Active faith

Ralph Reed, Executive Director of the Christian Coalition, is responsible for wedding high technology with cutting-edge political organization to engineer the most efficient and effective projection of religion into the nation's political life in modern times. In Active Faith, Reed articulates a new "theology" of political activism for devout Christians and calls upon all Americans, both religious and secular, to heal our ailing body politic. With a historian's practiced eye, Reed recounts the long tale of religious involvement in American life, showing that despite the popular belief, devout Christians and religious rhetoric have been the driving force behind nearly every major social reform movement in America, whether of the right or of the left. From abolition to the New Deal, from the labor movement to civil rights, Christian believers have been instrumental to the expansion of social justice in the United States. Reed paints compelling portraits of the most famous religious reformers of the past, including William Jennings Bryan, Walter Rauschenbusch, and Martin Luther King, Jr., men whose ideas and ideals exerted a broad positive influence on the secular politics of their day. By contrast, the involvement of Christian conservatives in politics today prompts puzzlement, anger, and condescension from the media and establishment politicians. Reed explains why this is so, blaming a knee-jerk secularism that has infected many of our institutions and that makes American elites suspect any public pronouncements of religious faith, Christian or otherwise. Reed gives a detailed account of how the Christian Coalition overcame media hostility, cultural stereotypes, and the missteps of the old religious right to become a respected and permanent fixture in American politics. Today, by uniting with Catholics and observant Jews, as well as reaching out to African-Americans, it stands poised to capture majority status on hundreds of local school boards, in city councils, in state legislatures, and in the U.S. Congress itself.