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This chapter argues that the ways in which some people and not others pursue credibility in the public sphere shape the possibilities for good debate in the future. In general, respondents understood public religion to be contrary to good debate. They negatively evaluated individual representatives who were seen as “conservative” in public life. They also negatively evaluated religious attributes and language in public life, even when they shared religious commitments with the representative being evaluated. Ultimately, respondents mobilized a normative preference for deliberative debate that conservative religion was seen to violate. Yet to ordinary persons, it is only conservative religion that operates in public life, in the form either of individual religion representatives or of religious arguments and reasons.

One of the greatest paradoxes in the study of gender and religion is that many young and politically conscious women continue to join, or remain in conservative and patriarchal religious organizations. This chapter brings together several excellent qualitative studies of female evangelicals in North America, and Pentecostals in Latin America and South Africa in order to identify common patterns of attraction to putatively oppressive religions. The focus here is on implicit benefits of religious involvement for women in various parts of the world. Quite simply, some women like patriarchy, while others ignore or subvert what they do not like, but the benefits outweigh the costs. This is not to say that religion acts as a coping tool or that women adopt religious beliefs cynically but that the latent social functions of conservative religion are not desired separately from it but add to its plausibility.

This chapter examines women, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), and traditional family values and conservative religion in the American South. It discusses the tendency of many Catholics in the region to allow the abortion question to serve as the Eclipse Issue, which is capable of compelling allegiance of the Republican Party on a whole array of economic issues. It also highlights the emergence of the so-called new racism which involves the replacement of overt racist appeals by religious and moral judgmentalism as the primary emotional issue that can move masses of Southern whites to vote for economically elitist policies.

This concluding chapter states that the conservative religion of white Mississippians provided almost no help to the state's African Americans as they struggled to abolish white domination. Evangelicals fought against black equality, proclaiming that God himself ordained segregation, blessing the forces of resistance, silencing the advocates of racial equality, and protecting segregation in their churches. This book claims that theology shaped evangelicals' responses to the demand for black equality. The literalist view of the Bible helped define segregation, while moderates who began the civil rights years with flexible views of Scripture found a corresponding openness to the moral critique of segregation. The book, however, does not attribute a special propensity for racism to conservative evangelicals; rather, it demonstrates that certain ways of viewing sin, morality, and individual responsibility structure a people's thinking so as to obscure and discount collective and corporate responsibility.

This chapter analyzes the extraordinary diversity of religious life in Westminster in these decades. While nationally famous puritan preachers performed in Westminster’s many fashionable pulpits (eg. St Martin in the Fields, Covent Garden), more careful analysis reveals a messier reality of compromise and resistance to religious reforms in the parishes. Some ministers were able to promote elements of puritan reform (restricted communions), yet religious conservatism was still a persistent presence in the area, especially in the parish of St Margaret’s, whose church had nevertheless been adopted by the House of Commons for its most important religious services. Beyond the parish churches, still more heterodox and even overtly royalist services were being performed. This chapter thus reveals a colourful spectrum of religious ideas and activities even on the doorstep of government, and often intense arguments over the nature of the parish community and of its religious life.

In 1854, an obscure Tennessee businessman, George Washington Harris, began recording the voice of Sut Lovingood, coward and fool, a task which took him through the war to come and which he assembled into a book in 1867. Sut was the antithesis of the gentleman. In Harris's hands, Sut describes himself as a “nat'ral born durn'd fool,” without “nara a soul, nuffin but a whisky proof gizzard,” with “the longes' par ove laigs ever hung tu eny cackus.” The voice Harris gave to Sut is that of a restless man who had changed jobs too many times and whose debts had piled too high. It is that of a man who failed at virtually everything, who could lay no claim to being a gentleman, and who knew business for what it is — a daily exercise in taking abuse and maintaining a smile, punctuated by moments of abject failure or triumphal conquest. It is the voice, in other words, of one used to humiliation but unable to do much about it. Like so many other humiliated and frustrated men he found his comfort in an edgy blend of conservative religion and radical politics, both of which he tempered with a sense of humor that tended toward the profane and which had, as its primary target, the very centers of Harris's existence: home and church.