Washington National Cathedral

Howard Anderson: Welcome to the Sunday Forum, where we are exploring issues of faith and public life. The Forum is an important expression of this Cathedral’s attempt to be a voice for generous-spirited Christianity and a catalyst for reconciliation and understanding in our nation and the world. We hope that these weekly Forums will be just the beginning of discussions in your home parishes and your own homes for a larger discussion of the kind of change that the world needs, and today we are very pleased to have an internationally renowned messenger of change.

Many of you know the Rev. Jim Wallis as editor and chief of Sojourners magazine and founder of the Sojourners movement. At my house, which is a BBC fan house, he is known as the husband of the real Vicar of Dibley, Joy Carroll, upon whom that was based. And, further, he is really Luke’s dad, because our grandson Will and his son Luke go to John Eaton School just up the road.

But he is, for purposes of the Forum, a best-selling author, influential public theologian, and a sought-after commentator on the intersection of faith and public life, which is what this Forum is about.

His bestseller in 2005, God’s Politics, resonated with an America tired of a divisive world and division between a secular left and a religious right. His latest book, The Great Awakening, is bearing the news about the future of faith and politics in our country, which I think can give us all hope. Jim, thank you for joining us today. (Applause)

Jim Wallis: Good morning, all of you.

Anderson: Jim is kind of a shrinking violet, so I will try to provoke him a little. Right on the cover of the Great Awakening, you say Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America. Is that statement, “post-religious right America,” wishful thinking, or is it real?

Wallis: You noticed that statement.

Anderson: I noticed it. (Laughter)

Wallis: Well, I have some good news and some better news.

The good news is that the dominance of the religious right over our politics and our religion is finally finished over in America. Isn’t that good news? (Applause)

The better news is that this book is not about the religious right. The better news is that a whole spectrum, a wide range of people of faith, especially a new generation, are applying their faith. They are addressing their faith. They are using their faith to take on the biggest challenges of our time, like the moral scandal of poverty, the degradation of the environment, or what we call God’s creation—threat of climate change, pandemic diseases which pillage whole continents, and I would say the exclusive use of war to combat evil, which has led to a disastrous foreign policy.

So a new generation is stepping up, wants to make their voice and their faith heard, wants their faith to make a difference. So this book is about how a new generation—many of us—can really not just disagree with how someone else uses their faith, but now that we have taken back our faith after it has been hijacked, we have taken it back, and now it is about what do we do with our faith.

Anderson: Some people say that what you are talking about and what you have stood for—you and all of those involved in Sojourners for 35 years—is something new. But in your book, you talk about it being very much squarely in the middle of American religious tradition.

Wallis: Yeah, they used to say, you are a progressive evangelical—my, that is a misnomer. Now the misnomer is becoming a movement, because the book talks about times in our past that historians called great awakenings, where faith rises up, a revival of faith, and then big things change like the abolition of slavery, or women’s suffrage, or child labor law reform, or most famously civil rights. This is when historians—the research on this was lots of fun. I learned more than I knew about William Wilberforce, the British parliamentarian who gave his life to overcoming the slave trade in Britain; Charles Finney, the second Great Awakening preacher, who was an evangelist and an abolitionist—and I was at Park Street Church just two weeks ago, where he preached in 1831, on weeknights all during that year. And he called people to Jesus Christ and then enlisted them in the struggle against slavery.

He actually used the altar call to sign up his converts for the antislavery campaign, so I was preaching in the same place as Finney. And I was confronted by the packed church of twenty-something evangelicals who believe they are new abolitionists, and they care about the people Nicholas Kristof writes about all of the time, the forgotten places and forgotten people in the world. So I think that what we are seeing now may be the beginning of another great awakening—not another revival, because the historians say that spiritual activity or conversion does not get to be called revival until it changes something in the society, and that is what this book is about.

Anderson: You talk so much about poverty, and in fact again that has been your ministry and work, to call attention of the world those who are poor, the least of these from biblical model. Do you think your statement “poverty is the new slavery” is something that is underneath all of these young evangelicals, and maybe people who are not even churched, being excited about the liberating gospel of Jesus Christ?

Wallis: What I mean by that, “poverty is the new slavery,” imprisoning minds, hearts, and bodies is, there’s actually more women and children right now who are being trafficked in economic and sexual slavery than the total number of slaves set free by William Wilberforce two hundred years ago. And then you expand that to three billion people living on two dollars a day.

