When the political tail wags the religious dog, and vice versa. Religion, hegemony, and democracy in contemporary North America

A discussion of Robert Wuthnow’s Why Religion is Good for American Democracy, Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry’s The Flag and the Cross, and Galen Watts’ The Spiritual Turn. Starting from Charles Taylor’s concept of social imaginaries, the review essay reads the three books as attempts to deconstruct some pieces of Western liberal commonsense: the preoccupation about the disastrous effects of the rise of new right-wing actors and coalitions vis à vis the weakness and fragility of moderates and progressives, whether religious or not; the all-too facile identification of American religious conservatism with white evangelicalism; and the view that “spiritual” individuals are self-centered, a-political citizens, whose acquiescence could pave the way for any authoritarian adventurism.