Red State Religion

Despite the title, Wuthnow is writing a sociologically-informed history of the interaction between religion and public life in Kansas. It rebuts the Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas by showing how religion largely served as a pragmatic, centrist framework knitting local communal life together.

However, in each case - slavery, populism, prohibition, evolution, and abortion - Kansas has served as a stage upon which national movements descended to act out an moral drama, sparking a blaze from plenty of dry local tinder. Geographically and politically, Kansas has served as a sort of American center stage.

Social-political movements in Kansas succeeded only to the extent they adopted a grammar of reaction to national forces hostile to its own religious values.