This research contributes to the ongoing debate over the proper role of religion in American public life and institutions by theorizing and empirically examining the role of religious groups in Wisconsin state politics. The project seeks to answer the following question: What is the role of religious advocacy in the legislative process in Wisconsin, and how does the secularity of modern social structure constrain and enable the involvement of religious advocates in that process? An answer to this question is pursued in light of current debates over the concept of “secularization” in sociology. The work mounts a defense of a neo-secularization paradigm in which secularization is conceived of not as involving a unidirectional movement toward a decline in religion, but as entailing a double-movement: institutional differentiation causes a decline in the scope of religious authority over the political sphere, but also creates new conditions which facilitate the re-emergence of religious organizations in the political sphere. Against this theoretical background. original data on the relationships between and among religious interest groups, secular interest groups, and legislators iii Wisconsin is being collected and analyzed. The empirical project is composed of three parts, each of which highlights the fact that religious advocacy is enabled by a secular political system whose autonomy from religious authority at the same time constrains religious involvement in politics to predominantly non—threatening strategies and goals. This is characteristic of the double-movement suggested by the neo-secularization perspective advocated here.