Books in Brief: Who’s Afraid of the Religious Right?

Who’s Afraid of the Religious Right? by Don Feder (Regnery, 318 pp., $24.95)

SYNDICATED columnist Don Feder is tired of hearing the Religious Right demonized. As he sees it, God-fearing folks have held back from public life far too much since the 1960s, ceding American culture to an increasingly ambitious movement of pagans, radical egalitarians, and sexual liberationists. An observant Jew, Feder is especially pained by his co-religionists’ hostility to the moral priorities of their own tradition, priorities shared by serious Christians. The columns collected here touch on a range of subjects—from abortion and Hollywood to UN peacekeeping and the budget—but they return again and again to Feder’s favorite theme: personal responsibility and the unique capacity of churches and synagogues, families and schools to promote it. He is a particularly able critic of the various fashionable determinisms invoked by the Left to justify vice and wrongdoing. If his tone is often that of a slightly overstarched Sundayschool teacher, he can be forgiven— that’s just about what we need these days.

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Gary Rosen

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Who’s Afraid of the Religious Right? by Don Feder (Regnery, 318 pp., $24.95)

SYNDICATED columnist Don Feder is tired of hearing the Religious Right demonized. As he sees it, God-fearing folks have held back from public life far too much since the 1960s, ceding American culture to an increasingly ambitious movement of pagans, radical egalitarians, and sexual liberationists. An observant Jew, Feder is especially pained by his co-religionists’ hostility to the moral priorities of their own tradition, priorities shared by serious Christians. The columns collected here touch on a range of subjects—from abortion and Hollywood to UN peacekeeping and the budget—but they return again and again to Feder’s favorite theme: personal responsibility and the unique capacity of churches and synagogues, families and schools to promote it. He is a particularly able critic of the various fashionable determinisms invoked by the Left to justify vice and wrongdoing. If his tone is often that of a slightly overstarched Sundayschool teacher, he can be forgiven— that’s just about what we need these days.