You know, that kind of world is neither just nor secure nor safe for our children, and the good news is that a new generation of young Christians and others in other faith traditions believe that Jesus probably would care more about the three thousand children who died again yesterday, and will today, and again tomorrow, because of what Bono calls stupid poverty and preventable disease—Jesus would care more about them than gay marriage amendments in Ohio. (Applause) So I think that rising tide, if you will, is really a new abolitionist tide.

Anderson: One of the things that I noted and I do—I am so sorry about the death of your father—you wrote a wonderful postlogue in your book about how his faith inspired, and how that shaped you, and many of us I think are Christians or, in our own religious tradition, inspired by our parents. Who are some of your other heroes out of scripture or out of the tradition of this abolition movement that comes up every five hundred years or so, it seems, in church history?

Wallis: That was the fun part of the research on this book. I knew something of these people. You know Wilberforce, the movie Amazing Grace, some of you might have seen the movie this past year. He put forward that bill nine times before it passed, and then the movement to overcome slavery itself took thirty years. And Wilberforce died three days later because his work was done. I went to Holy Trinity Church, Clapham Common, which was his church in London, and the rector showed me around and was very proud of all of the pictures of all of these old English white guys on the wall. And he showed me a table and said, “That is the table.”

And I said, “What do you mean?”

It was an old, worn, weather-beaten table. “That is the table on which he wrote the anti-slave trade legislation, and every Sunday morning we celebrate Holy Eucharist on that table.”

And I thought, what a powerful symbol, a breaking down of the secular and the sacred. On that table, slaves were set free, and the body and blood of Christ was celebrated. That is Wilberforce.

Then there is King, and King has always been a hero and mentor of mine, but I have learned more about his personal faith journey. How in Montgomery his theologically academic, powerful seminary training was not enough when the death threats began coming. I tell the story in the book about his kitchen table experience. One night at midnight, the threats came to kill his family, and he had a cup of coffee and he was… how God became real and personal for him, like never before, and the deeper you go into the struggle for justice, the more personal and real your relationship to God has to become. And the story of King and Wilberforce and Finney and, you know, so many more, inspired me again.

Anderson: This March 30th, right from that pulpit, the Canterbury pulpit, we will celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s last sermon in a church before his assassination in Memphis just a few days later. And it seems to me, as I study King myself, that, as long as he kept to issues which seemed to be personal piety issues, his clergy colleagues did not criticize him. But then he moved into civil rights and began to get criticized. But when he began to make the connections to the war and worldwide poverty, he became almost a pariah. Can you say something to us about that whole private piety versus the common good? You define the common good wonderfully, I think.

Jim Wallis: When I was a 14-year-old kid in my little evangelical church in Detroit, Michigan, I was becoming aware of how divided my city was, black and white, and I began to ask questions. How can we live the way we did in white Detroit, and life seemed so different in Black Detroit?

One day an elder said to me, “Jim, you have to understand, Christianity has nothing to do with racism. That is political and our faith is personal.” I say in the book that I think that is the night that I left in my head and heart and in a couple of years I was gone. And I did not have words to go around that experience then, but I do now.

I would say now, God is personal but never private, because the biblical prophets deal with, well, look at their audience: they are taking to kings, rulers, employers, judges, princes, and they are talking on behalf of widows, orphans, workers both left out and left behind. And they are talking about land, labor, and capital, the stuff of politics.

It is a public God. Our faith is personal, but it explodes into the world with public consequences, so the book talks about—you know, John Stewart asks good questions, so he asked me, on the Daily Show, a few weeks ago, “Now, in your last book, you talked about this bloc of religious right people trying to win elections for just one party, and you want to do an alternative to that. How is it going?” He said, “You want to create a religious left to counter the religious right?”

I said, “No, that would be a mistake, because the country is not hungry for a religious left to just act like the religious right has acted. They are hungry for what I call in the book a moral center, which is not a mushy middle or a soulless centrism, but it is don’t go left, don’t go right, go deeper. What are the moral choices and challenges right beneath our debate? And then I can do the politics and common good.”

