God’s Politics
The Rev. Jim Wallis is among the speakers at a campus forum on faith and politics.
Monday, February 20, 2006
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Durham, N.C. -- The Rev. Jim Wallis wants to change how Christians engage with
politics, and how politicians engage with Christians.
As a prominent voice in public debates about values and voting, Wallis has created slogans such as “Budgets are moral documents” and “God is not a Republican. Or a Democrat.”
His best-selling book God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It critiques the political right for applying morality only to hot-button issues like abortion and marriage and the left for shying away from faith in public discourse.
His message is “a combination of conservative values and radical social ethics on justice,” Wallis said in a phone interview from outside London, where he was promoting his book’s U.K. launch. It’s an agenda “of traditional values on family, marriage, personal responsibility [and] culture, mixed with an economic populism and a pleading for a better kind of foreign policy that doesn’t rely on endless, unilateral, preemptive war.”
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“Social movements are what change history,” he said, “and the best ones have spiritual foundations.”
As evidence of a movement, Wallis points to efforts such as the recent statement on environmental stewardship by evangelical leaders, a 2004 declaration by leading theologians against the Bush administration’s war policies and an address by rock star Bono on global poverty at the National Prayer Breakfast.
“The movement that’s rising up now is going to be around the issue of poverty,” Wallis said. “People are making the connections, as Martin Luther King did, as the prophet Micah did, between poverty and war. Wallis sees “the war in Iraq draining us of resources and young lives and all the rest; a bridge to Alaska taking more money than what it would cost to support the African Union troops in Darfur to prevent genocide.”
Like his agenda, Wallis’ tactics are a mix of the traditionally liberal and conservative. He regularly rubs elbows with the rich and powerful, attending the World Economic Forum in Davos. He appears in mainstream news media and has met privately with President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Yet, despite such visibility, Wallis’ main occupations are pastor of an inner-city Washington, D.C., church and editor of the niche progressive Christian magazine Sojourners.
He will speak at the American Values Summit event at Duke, where he hopes to find allies among people who have become politically divided over issues such as abortion and gay marriage.
“I support a consistent ethic of life, which means all of the ways that life is threatened, whether it is abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, HIV/AIDS, poverty, nuclear weapons,” Wallis said. “I think, practically, that pro-life and pro-choice people -- these sort of rhetorical categories -- could join together and actually do something dramatically about the abortion rate, could dramatically reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies in America.
“I happen to think family breakdown, family crisis, family disintegration, is a huge issue,” he said. “But it makes no sense to scapegoat gay and lesbian people as if they’re the ones responsible for the breakdown of the family.
“After a year of traveling around doing this book tour, what’s
clear to me now is the monologue of the Religious Right is finally
over and a new dialogue has just begun.”
