THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

Barry Hankins's Uneasy in Babylon is a valuable study of the conservative movement within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). This book does for Southern Baptist conservatives what William Martin's With God on Our Side (Broadway, 1996) did for the Christian Right as a whole. It provides exhaustively researched profiles of the movement's leaders and carefully reconstructed accounts of its major initiatives. Although not a comprehensive history of the movement, it is very thorough within its focus, which is the late 1980s and the 1990s when SBC conservatives consolidated control over seminaries and mission boards. This research is significant not only because of the Southern Baptist Convention's size— at sixteen million easily the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, but also—Hankins argues —because political mobilization among Southern Baptist conservatives was very different from mobilization among other Evangelicals.