I do love that because the common good is deep in Catholic social teaching, in Protestant notions of public good, in the black church, in evangelical revival, but also in Judaism and even in Islam. I knew nothing about the common good in Islam until I began to research this, and you can access this from our democratic secular constitutional tradition. So common good can be accessed from any of our traditions, and it can challenge, I would say, the individualisms of the right and individualisms of the left and the selective morality of both left and right in a new politics of the common good.

Anderson: You are talking about left and right really not having credence any more, or predictability, or maybe even any use that is good for the common good.

Wallis: Well, left and right, let us remember, are not religious categories or moral categories. They are political and ideological categories, and they create this notion—and the media is worse than the politicians—that there are only two sides to every issue. When they have you on these TV shows, they do pre-interviews, you know, on the phone, and I have learned they are auditions to see if the talking heads have enough conflict to make for good television. You know, they do not want to find we have a politics of fear and a politics of blame in this country, and both sides do it. The country is hungry for politics of solutions and politics of hope, and that is a very different kind of politics. And so what is conservative or liberal means little to me, but what is right and what works means much more.

Anderson: It is interesting—your work, which I have followed over the years, being a subscriber to the magazine for decades… You really follow Jesus, don’t you? Phyllis Tickle, the author and theologian, has just written a book called The Words of Jesus, and she said that when she field tested it, it was like the red-letter edition with everything stripped out except the words of Jesus. And when they all got done, they all kind of said, we do not like the guy very much. And you have made the statement—they said that he was scary, and you have made the statement, and I think that is just really a wonderful litmus test for me personally, either the words of Jesus are authoritative or they are not. Could you say a word about that?

Wallis: Well, the religious right is being replaced by Jesus, and that is progress, I think. (Laughter and applause.) I tell the story in the book about how we did the God’s Politics event in Nashville. In Nashville, you don’t do a book signing or lecture, you do a concert. So Jars of Clay, and Emmylou Harris, and Buddy Miller, Ashley Cleveland, all sang and I got to preach and we sold out the Belcourt Theater twice in one night. It was a great concert.

The next day I was interviewed by this guy, and he spoke like we are just speaking. He is on the radio, he says, “Now I am a secular, Jewish country music song writer and disc jockey, but I love your stuff.” He said, “I think there is a movement growing, and it has got to have a name. I have a suggestion for you.”

I said, “What is that?”

He said, “Call yourselves the ‘the Red-Letter Christians,’ that stuff in red that Jesus said, I like the red stuff. The rest I can do without.”

Brian McLaren, who was here last week, and Shane Claiborne, Tony Campolo and Amy Sullivan, a bunch of us got together and now we are calling ourselves the Red-Letter Christians because, you know, I like the other stuff too, I really do, I am an evangelical. I like the whole Bible, but the red stuff has not gotten the attention that it deserves.

We have lost the red stuff. We have lost the teaching of Jesus, and a whole new generation wants to know that. They want to know what did Jesus mean by this, when he did this what does that suggest, or what did he say or what did he do? So there is really a going back to Jesus, and it is very simple, it’s always been what reforms the church. In every single Catholic order, what the founder does, he or she goes back to Jesus. At every evangelical revival, we go back to Jesus.

I mean it should be simple. I know it is a news flash, but most people think that Christians ought to be those who pay attention to Jesus. I am not sure why they think that, (Laughter) but that is what they think. And so, when we get back to Jesus, somehow our faith comes alive again, and it begins to make sense to people in the world again.

Anderson: But the words of Jesus can be kind of hard.

Wallis: It is not I am okay and you are okay.

Anderson: That is right it certainly is not. There is clearly—and you write extensively about it, as do many theologians—the Gospel preference for the poor. I mean, you cannot read anything, including the Sermon on the Mount or any of the words of Jesus, as he is always pointing our responsibility, those who have much, toward the needs of those who have little. Is there good news, given the Gospel preference for the poor, for all of us comfortable people? Because I was taught in seminary, “Howard, your job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Well, we are the comfortable. Is there good news for us as well?

Wallis: You know, I think that the flip side of economic poverty is spiritual poverty, and I find not only half the world, three billion people, living on two dollars a day—I find the affluent world being afflicted, if you will, by a real crisis of meaninglessness and emptiness. I mean, what do we do when we get depressed? People say, let’s go shopping, this will help me with my depression. Well, it doesn’t really for very long, and so my students—I teach a course at Harvard part-time, and I am amazed at how they are volunteering and tutoring inner city kids and meeting children who live on garbage dumps in Mexico.

They are volunteering in ways that are way beyond what is necessary for a balanced resume, so I ask them, why do you do this? And the two words I get back all of the time are, we are looking for meaning and looking for connection.

Here is a news flash. Shopping does not satisfy the deepest longings of the human heart, and advertising suggests that it does. It doesn’t. The children of the affluent, in particular are looking for something deeper. They want their lives to count for something, so I think in the message of Jesus there is—going back to Isaiah, there is healing for all of us. Jesus liked Isaiah and I do too, and Isaiah 58 says, “If you share your bread with the hungry and welcome the homeless into your house, then will your light rise like the dawn and your healing come quickly.” You read that and say, oh, Isaiah must have meant their light and their healing: those of us who have doing for those who have not, those of us who have been blessed, giving back to those who have unfortunately not been blessed. No, Isaiah is suggesting that we all need healing here, we all need healing, and Jesus’ message has healing for the poor and healing for the affluent in this new community that he creates between both of us.

Anderson: It is interesting, at the service right before this, in our prayer of confession, we ask for forgiveness for those sins that we have committed, those things left undone, many of which you have highlighted, and then there is another line that I think is very pertinent to your book and your work: and forgive for those things done in our name. You point out that some of your Harvard students can’t quite figure, for instance, in the legacy of slavery, that there is any responsibility there. Could you say a word about that?

Wallis: Yeah, that is always a tough week, the week on racism, and I say things like, “That to benefit from oppression is to be responsible for it,” and the push back is, “Wait a minute, my parents never had slaves,” or, “My people came here after slavery,” and then I say, “I didn’t say guilty, I said responsible. Has anyone here in this room full of Harvard students not benefited from the way society is organized?” If you benefit from unjust structures and habits and behaviors, then you can’t help benefiting if you are born into benefit, but then you are responsible.

Back to your previous question, it strikes me as very interesting, I am talking these days to a lot of business people, a lot of CEOs, a lot of people who are kind of reaching the half-time point of their lives. And what are they talking about? Not just more success, more accumulation… they are talking about doing something that has meaning and purpose.

You know, Bill Gates thought he was going to just be a philanthropist when he retired in the seventies. He is quitting in Microsoft this July to run his foundation full time, because what gives him now delight and joy and really stimulates his entrepreneurial juices is really finding a cure to HIV/AIDS, to doing something in Africa that makes a difference. And so he and Melinda and all of these folks, as I watch them now and talk to them, they all want to do something with the second half of their lives that is much more meaningful than just more success and more accumulation. So they are taking responsibility for what is happening in the world and they are using all of their talents.

I don’t tell talented business people that they all should just work in a soup kitchen. You should do that to understand the problem, but I want people to apply their gifts, their energies, their talents, to finding solutions. We need a whole generation of social entrepreneurs to find real solutions to these vexing issues that politics has not solved. So when politics fails to resolve or address our biggest issues, what often happens is social movements rise up to change politics, and the best social movements have spiritual foundations.

Anderson: One of the things that you first talk in the book about racism, and in fact, we are going to show again a movie called Traces of the Trade as so many of us grow up in the northern states—you in Michigan and me in Minnesota—say that was not my problem. Traces of the Trade talks about how most of the northern fortunes are, many of them were based on money made in slavery and the selling of human beings, and you go right from there in a segue to women and girls. You say they have experienced forms of oppression throughout history, and I know that you model in your own life. For instance, I see over at John Eaton School, you are for something that Luke is doing in his course, and you have little Jack behind, but that does not seem to be true in many evangelical households, nor in the world. Say something about what you have written about this whole issue of the oppression of women and girls.

Wallis: Well, I live with a priest, and she was one of the first women ordained in Britain fifteen years ago, and so she was on the forefront of that battle. First of all, if you look at all the things like economic injustice, poverty, HIV suffering, the ones who are victims of conflicts, women are much more likely to be victims of our world’s problems than men. The feminization of poverty it is so called.

There are more women who are poor. The victims of conflict, and it is not soldiers any more who die in these conflicts, it is civilians and often women and children. So number one, women are more likely to be the ones suffering most from our unresolved problems; secondly, they still are the ones who are looked to, to hold life together in the midst of the conflicts, and they tend to do that. They hold families and villages and communities together even though they are the principal victims of the problems. And third, they are the ones who are least in a position to change the circumstances that lead to the problems, because they are not in decision-making roles. So it is kind of a triple jeopardy. First you are principle victim, second you still are going to hold life together, and third, you are not in a decision-making place to change the problems.

