander Riley,

W. S. F. Pickering, and William Watts Miller. New York: Berghahn Books,
2013. Pp. viii1309. $95.00.

Terry Nichols Clark

University of Chicago

Sociology has largely ignored the arts. But as central to values, emotion,
ideology, and personal lifestyle/identity, the arts have long been arguably
as important as crime or other common research topics. Younger sociol-
ogists have seen this gap: culture and arts are the most active topic areas in
Europe and the United States. Yet most current arts research is narrowly
descriptive. This volume aims to change this, by revisiting the Durkheim
tradition to invigorate artistic theorizing. The strengths of the book are the
featuring of the diversity of the tradition and the many lines linking broadly
Durkheimian themes to current work on the arts. Its historical/philosophical
tendency unfortunately does not reach so far as to link analytically to cur-
rent empirical work as published in the journal Poetics. Still, it offers much.
The editors creatively include a mix of the classic and contemporary Durk-
heimian tradition. Several chapters are in dialogue with one another and
others, illustrating the richness of this theorizing, as well as (sometimes) its
looseness. The rst two chapters by Miller and Pickering build the books
analytical foundation. Millers chapter The Elementary Forms is a sub-
tle reading of aesthetics and art and their embeddedness in society. Durk-
heimian effervescence is dissected, where Miller nds ritual as well as sub-
jective creative energy. Pickering stresses Durkheim more in his
French context, where Durkheim as builder of scientic sociology opposed the
arts as a nonserious activity thus to be ignored. As champion orator on the
Third Republic, Sorbonne patron, and advocate of la pense serieuse, he
profoundly opposed Proust, Bergson, and Tarde and their efforts to capture
the ethos of the waning aristocracy. This antiarts theme, derived from con-
sidering art as subjective, emotional, and unscientic, was also invoked by
Max Weber (Economy and Society [Bedminster Press, 1968, pp. 60810]) as

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