Second Coming: The New Christian Right in Virginia Politics.

• Author: Greenblatt, Alan

Mark J. Rozell and Clyde Wilcox Johns Hopkins University Press, $32.95 By Alan Greenblatt John Warner's bid this year for a fourth Senate term has turned into an ugly episode of "This Is Your Life," with all his old enemies lining up to greet him. He may be the commonwealth's most popular politician, but within Republican Party power circles he has become a whipping boy. In the midst of the national GOP resurgence, Virginia Republicans have suffered some humiliating setbacks in recent years, and they blame their losses on the patrician Warner, who has failed to support GOP candidates such as Iran-contra figure Oliver North.

John Warner is the type of politician who unabashedly brags about his clout and proudly shows off a painting by Winston Churchill that hangs in his office. Warner has compiled one of the most conservative voting records in the Senate, but he cuts the kind of establishment figure cultural conservatives love to hate.

At a prayer breakfast in Richmond this past January, North said that one of the main qualifications he sought in any contender for this year's Republican primary is that he doesn't live at John Warner's home address. Mike Farris, the home schooling advocate who ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor on the GOP ticket in 1993, has repeatedly told reporters, "We've got a sickness in our party and that sickness is named John Warner." And erstwhile Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork has endorsed former Reagan budget director Jim Miller, Warner's rival in the June 11 primary. Bork has referred to Warner, one of six GOP senators to oppose Bork's confirmation in 1987, as a "supposed Republican" who cannot be trusted to stand by conservative principles.

Much of the blame for recent Republican failures, however, rests not with Warner but rather with the Christian Right, which has brought new activists into the GOP fold but also saddled the party with some unelectable candidates. In Second Coming, Mark J. Rozell and Clyde Wilcox provide a useful background look at the stars aligning this year against Warner. The book is an illuminating case study in how the Christian Right's insistence on ideological purity sometimes works against the GOP's best interests.

In a book happily free of both bias and academic jargon, Rozell and Wilcox show how social conservatives, motivated by their hostility to abortion, federal education standards, and gun control, have managed to overwhelm the remaining moderate party regulars in the...