So I talk in the book about how, now only are women, you know, the ones who suffer most, they are the ones who leading the solutions in the poorest places in the world. Muhammad Yunus has also written a book that you all should read about the Grameen bank in Bangladesh. Half the country basically has gotten these low-interest loans, and it is changing Bangladesh, and 98% of the loans go to women. The slogan is, you teach a man fish, and he will feed himself, but teach a woman to fish and she will feed the village. So I think that women are not just victims here, they are often the principal sources of solutions for a lot of these problems, if given the chance to be the decision makers.

Harold Anderson: The Center for Global Justice and Reconciliation of the Cathedral is having a Women’s Empowerment Summit in April and Muhammad Yunus, Madeleine Albright, Mary Robinson, and lots of these folks, they are bringing together 150 organizations which serve women and girls around the world, and what you say is so true. The percentage of default on the micro loans is almost zero. Women always pay it back. However, if the men get it there is between fifty and sixty percent default on the loans, so what you say has been borne out in the research that we have done here, and if you want to change a society, empower women.

Wallis: But be careful, because I was attacked by a right-wing commentator as saying that very thing, I was sexist.

Muhammad Yunus is following me around on this book tour, and it is kind of fun. In Portland, the very first stop there was this Bagdad Theatre. Powell’s Bookstore had this big theater, where they had the event, and it had my name and then the name of the movie that was showing, so it said “Jim Wallis… American Gangster… Muhammad Yunus… American Gangster” (Laughter) so both me and Mohammed are kind of American Gangsters. I am kind of proud of that, you know (Laughter).

Anderson: In a minute here we are going take questions from our audience, both online and here in the nave, but I want to ask one more question, because I found it so important. There are tens of thousands of us who look to you as a person who has kind of guided the way, and how, in a responsible way, people can bring their faith affirmations to the public realm. And near the end of your book, you talk about the biblical issue of commissioning, and you are commissioning another generation. You have referred to that a number of times today. What is the commission that you are giving them and us, and how can we carry it out?

Wallis: The best part of this book tour so far has been this new generation. Every time we are at a university or college seminary, there are never enough chairs, every single time, and the crowds of young people coming out are so encouraging to me. I [mentioned] college-age seminarians, but you know I am talking to 14-year-olds every week about what they want to do about their faith in the world, so I say three things to them.

I say, one, take care of your faith, because without that you will not be able to sustain any serious movement for social justice; two, take care of each other; and three, think movement, because we’ve to think past organizations. There was SCLC, CORE, and SNCC, and NAACP, there was a civil right movement. You have to think beyond our churches, organization, and start thinking movement again.

We have asked the young people for the edges of their lives and that is what we have gotten: the edges. They want to be asked for the whole of their lives. They want someone to say, “I want you to commit everything,” and they are. They are showing up at all of these events. I was at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, preaching, not quite as big as this, but a pretty good-sized cathedral, and the press of course said a much younger than average congregation at Grace Cathedral showed up, and we are getting that at every event.

Young people are showing up even where young people aren’t going to church. They are showing up at these kinds of conversations because some of them say that I am spiritual but not religious. That is a new denomination on the West Coast, (Laughter) Spiritual but not religious. Ben Cohen from Ben and Jerry’s ice cream told me, “Jim, I am spiritual but not religious.” I said, “Ben, offer them some free ice cream and you could be the bishop of this thing,” and he told me that he is thinking about that. I am very encouraged and surprised, often, that young people show up in such numbers, but they really are.

They just want to be real in their lives and in the world. They are tired of the rhetoric. They want to see some real action, and it’s personal. It is not just a social agenda. They want to be followers of Jesus Christ.

Or, I was in a conference of five thousand rabbis last month. There was this horde of young Jewish renewal energy, connecting Judaism to social justice, so it is not just in Christianity it is in all of our traditions.

Anderson: That’s a very hopeful note.

Wallis: Very hopeful.

Anderson: Let’s move to questions that our audience might have. If you would like to ask a question, come down the center aisle to one of the microphones.

