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 Editorial Review:

 Ever since the reelection of President Bush, conservative Christians have been stereotyped in the popular media: Bible-thumping militants and anti-intellectual zealots determined to impose their convictions on such matters as evolution, school prayer, pornography, abortion, and homosexuality on the rest of us. But conservative Christians are not as fanatical or intractable as many people think, nor are they necessarily the monolithic voting block or political base that kept Bush in power.

Andrew M. Greeley and Michael Hout's eye-opening book expertly conveys the complexity, variety, and sensibilities of conservative Christians, dispelling the myths that have long shrouded them in prejudice and political bias. For starters, Greeley and Hout reveal that class and income have trumped moral issues for these Americans more often than we realize: a dramatic majority of working-class and lower-class conservative Christians backed liberals such as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton during their runs for president. And when it comes to abortion, most conservative Christians are not consistently pro-life in the absolute fashion usually assumed: they are still more likely to oppose the practice than other Americans, but 86 percent of them are willing to tolerate it to protect the health of the mother or when the woman has been raped, and 22 percent of them are even pro-choice.

"Many of us make facile talk about conservative Christians while having vague ideas of who they are. Now we have no excuse. Greeley and Hout tell us exactly who they are, upsetting stereotypes along the way."  -- Garry Wills, author of What Jesus Meant

"Pundits and political operatives have produced an enormous amount of nonsense in recent years about conservative Protestants. With a clear eye for extracting details from survey data, Andrew Greeley and Michael Hout have given us an important book filled with valuable information."  -- Robert Wuthnow, author of America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity

"This book is original and beautifully written. Greeley and Hout argue that the public doesn't know what it should know about conservative Christians; and what they report here will undercut most of our inherited biases, especially those of religious and political liberals. I spent fifteen years studying American evan gelicals and found myself informed and surprised by what the authors report in every chapter. The book is an academic page-turner." 
-- William M. Shea, author of The Lion and the Lamb: Evangelicals and Catholics in America

"Americans are incredibly vulnerable to popularizing and generalizing about certain groups—religious groups in particular—and conservative Christians are currently such a target. This informative book will therefore clarify many misperceptions on the part of the general public."
-- Wade Clark Roof, University of California, Santa Barbara

The Truth about Conservative Christians: What They Think and What They Believe

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FATHER ANDREW M GREELEY divides his time between teaching at
the University of Arizona at Tucson and The University of Chicago.