Conserving the American dream : faith and politics in the U.S. heartland

Recent decades have seen substantial changes in the U.S. political
landscape. One particularly significant development has been
the growing influence of a conservative coalition encompassing
evangelical Christianity, interventionist foreign policy and neoliberal
reform. This study explores the force and internal dynamics of
this political assemblage. Based on fieldwork among conservative
voters, volunteers and candidates in a small city in northwestern
Ohio during a midterm election year, it probes the energy of
conservative politics, its modes of attachment and influence, and
the organizational forms through which it circulates. Contemporary
conservative politics are shown to be centered on a particular
epistemological intuition—that to be able to act, one must believe
in something. This intuition implies an actively affirmative
stance toward “beliefs” and “values.” The study also addresses
methodological and analytical challenges that conservative politics
pose for anthropological inquiry. It develops a “conversational”
analytical attitude, arguing that in order to understand the lasting
influence conservatism one has to take seriously the problems that it
is oriented toward.