William Barber II, leader of North Carolina's Moral Mondays and co-chair of the nationwide Poor People's campaign Jenkins profiles Washington political insiders-including former White House staffers and faith outreach directors for the campaigns of Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton-as well as a new generation of progressive faith leaders at the forefront today, including:

Today's rapidly expanding interfaith coalition - which includes Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and other faiths - has become a force within the larger 'resistance' movement. Throughout our history, the Religious Left has embodied and championed the progressive values at the heart of American democracy-abolition, labor reform, civil rights, environmental preservation.ĭrawing on his years of reporting, Jenkins examines the re-emergence of progressive faith-based activism, detailing its origins and contrasting its goals with those of the Religious Right. Constituting an amorphous group of interfaith activists that goes by many names and takes many forms, this coalition has operated since America's founding - praying, protesting, and marching for common goals that have moved society forward. Since the ascendancy of the Religious Right in the 1970s, common wisdom holds that it is a coalition of fundamentalist powerbrokers who are the 'moral majority,' setting the standard for conservative Christian values and working to preserve the status quo.īut, as national religion reporter Jack Jenkins contends, the country is also driven by a vibrant, long-standing moral force from the left. From one of the country's most respected religion reporters, a paradigm-shifting discussion of how the Religious Left is actually the moral compass that has long steered America's political debates, including today.

American Prophets by Jack Jenkins