Religious faith is under assault.  In books and movies and on television, militant secular critics attack religion with a renewed vigor.  These "new atheists" repeat a two-part mantra:  that religious faith is hopelessly irrational and that those possessed of such faith are responsible for the hatred and bloodshed that has plagued humanity.  Abandon religion, they urge us, and the world will at last live in peace.

 















In Encounter Books' new In Defense of Faith:  The Judeo-Christian Idea and the Struggle for Humanity, David Brog examines this proposition in the context of Western civilization and the Judeo-Christian tradition and asserts that, far from encouraging hatred and violence, the Judeo-Christian tradition has easily been the most-effective curb upon the dark defects of human nature and our best tool in the struggle for humanity.  Brog talked about Judeo-Christian values under attack during a late-July online interview by John Rossomando on Newsmax.TV.
 

Brog lives and writes in Washington, D.C.  He worked in the U.S. Senate for seven years, rising to be chief of staff to a senior Senator and staff director of the Senate Judiciary Committee.  Prior to his time on Capitol Hill, Brog served as an executive at America Online and practiced corporate law in Tel Aviv and Philadelphia.

Brog's In Defense of Faith rebuts the fashionable arguments against religion and presents the strong and lasting record of the Judeo-Christian idea -- from the Christian activists who fought to stop the genocide of Indians in South America and their ethnic cleansing in North America, to the abolition of African slavery on both sides of the Atlantic, and on to modern human rights activists from Martin Luther King, Jr., to the rock star Bono.  

Brog told Newsmax's Rossomando that people of faith share the grass-roots Tea Party movement's belief in limited government and personal responsibility and are trying to preserve those values.  "I'd like to see people of faith take a greater role in the tea party," Brog said.  "I'd like to see the tea party's message be one of compassion, be one of concern, not one of apathy."

Encounter Books is an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, a nonprofit group that is substantially supported by The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee.