Ralph Reed OP-ED Featured in the Wall Street Journal

“The Smear Campaign Against ‘Christian Nationalists,” an op-ed written by Ralph Reed, founder and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal. In his latest op-ed, Reed argues against a smear campaign against Americans who believe in the connection between faith and freedom.

Below is a brief excerpt.

The PRRI survey asked if our nation could survive “if the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations.” A negative answer could qualify one as a Christian nationalist. Suddenly one’s belief in the value of orthodox religious faith—which social science has found is strongly correlated with positive behaviors like marriage, child-rearing, charitable giving and volunteerism—is classified a threat to social stability and our constitutional order.

One could dismiss this overreaction as crass politics by an unpopular party eager to eke out an election victory by demonizing churchgoing Americans. The Democrats’ strategy of forcing abortion to the center of the 2024 campaign certainly makes pro-lifers convenient bogeymen. Yet it also underscores that the modern Democratic Party—which in 1976 nominated as its standard-bearer Jimmy Carter, the most explicitly evangelical president since Woodrow Wilson—is now so captured by secular progressivism that it views religious folks as alien and dangerous to the American experience.

It strikes me, however, that the slandering of evangelical Christians is more than a campaign strategy or proof of secularism’s triumph. Stripped of its academic jargon and pretense, it is a fashionable but insidious bigotry that seeks to marginalize and disqualify from our civic discourse tens of millions of Americans who take their faith seriously.

Read the full of version of Ralph Reeds Op-Ed, “The Smear Campaign Against ‘Christian Nationalists.”