Wallis: They are afraid it might be an altar call. (Laughter)

Anderson: Well, we will make them sign something important, won’t we? Then we will alternate between microphones.

Question #1: I would like to go back to your point about how shopping is not the solution. On the eve of September 11th and the day after, when, really, the world was waiting to exhale and no body knew what to do, the leader of our country, the thing that he said that was a call to action was, don’t worry, go shopping. That is what he said. So my question to you is, as we get ready for a new moment of waiting to exhale, as we get ready to vote for a new leader of our country, what can we hope to hear from him or her? And if we do not hear it, what can we do ourselves?

Wallis: That was not one of our President’s best moments, shall we just say. A better moment, he just came back from Africa, where he is very popular, when he gave fifteen billion dollars of aid for AIDS in Africa, and that could have been a whole different direction, had we pursued that more courageously. The last conversation I had with Present Bush—before we stopped talking because I did not support the war in Iraq—the last thing I said to him was, “Mr. President, unless we drain the swamps of injustice in which the mosquitoes of terrorism breed, you will never succeed in a war on poverty or a war on terrorism.”

I think that whole direction of understanding that our security is bound up with the security of others, how they feel, is the only way to secure a future. We have to change the conversation and change the dynamics of resentment, anger and fear which is such a breeding ground for murder and terrorism. So I think, you know, I talked about this a lot in the book, we need a new narrative for foreign policy. We need a new narrative for national security.

It is not enough to say that this was a stupid war and I will support better wars, trust me. I do not hear anyone really going as deep as we have to go on that question. This world is hungry for American leadership not for American domination. Finally, it is going to be the progress we make in partnership with other nations to help make those nations help them become more secure in which we will find the security for Will, Luke, and Jack, and all of our kids.

This foreign policy is not making our kids safer. It is making this world more dangerous for them, and a vision that has the real threats of terrorism, countered with nothing but an endless scenario of permanent war, is just not the answer to what are real threats out there. So I talked about nonviolent realism, which is a different kind course than either a liberal pacifism, which does not take evil seriously, or a combat conservatism, which says military power can easily crush evil and just smash it.

It has not worked out that way. It pops up again, unintended consequences, over here things get worse and we are creating more of the problem. And to say that shopping is the answer is really a sad response to a deeper reflection about how a new way of living in the developed world is necessary to even people living in the developing world. (Applause)

Question #2: Good morning. Luke 12:58 says, “Make every chance possible to settle with your adversary.” In this new day and age, I feel like we take a lot of time thinking about what makes us different from each other, what makes the left different from the right, what makes the right different from the left, and we do not focus on the fact that we all want a better America, and we all want a better world. What is the best way that we can settle with our adversaries? What is the best way we can come together and unify without having to be compromised to let both people lose? People are afraid of compromise right now, because we feel like nobody wins. So how do we settle with our adversaries? How do we unify?

Wallis: That is a very important question. When I talk about the religious right, I say that their monologue is over. They are still there. They are not dead and gone. The monologue is over, and a new dialogue has begun. What I am trying to do is reach out to my brothers and sisters on the religious right and say, where to do we have some common ground?

Richard Land and I, and Southern Baptist leader, religious right leader, went to the White House together on Darfur. We care about Darfur. How do you find common ground by moving to higher ground? And this is where the left/right polarizes and paralyzes our discourse, and because they are not religious categories, we should not squeeze ourselves into them, particularly during election years.

So what do we find? You do not have to agree with someone on everything to work with them on things that you really together agree to. So we should be kind of shaking up politics, if you will, by having some coalitions of unusual suspects, who are coming together as a very strong conservative leader, very well known… surprised me when he came to me and said—and I am not going to tell you who it is, because we have not done it yet—says that I would like to work with you on something, and shake things up if people saw you and I working together on this. You would be surprised to know that, as a conservative, I am against the death penalty, and I would like to work with you on trying to end the death penalty.

This surprised me, and when I hear those things, it shows me sometimes my lack of faith, my still being stuck in old categories, good people and bad people and all of the rest. There are people of conscience who are legitimately on different sides of some of these tough issues. So how do we find some common ground? Again, by moving to higher ground. I think even on a divisive issue, like abortion, we can really find common ground to dramatically reduce abortion in this country due to unwanted pregnancies, to really reduce the number of those, without necessarily criminalizing a difficult and often desperate choice.

