David Domke. God Willing? Political Fundamentalism in the White House, the "War on Terror," and the Echoing Press. London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press. 2004. 240 pp. $75.00 (cloth); $22.95 (paper). * Jo Renee Formicola, Mary C. Segers, and Paul Weber. Faith-Based Initiatives and the Bush Administration: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Abstract

Any reading of American history quickly demonstrates that the wall separating church and state has never been able to keep religions out of the nation’s politics or politics out of the nation’s religions. Most of the country’s social movements—the Revolution itself, abolition, Prohibition, woman suffrage, the “Red Scare,” the push for civil rights, and protests of the Vietnam War—involved religious dimensions. Religious groups also have played key roles in political coalitions, including the one that backed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Thus in practice, the wall of separation between church and state that Thomas Jefferson famously envisioned in his letter to the Danbury Baptists probably works more like a chain-link fence, a metaphor simply unavailable to a country gentleman in eighteenth-century Virginia. Although the fence limits exchanges and bars embraces, it allows mutual awareness, conversation, and even some cooperation. Small wonder, then, that like convicts in adjacent compounds, church and state occasionally linger together too long at the fence that separates them, spurring their wardens to investigate what they might be up to.