Social issues, moral issues, culture war issues—there are many names for the salient policy topics that include abortion, gay marriage, transgender rights, and more. These issues are complex and multifaceted, making them both essential and difficult to study. Fortunately, two new books—Yes Gawd! How Faith Shapes LGBT Identity and Politics in the United States and Moral Issues: How Public Opinion on Abortion and Gay Rights Affects American Religion and Politics—offer compelling theories and a wide range of empirical strategies to help us make sense of the religious and political worlds in which we find ourselves. The former is a single-authored book that upends existing narratives about Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Americans, explaining how and why faith serves a crucial function in the development and maintenance of both social and political identities. The latter is a coauthored book that argues that moral issues lie at the heart of Americans’ decision-making, influencing both their religious and political identities. By asking broad research questions, developing interdisciplinary theories, and applying diverse empirical evidence, both books shed much-needed light on some of the biggest questions in American politics.
Yes Gawd! begins by challenging the common conception that LGBT Americans stand outside organized religion, largely as a result of trauma experienced before coming out or feeling unwelcome within religious spaces. While acknowledging organized religion’s role in persecuting LGBT people, Cravens III argues that this interpretation is overly simplistic. Survey data showing that a majority of LGBT Americans identify with a religious tradition and consider faith an important part of their lives, coupled with thick descriptions of LGBT-affirming faith traditions and organizations, represents the book’s first crucial contribution. Rather than treating this material as mere context-setting, Cravens III uses the early chapters to place LGBT Americans and organizations squarely within the conversation on religion and faith.
The book’s second major contribution comes through the development and testing of a broad theory for understanding LGBT politico-religious distinctiveness. The first part of this theory—convincingly demonstrated in chapters 3 and 4—argues that both the coming-out experience and post-coming-out religious socialization jointly produce a distinct LGBT politico-religious identity. While this level of theorizing and empirical analysis would be sufficient for a valuable book, Yes Gawd! goes further, offering an encompassing, holistic account of the socialization experience. Cravens III develops and tests a theory detailing three distinct pathways by which religion influences political engagement among LGBT individuals. Chapters 4–7 show that religion’s influence on the extent, motivations, and forms of community engagement, as well as on political actions and attitudes, depends on whether it aligns with or conflicts with an LGBT identity. Employing both qualitative and quantitative data, the book addresses each step in the theory, persuasively showing the role that religion and faith play in the political lives of LGBT Americans.
Importantly, Cravens III overlays his broader argument with crucial nuance, marking the book’s third significant contribution. For instance, the book accounts for religious socialization experiences that occur both before and after coming out, incorporates both positive and negative religious experiences, and recognizes the need for additional care when examining the experiences of LGBT people of color. Yes Gawd! arguably takes on a great deal—but that is because these lived experiences are inherently complex and interconnected. Cravens III grounds his theory in the conviction that we cannot silo identities and experiences; they are inextricably linked and must be studied as such. In doing so, Yes Gawd! sets an example for scholars interested in conducting identity research in complex and nonreductive ways.
While Moral Issues focuses on the power of moral issues—specifically abortion and gay marriage—to shape partisanship and religious identification, at its core, it is about how we become who we are and why our society is so divided. The book demonstrates the power of certain policy attitudes, adding an important caveat to the long-held consensus that the American public lacks strong and meaningful policy views. In brief, Goren and Chapp build a theory of “moral power,” contending that two features of abortion and gay marriage—the changing information environment starting in the late twentieth century and the automatic emotional responses humans have to moral issues—can reshape both partisan and religious identities.
Before presenting evidence for their central argument, the authors carefully establish whether the building blocks of their theory are plausible. Chapter 3, for example, details the extent to which abortion and gay marriage have received attention in political and mainstream media, as well as the frequency of emotion-related language in media discussions of these issues. This rich descriptive chapter effectively sets the stage for the authors’ proposed mechanism. The authors then preemptively address likely objections and alternative explanations by showing that attitudes on moral issues are rooted in emotions (chapter 4) and that moral issue attitudes are quite stable, even in the face of aggregate-level change (chapter 5).
Only after this careful groundwork do Goren and Chapp move to their central evidence. Drawing on seven sources of panel data spanning from the 1990s through 2020, the authors show that moral attitudes can drive both religious change (chapter 6) and partisan sorting (chapter 7). Specifically, individuals holding more conservative views on moral issues in one period are more likely to become or remain religiously affiliated, report higher religiosity, and identify as Republican in the future. The strength of Moral Issues lies in the authors’ linear and logical approach, painstakingly building their case. The book takes readers on a journey that challenges—or even overturns—what many social scientists believed about the relationship between issue positions, partisanship, and religion. Yet, because the authors present their case so clearly, readers are likely to find themselves nodding along, wondering how anyone could have thought otherwise.
In many ways, these two books are strikingly different. Yes Gawd! focuses on the socialization experiences of LGBT Americans and the political consequences that follow, while Moral Issues examines how attitudes toward gay marriage and abortion shape Americans’ relationships with religion and politics. The former offers a detailed account of a numerically small and often overlooked group, intentionally limiting discussion of its broader political implications. The latter provides an overarching explanation for how Americans’ identities change, necessarily leaving less room for nuance. Each book’s approach, and therefore its contributions, is distinct.
Yet, in three key respects, these works share common ground. First, both ask big, important questions and provide imperfect, but convincing, answers. Big questions rarely have simple answers and almost never benefit from perfect data. As a result, many scholars shy away from them. These two books stand as examples of political science at its best: the authors creatively and persistently marshal evidence in support of their arguments, leaving readers with little choice but to take their conclusions seriously. Cravens III does this by carefully testing each step of a nuanced causal argument, building a model that accounts for diverse backgrounds and experiences. Goren and Chapp, meanwhile, strengthen their case by laying out alternative explanations and directly engaging with likely critiques, anticipating readers’ concerns before they fully emerge. Second, both works demonstrate that political science research is stronger when scholars engage deeply with other disciplines. The strength—and credibility—of these theories stems from lessons drawn from sociology, gender studies, psychology, religious studies, communication, and more. Third, both books set the stage for future research in this area. While transgender rights are not a primary focus of either work, their salience has risen dramatically in recent years—whether through Donald Trump’s provocative campaign ad declaring “Kamala Harris is for they/them” or through national debates about transgender athletes, bathroom policies, and healthcare for minors. The culture war debates are not disappearing; they are expanding and evolving. Yes Gawd! and Moral Issues will undoubtedly serve as foundational texts on which future scholarship can build.
