| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Geoffrey Layman. The Great Divide: Religious and Cultural Conflict in American Party Politics. (Power, Conflict, and Democracy: American Politics Into the Twenty-First Century.) New York: Columbia University Press. 2001. Pp. xiii, 435. Cloth $49.50, paper $22.50.

What explains the chasm between the contemporary Democratic and Republican parties over cultural and religious issues? Political scientist Geoffrey Layman attempts to answer just that question. The result is a well-researched analysis of the role of religion in modern American politics that, while ultimately unsatisfying to the historian, represents a major contribution to the burgeoning literature on religion, politics, and electoral change. 1

Layman argues that cultural issues cannot be separated from the political parties. He argues that "the connection between the initial introduction of cultural liberalism and cultural conservatism into the Democratic and Republican parties . . . ha[s] been greatly facilitated by party activists" (p. 50). Layman proposes a model to understand how cultural issues, like abortion, develop from a traditionalist-modernist religious cleavage. "Strategic politicians," as Layman calls them (he includes George McGovern, George Wallace, and Ronald Reagan as examples), embrace cultural issues prompting party activists to reorient the parties along such issues. Only then do parties take these issues to a mass base, contributing to a changed electorate. Since the 1960s, the political parties have been affected less by grass-roots-based demands, Layman's research shows, than by the religious beliefs of party activists themselves. Party activist religious preference is the root of division between a (now) traditionalist Republican Party and a (now) modernist Democratic Party. . . .

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