Active Faith: How Christians Are Changing the Soul of American Politics. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1996 by Jonathan Rowe

Pat Buchanan posed a major problem for the Christian Coalition leadership in his primary campaign last winter. Here was a certified right-winger, revered by much of the Coalition's political base, who wasn't staying on the safe reservation of "family" issues. Instead, Buchanan was carrying crusade for traditional Christian values right into the corporate boardrooms.

Beneath the bumptious attacks on layoffs and trade deals were the echoes of a basic moral principle: The strong must choose between love of neighbor and love of lucre, just as the young must choose between abstinence and fleshly indulgence. This was dangerous.

The Republican coalition is built upon a gaping fault line - a central hypocrisy, some would say - between traditional moral values and libertarian market amorality. Reed has tried mightily to keep God and Mammon in separate closets. But now Buchanan was blowing the cover, and Reed's response is revealing.

In his new book, Active Faith, Reed does to Buchanan pretty much what The Washington Post does to him - and to Reed himself, for that matter: He marginalizes through epithet. Buchanan is an "economic nationalist," he says, which as Reed knows is Washington Post code for "belligerent ignoramus." Then, shifting into a squishy moral relativist mode, he says that a Christian can go either way: supply side or Buchananite "nationalist," it's just a matter of - yes, choice.

The important thing, Reed says, is to keep the Republican coalition together. No matters of principle are involved. The party can attract those blue-collar Reagan Democrats "with the magnet of social issues such as abortion and gay rights," he says, "whereas to draw them with anti-Wall Street and anti-big business rhetoric threatens to alienate the economic conservatives who comprise the other half of the party's base."

In other words, finesse the underlying issues and try to keep everybody happy. With one blase stroke, Reed has brushed aside the Master's warnings against acquisitiveness and greed - qualities upon which supply-side thinking is based. It's the kind of footwork which, if done by a certain Democratic president, the right would call a "Slick Willie." It's also Active Faith in a nutshell: Machiavelli with a pious face.

The book is Reed's attempt at a coming-of-age story, for the Christian Coalition and for himself. In particular, he is trying to soften the Coalition's harsh and rancorous image in a presidential election year. He declares the movement, and himself, ready to put off the childish things of inflammatory polemic and rancor. He is conciliatory and reasonable; although this manner is obviously for effect, I thought he meant it, up to a point.

Reed grew up in Miami and northern Georgia, son of an ophthalmologist and a homemaker. He was drawn to politics early; in high school, he ran for student council president on a platform of Coke machines in the locker rooms and greater student power. He was an active Young Republican in college, and after graduation he came to Washington to work as executive director of the National College Young Republicans. He skirts past his work there under Lee Atwater, his mentor, except to say that it was "political hardball." I wish he weren't such a chronic image-polisher. A few good Atwater stories would have given some life to a manuscript that often reads as though focus-grouped by Frank Luntz.

At any rate, Pat Robertson spotted Reed after his campaign for president in 1988 and made him head of the new Christian Coalition. Reed proceeded to build the organization from the ground up, out of the ashes of the Moral Majority. After the 1992 elections, his operatives fanned out across the country, encouraging simpaticos to run for local office, and developing a political base - just as he says young Democrats did after the McGovern campaign.

The left may be the demon that animates Reed's Manichean political universe. But he's also fascinated by it, the way a fundamentalist is by sin. (He complains about the stereotyping of the so-called Christian right, but his view of the left is no less cartoonish.) The environmental and civil rights movements are the tactical models he seeks to emulate. He set out early on, he says, to create a "mirror image of the New Left," and the Christian Coalition was the eventual result. Like any good political strategist, Reed lays claim to the moral high ground. FDR and Martin Luther King were really prophets of the Coalition's agenda, he says. If alive today they'd be working on issues like school vouchers and a ban on abortion for women.

This is a stretch. But Reed is right that liberals have drifted from the mainstream values from which their two icons spoke. Like Atwater, Reed is a cagey strategist with a natural instinct for polemical jujitsu. He understands that politics is not about talking at people, the way liberals tend to do, but rather about tapping into their inner conversations - talking to them the way they talk to themselves.

This is the gift of both demagogue and saint; one speaks to our darkness, the other our light. In Active Faith, Reed works hard to sound like the latter. When he started going to church again, in 1983, he says, he felt compelled to reassess his hardball tactics. There is sincerity in his voice when he describes how he began to apologize to people he had maligned along the way - "to break bread with them or pray for them." Even if most of these former "enemies" were in the Republican camp (he doesn't say), and even if the self-congratulation is a bit unseemly, this is the one moment in Active Faith that comes close to justifying the title.