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Fourth, Freeing God's Children provides a window into the changing religious landscape, at home and abroad. For the past three decades, much American religious commentary has focused on the clash between conservative and liberal religionists over the nation's meaning and direction. In this book we will encounter alliances that belie that simplistic dichotomy. Liberal Jewish groups team up with conservative Pentecostals, the Catholic Church with Tibetan Budhists, Episcopalians with the Salvation Army, black churches with secular activists, feminists with evangelicals. Especially robust is Jewish activism for persecuted Christians, which flows in part from Judaism's historical commitment to human rights, but also from a growing sense of kinship with those whose persecution is written off as inconvenient. These diverse alliance of "strange bedfellows" illuminate how religous currents around the globe are impinging on American society and politics.

Finally, this exploration has something to teach us about the role of transcendent faith in the new millennium. For much of the twentieth centruy, the dominant view among intellectuals was that modernization brings an inevitable secularization of society, a waning of religious salience. Thus one reason top journalists, scholars, and policymakers have been slow to grasp the import of this new religious engagement is that they have long operated with secular "pictures in their heads" that dismiss the force of religious commitments in people's lives. Developments charted in this book not only challenge this "secularization thesis" but also suggest the need to incorporate the role of faith, particularly global Christianity, into the calculus of human rights around the world.

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I agree with you on the fact that these days many christians aren't correlating todays civil rights issues with their religion. If there is anything we've learned from our past is that civil rights are infringed upon when religion takes the helm. At this time in history the conservative fundies will say and do anything to promote their selfserving causes. They will go down but not without a fight. In the US they thought GW Bush was their salvation,boy were they off the mark on that one. Activists like this don't scare me they just annoy me more than anything.

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