Religious conflicts

In The Great Divide: Religious and Cultural Conflict in American Party Politics (2001) Layman provides a comprehensive account of how the new traditionalist–modernist cleavage in American religion has come to shape the contemporary American political party system, the extent to which the religious and cultural divide between the Democratic and Republican parties has grown over time, and the process through which this growth has occurred. Similar to Carmines and Stimson's discussion of the types of issues capable of creating issue evolutions, Layman contends that the traditionalist–modernist religious cleavage came to affect party politics because it is associated with political issues that are easily understood, arouse strong emotions in a large number of people, reflect a deep-seated social conflict, cut across the lines of party conflict that existed in the 1970s, and appealed to the strategic incentives of certain groups of politicians within both parties.