Yet Diamond cannot always be counted on to think through the significance of these details, particularly for the progressive politics she values. For instance, liberals who wonder why their defense of "rights" no longer seems to speak to the rest of the country as powerfully as it once did might consider how Christian co-optation of the language has stripped away its former meaning. Even the ACLU faces competition from the Christian right: from a nonprofit defending "parental rights" in the courts, led by Jay Sekulow, yet another Christian-broadcasting television star. Similarly, the facts of liberal academics and think tanks must compete with those gathered by the secular and religious think tanks of the right, which are busy marshaling data in support of their cause.

Diamond is at her best in reminding us of the Christian right's uneasy home within the Republican Party. That relationship, in her mind, is one in which the secular GOP elites largely thwart the Christian right's agenda. Although the Republican Party platform includes support for a "human life" amendment, it is on the back burner among its legislators, she points out. Furthermore, when Christian-right activists become officeholders on, say, local school boards, they are often voted out once they attempt to translate their agenda into action. Far from being the "farm team of future officeholders," as Ralph Reed (former executive director of the Christian Coalition, now a political consultant) called them, they often end up like the school board members of Vista, California, who were ousted in 1994 after voting to teach creationism and refusing government funding for a breakfast program for poor children.

The Christian right can sustain its mobilization in the face of these defeats because of the support it receives from the evangelical subculture, Diamond argues. While Diamond's points hold in a certain limited context, in fact the Christian right also maintains power by exercising it vigorously. It has won veto power within the Republican Party on the abortion issue in both presidential and state races. It has not managed to achieve a full legislative agenda, but it has managed to restrict the choice of candidates. Secular Republicans can stage-manage the Christian right out of the camera's eye, as they did during the 1996 national convention, but that does not reduce its influence behind closed doors. And its activists won that influence through the grassroots politicking necessary to be elected as party delegates. Even as secular Republicans now squirm at the idea that they have to play ball with the Christian right in yet another presidential election, it is doubtful that they can do without the electoral margin hundreds of thousands of conservative evangelicals provide at the polls. One-quarter of the new class of members of Congress elected during the GOP sweep of 1994 identified themselves as evangelicals.

While reading Diamond, it struck me that this is a Republican Party that, since Reagan, has become more like the Democrats of old--more an amalgam of interest groups than party regulars. The Christian right is now the counterweight to the corporate types backing George W. Bush; it thus fills a role no longer played by small-town, Taft-style Republicans. And any corporate type willing to finesse antiabortion and more authoritarian family-values-style politics can make it to the top of the party and perhaps the country. In turn, Christian-right organizations do their job by linking a defense of the traditional family to conservative economic policy--as one Christian-right supporter told me, "Let's cut families' taxes so mothers can return to the home."

In reviewing the changes in the Christian right's political program over the past fifteen years, Diamond's book has great value. I was not quite as satisfied with her analysis of how the huge evangelical subculture supports the Christian right. Her research is limited to broadcasts and written documents produced by the movement--the public face of evangelicalism. This public face is leadership driven, with an institutional and male bias. Yet evangelicalism is defined by its individualistic nature, by Christians having the power to develop a direct relationship with God outside of churches, pastors and even the mass Christian public that Diamond believes is abetted through religion-based media. What of the women interviewed by Brenda Brasher, author of last year's Godly Women: Fundamentalism and Female Power, an ethnography of a pair of fundamentalist churches? These women were uninterested in their pastors' efforts to mobilize them politically and provided little support to the church's antiabortion ministry.

Brasher spent six months with women at two fundamentalist megachurches in Southern California, one in a suburban, mostly white, middle-class area and the other in an urban, working-class neighborhood where 28 percent of the parishioners are Latino and 65 percent are white. In both churches, women had drawn on the intense gender segregation of the movement to build women-only ministries, attending their own Bible study groups and retreats, promoting their own leadership and intimate neworks to "work out their emotions...and come to an accord on the meaning of faith." The segregated ministries also give women a power base the pastors hesitate to ignore, undercutting the church's authoritarian message. Both churches are part of a new Christian movement, where worshipers dress casually and draw on rock, rap and Latin jazz to pay tribute to God. Brasher does warn against generalizing from these examples, because fundamentalism is far from the cohesive movement portrayed by both the media and academia.

The questions Diamond is unable to answer because of her focus on the documentary record are better understood through Brasher's book. Diamond mentions in passing that one-third of evangelical voters did not cast ballots for Republicans in 1994, that more evangelicals are divorced than in the population as a whole and that they often draw on the latest cultural styles to express their faith. Brasher understands these seeming conundrums because she has discovered a more varied world than outsiders would expect, one with sympathetic ties to the personal-growth movement. Its women often turn to the church after experiencing some personal trauma like divorce, and in their separate women's ministries they speak freely of marital troubles and abuse and resolve them through their relationship with God. They are embarked on a search for meaning (to assert values against materialism) and order in a world that they experienced before their conversion as one of chaos. Women's power within the congregations flows from these segregated ministries, and if they don't support a church headed by women, many support egalitarian marriages. Some are even pro-choice.

In this context, Brasher speculates, fundamentalist ministers' "dominant teaching on sex roles...should be considered a rhetorical effort to sway the behavior of highly independent, diverse congregations rather than a description of or prescription for authority and power patterns." By engaging more with popular culture, fundamentalism is continually changed by it--leaving preachers seeking to win adherents to a more rigid political position while the cultural ground is continually shifting.

Diamond looks at evangelical culture only to provide an explanation for the longevity of the Christian right. Her book would have been richer if she had viewed it as a mystery to unravel, as do those more attuned to the inner language of the new Christian movements.

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