CONCLUSIONAlthough the discipline o

CONCLUSION
Although the discipline of political science was slow to embrace the study of religion, the
discipline now supports a thriving and diverse religion and politics subfield. Religion and politics
THE ESSENTIALITY OF CULTURE 649
research by political scientists continues to face disciplinary challenges to its relevance, but that
has not deterred a growing number of scholars from dedicating their careers to understanding the
myriad hows and whys of the religion-politics connection, both in the United States and across
the globe.
The handbooks I referenced at the outset of this article (Haynes 2009; Smidt, Kellstedt,
and Guth 2009) are but two illustrations of the variety in substantive, epistemological, and
methodological approaches employed by scholars of religion and politics. The growing variety
inherent in the subfield is a testament to its vitality and prospects for continued contribution to
the broader social scientific understanding of religion. However, I would welcome a bit more
theoretical unity among religion and politics scholars. Broad theorization never hurts disciplinary
relevance, and more importantly it moves us toward a better macro-level comprehension of how
and why religion and politics are so inextricably linked.
My proposal is that the concept of culture, and more specifically the notion of competing
religion-based subcultures, might provide a bridge across endogenous (psychological and social
psychological) and exogenous (social movement and contextual) theoretical approaches to the
study of religion and politics. Admittedly, culture is not the easiest concept from which to gather
traction. Something that is often most evident in “symbols, rituals, narratives, icons, and songs”
(Smith 1996:11) does not lend itself especially well to standard analysis of quantitative data.
And advocates of cultural analysis run the risk of being perceived as hostile to the insights
offered by the rational choice tradition of scholarship, although I, for one, have no interest in
discarding rational choice approaches. My position is that the insights inherent in the concept
of culture get to the very core of how we order our lives together—and are thus essential to the
general endeavor of understanding religion’s role in shaping political worldviews. Religion-based
subcultures distinguish themselves through their shared norms, symbols, and values, contributing
to a powerful sense of mutuality. A subcultural meaning-system understandably can be the root of
shared political grievances and may compel political action. Tilly (1978) argues that people will
only pursue such political activity that is consistent with their shared norms and traditions. Thus,
(sub)culture is Swidler’s (1986) metaphorical “tool kit,” circumscribing the content of political
grievances and the universe of acceptable political strategies.
Consider for a moment the centrality of subculture in a religious historian’s account of
20th-century evangelical Protestants:
The ignominy surrounding the Scopes trial convinced evangelicals that the larger culture had turned against them.
They responded by withdrawing from the culture, which they came to regard as Satan’s domain, to construct an
alternative universe, an evangelical subculture . . . They set about forming their own congregations, denominations,
missionary societies, publishing houses, Bible institutes, Bible colleges, Bible camps, and seminaries—all in an
effort to insulate themselves from the larger world. (Balmer 2010:49)
Absent this process of creating and refining a shared subcultural meaning-system and building
institutions to support it, it is hard to imagine the birth, much less the continuing political success,
of the Religious Right or the broader pro-family movement (see Lindsay 2007). And there are
and will be many more religion-based subcultures that take on deep political significance, since
“the system of myths and symbols which religion provides is capable of being continuously
interpreted and reinterpreted in order to accommodate it to changing economic, political, and
other social circumstances” (Cohen 1969:210, quoted in Ross 1997:310).
As we look toward the future, scholarship on religion and politics should work wherever
possible to identify religion-based subcultures, provide rich descriptions of them, explain why
they are distinctive, and then analyze their politics through the lens of the subcultural norms,
values, and symbols that resonate with them. We should follow the charge of Wald and Leege
(2009) to pay close attention to the socially constructed institutions that are charged with the
transmission of culture. Doing so would go a long way toward the advancement of political
650 JOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION
science theory per se, especially if the religion and politics subfield as a whole comes to the
conclusion that “religious questions should be subsumed under a general theory of cultural
political conflict” (Wald and Leege 2010:357).