Washington National Cathedral

The Sunday Forum: Critical Issues in the Light of Faith

The Rev. Canon Howard Anderson, host

“Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America” is the topic of this discussion between Jim Wallis and Cathedral Canon Howard Anderson.

“The good news is that the dominance of the religious right over our politics and our religion is finally finished—over—in America,” Wallis pronounces simply. Better news, he says, is that “a new generation is stepping up, wants to make their voice and their faith heard, wants their faith to make a difference.” The new generation of the faithful, he asserts, is starting to address huge problems of poverty, environmental degradation, pandemic diseases, and “the exclusive use war to combat evil.”

Wallis terms poverty the “new slavery.” He offers a shocking set of figures about people worldwide living in great privation and human trafficking, and those who perish daily from preventable and curable disease. Involvement to solve such problems is sometimes called “political”; many people of faith do not want politics to be drawn into the messages of the church, or into their own beliefs and actions. Wallis asserts that the Bible is inherently “political,” because it talks about justice.

As a teenager in Detroit, Wallis was troubled to observe racial divisions and inequality in his city. One day an elder said, “Jim, you have to understand Christianity has nothing to do with racism. That’s political. And our faith is personal.” The experience gradually drove Wallis away from the church for a time. Today his reaction to that elder’s mentality is, “God is personal but never private, because the biblical prophets deal with—well, look at their audience. They’re talking to kings, rulers, employers, judges, princes. They’re talking on behalf of widows, orphans, workers, those left out and left behind. They’re talking about land, labor, and capital: the stuff of politics. Our faith is personal, but it explodes into the world with public consequences.”

Americans, according to Wallis, are yearning for a “moral center:” “Don’t go left, don’t go right, go deeper.” Left and right, he asserts, are merely broad ideological and political categories that thrive on simplistic argument but do not point to solutions.

“The religious right is being replaced by Jesus, and that’s progress,” Wallis says. He discusses one new term, “red-letter Christians,” now being used to describe people who seek to follow to Jesus’ teachings, independent of simplistic old political labels. Wallis cautions that Jesus’ teachings are not simple, and are not I’m OK, You’re OK.

Wallis’s newest book is The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America.

About The Rev. Jim Wallis

The Rev. Jim Wallis is a bestselling author, public theologian, speaker, preacher, and international commentator on religion and public life, faith and politics. His latest book is The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America (HarperOne, 2008). His previous book, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It (Harper Collins, 2005), was on the New York Times bestseller list for 4 months. He is President and Chief Executive Officer of Sojourners; where he is editor-in-chief of Sojourners magazine, whose combined print and electronic media have a readership of more than 250,000 people. Wallis speaks at more than 200 events a year and his columns appear in major newspapers, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and both Time and Newsweek online. He regularly appears on radio and television, including shows like “Meet the Press,” the “Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” the “O’Reilly Factor,” and is a frequent guest on the news programs of CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and National Public Radio. He has taught at Harvard’s Divinity School and Kennedy School of Government on “Faith, Politics, and Society.” He has written eight books, including: Faith Works, The Soul of Politics, Who Speaks for God?, and The Call to Conversion.

Jim Wallis was raised in a Midwest evangelical family. As a teenager, his questioning of the racial segregation in his church and community led him to the black churches and neighborhoods of inner-city Detroit. He spent his student years involved in the civil rights and antiwar movements at Michigan State University. While at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Illinois, Jim and several other students started a small magazine and community with a Christian commitment to social justice which has now grown into a national faith-based organization. In 1979, Time magazine named Wallis one of the “50 Faces for America’s Future.”

Jim lives in inner-city Washington, D.C. with his wife, Joy Carroll, one of the first women ordained in the Church of England and author of Beneath the Cassock: The Real-life Vicar of Dibley; and their sons, Luke and Jack. He is a Little League baseball coach.