How do we find that common ground, which is where I think a lot of people in the country are waiting for someone to articulate on many of these questions. Again, a moral center is not a splitting the difference of extremes or a mushy middle, it is like, what are the moral choices and challenges that we could find some common ground on? I think that listening is part of it. There is a whole section about how overcoming poverty will take some of the best ideas from the conservative side as well as the best ideas from the liberal side, and then new ideas neither side has yet thought of.

Anderson: We have time for one last quick question.

Question #3: I appreciate your comments on looking at all faiths when you are thinking of common ground. I think that more than ever today, we need to include our Islam brothers and sisters, as well as all different faiths, that’s one. My question, though, has to do with—I can’t resist—is the election that is going on now and, well, because you seem to be looking very clearly and deeply at comments that are made by people today, and I would like to get your comments on the strengths and weaknesses of the candidates that we have in our beloved, wonderful—no, I think that it is one of the most exciting elections we have ever had, and I think the people are excited, so I would like to hear the strengths and weaknesses of Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama?

Anderson: (Laughter) And when you are done with that I would like some tips on the stock market. (More laughter) We are all listening, Jim.

Wallis: I have known Barack Obama for about ten years, back when he was a lowly state legislator in Illinois. I have known Hillary for that long as well. John McCain, we have had some connection between other people but have not had a sit-down conversation yet.

Let me just say that I think change—the election is over, the results are in, change won. Change won this election, and now all of the candidates are competing with each other to try and persuade us that they are the best agent for change. They are all trying to make that point. The Democrats certainly were.

John Edwards, I also know him and Elizabeth very well, and bless John Edwards for putting poverty on the agenda of this election campaign. (Applause) You know, Republicans have been running as agents of change, they are part of the White House and yet they are all outsiders. It is an amazing election time. The country is hungry for a change of direction. We have gone so far down the wrong road that there is going to be a snap back if you will. The Democrats hope the snap back comes as far as a Democratic victory.

I want it to go much further than that. You see, I was at the State of the Union this time as a guest, first time I got sit in balcony as a guest and look down over the railing and watch this thing, and you know the titter was, would Barack shake hands with Hillary? No. Would the president embrace them? And all of this stuff, so I am watching them, and as I said, I know them. I know a lot of those characters down on floor, and I like some of them, but it struck me again that I think sometimes that they think they are the center of attention, that everything comes through them. They change history.

History does not bear that out. History suggests that grass-roots social movements change politics and politicians more than they change history. Lyndon Johnson was not a civil rights leader until Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks made him one. And so I would say, whoever your favorite is of those three, whoever wins the election, they won’t be able to change the big things in this city unless and until there are social movements pushing and pressing from the outside.

There are three pharmaceutical lobbyists for every member of Congress—and that is one industry—even if the candidate wants to change. I think that these three all want to change things. I know two of them well, and the other, I think that he wants to change things too. I am telling you the wrong approach is to have your favorite win and then fold your arms and say, now let’s see if they produce. The right approach is to say who ever wins, okay, now it is time for us to produce. (Applause)

So this book is about movements in the past, where people of faith have produced faith, action, energy, hope and change. And now I think that is upon us, and we have the chance now. I have been doing this for awhile, and I have never felt, for more than three decades, the chance exists to really move history on some of these big questions.

There are seven big questions here on the usual things and it will take commitment on all three levels personal, communal, congregational, and public policy and that is what we are talking about here. It is going to take us making a simple choice, a choice between hope and cynicism. That is the big spiritual choice.

Cynicism could be a buffer against commitment. Send us the folks against the bad stuff, but don’t think that it will ever change. Hope is not a feeling or a mood or a personality type; hope is a choice, a decision we make because of this thing called faith. The Bible says that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, and my best paraphrase of that is, “Hope means believing in spite of the evidence and then watching the evidence change.” It is time for that kind of hope again, and that is a choice that we need to make.

Anderson: You have been, we have been, commissioned. It has been a great conversation. Next week our Dean Sam Lloyd will be back, and he will have a special guest from the world of music, international opera star and Washington native Denise Graves, but before our 11:15 service, to which you are all invited, both our online audience and those present in the nave, you can enjoy a cup of coffee at the west end, and Jim has graciously agreed to be there to visit with you a bit. Thanks for being here today, and Jim, thank you very much.

Wallis: Thank you. (Applause)