February 24, 2008 10:00 AM
Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious America
“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.