In contrast with contemporary Democrats, who idolize bankers, Roosevelt was suspicious of Wall Street. Blasted by the rich as a traitor to his class, Roosevelt also deviated from his Episcopalian background. The Protestant work ethic honors the entrepreneurial spirit; Catholicism is wary of it.

Were the New Deal alive today, Winters says, Democrats would stress social issues, such as reducing the number of high-school dropouts. Instead, they are fixated on economics. What most distinguishes modern Democrats is their focus on the rights of the individual as opposed to the welfare of the group. It is this un-Catholic vision that Winters says has led to the party’s downfall. Regrettably, Winters targets Kennedy as a primary culprit. By promising to keep (his) religion out of the White House, Winters argues, Kennedy in effect authorized Democrats to abandon morality.

Winters devotes much ink to proving that public figures (then and now) invoke the Bible. He does this to buttress his claim that, J.F.K. notwithstanding, religion is an inseparable aspect of American politics. But the examples he cites, among them Martin Luther King Jr.’s perorations, fail to make his point. They refer to Judeo-Christian ethics in a broad sense. What Winters has in mind is specifically Catholic morality.

Thus he faults the Democrats for being “unyielding” on abortion. He argues that allowing stem-cell research is not a straight­forward issue. He embraces Catholic limitations on warfare that would forbid the government from aiming weapons at civilian populations—the very strategy that kept the peace during the cold war. He is sympathetic to prayer in schools. Winters claims that by renouncing such patently Catholic positions, Democrats became “the de facto party of secularism.”

But is that why they started losing? Or is it because they abandoned the communitarian spirit of the New Deal? Winters conjoins the word secular with liberal and elite, a way of making it a slur, but community values can just as easily have a secular underpinning as a theological one. In fact, the party’s string of presidential winners—F.D.R., Harry Truman, J.F.K., and Lyndon Johnson—were all nonreligious in their public personas, though none were amoral.

Kennedy’s secular approach still seems the only way to govern in a diverse society, at least if one hopes to avoid a religious war. Indeed, Winters himself barely admits the possibility of well-intentioned disagreement with Catholic positions. In the arguments of the abortion-rights lobby, for example, the author hears “echoes of anti-Catholic bigotry.” But this is akin to imposing a religious test on the rest of us—a dubious strategy for retaking the White House.