The good fight: how much longer can the religious left remain politically neutral?

God's Politics

By Jim Wallis

Harper San Francisco, $24.95

Let us read, brothers and sisters, from the Gospel of Karl, chapter 20, verse 4. "And lo, in those days, the man they called Rove did proclaim, 'I shall find those lost four million evangelical voters and I shall shepherd them to the polls.' The call went far and wide, throughout the lands of wheat and sugar, in every hill and valley, and the people did hear. They phone-banked, and caucused, and lobbied their neighbors about capital gains tax cuts. And on the first Tuesday of the eleventh month, they voted?'

By now, it's become gospel truth that the mobilization of religious conservatives won the 2004 election for George W. Bush. The grassroots base rallied around hot-button issues like gay marriage while the president conducted a more moderate campaign nationwide, and they provided a cushion of votes in the red states that drove up his popular vote total. Amid the flurry of activity on the religious right that preceded Election Day, what was the religious left doing?

Well, here's a taste. On the morning of Nov. 1, the day before the election--a highly competitive presidential election--I opened my inbox to see a press release from the once-venerable National Council of Churches (NCC), an umbrella organization for liberal, mainline denominations. Religious organizations-like other non-profits--are subject to all manner of complicated rules regarding how political they can be, particularly in the weeks before an election. Even so, I expected a pre-election press release to have some bearing on the decision facing the country. I was wrong. "NCC Urges U.S. to Accept Responsibility for Uighur Chinese Refugees at Guantanamo," read the headline. I have no doubt that advocacy on behalf of Chinese Muslim prisoners is a worthy cause; I also have no doubt that it confirms the irrelevance of the once-powerful religious left.

Which is why the recent emergence of Jim Wallis as the public face of the religious left has been such a welcome development for many progressives who are also people of faith. An ordained minister in the American Baptist Church, Wallis is the founder of Sojourners magazine and the progressive movement Call to Renewal. In the last few months he has faced Tim Russert's queries on "Meet the Press," chatted up Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show," discussed poverty with Charlie Rose, and mused about faith and politics with Terry Gross on NPR's "Fresh Air" And now he's released his latest book, God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, which debuted on The New York Times' bestseller list and in the number two slot on Amazon.com. Wallis's ambitions are grander than just writing a bestselling book--he wants to energize a religious movement in this country to rival the influence of the religious right. Can Wallis stop the decline of the religious left? Only if he wants to.

Not the liberal Pat Robertson

Whenever he is in front of an audience, one of Wallis's favorite bits is to ask: How can you recognize a politician in Washington? He then licks his index finger and holds it up. "They're the ones walking around with their fingers in the air to see which way the wind is blowing," he says. For those of us who believe public service is a noble profession, it can be an annoying gambit. But it's more than just an anti-establishment rant. Wallis' point, he goes on to explain, is simple--Stop blaming politicians and start changing the wind.

God's Politics is part argument for why the wind needs to be changed and part manual for how to change it. The book reads like a sermon by a minister who has learned that the best way to keep his congregation from falling asleep is to break up the theology with anecdotes and provide plenty of lists for parishioners to scribble down in the margins of their bulletins. Sprinkled among timeless lessons from the likes of Habakkuk and Amos are stories from Wallis's time on the front lines of poverty-for 30 years, he has lived in one of Washington, D.C.'s most violent neighborhoods--and from his travels around the country to build a vibrant progressive religious movement, as well as his frustrating encounters with political establishments on the right and the left. The lists are meant to outline progressive religious principles: the Six-Point Plan for Iraq, Ten Lessons to Defeat Terrorism, Ten Lessons for Understanding and Surviving War, Eight Millennium Development Goals, and, as a conclusion, 50 Predictions for the 21st Century.

As a long-time advocate for the poor who was leading faith-based organizations decades before George W Bush ever heard the phrase, Wallis has the street cred and moral authority to make his case. To liberals who believe that religion has no place in public life, Wallis argues that "God is personal, but never private," citing Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Joshua Heschel, and other moral crusaders whose names warm the hearts of good lefties. To conservatives, Wallis says that their attempts to apply religious solutions to policy problems-from terrorism to Iraq to the economy to abortion--have betrayed Christian principles of justice, mercy, and humility. Both sides, he charges, have done wrong by religion. Republicans have hijacked faith in the name of divisive causes that fail to help the neediest, and Democrats have largely avoided discussion of religion altogether.