LOUISVILLE — Jim Wallis, the editor-in-chief of Sojourners Magazine, is a man who once was arrested in the Capitol rotunda, in front of eighth graders studying civics, while demonstrating against tax cuts for the rich. He describes himself as “a 19th century evangelist born in the wrong century.”
Because Wallis is the kind of evangelical Christian who stands in the streets and speaks up for what he thinks is right, who thinks religion should always inform politics, who resonates in his bones with those 19th century Christians who fought for the abolition of slavery and for women’s right to vote and for child labor laws.
He’s in the midst of a book tour for the just-published and best-selling “God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It.”
He tells good stories, too.
On March 15, Wallis spoke at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary for the annual Greenhoe Lectures, part of the seminary’s 2005 Festival of Theology and Reunion. The theme this year: “Justice from a Local and Global Perspective.”
In the first of two lectures, Wallis told of two conversion experiences.
One, when he was six — considered a ripe old age for salvation in his childhood congregation. One night, Wallis and some other children not yet saved were put in the front row, directly in front of the fiery, powerful, somewhat scary preacher, who turned his attention fully upon the front row. If Jesus came back tonight, “your mommy and daddy would be taken to heaven and you would be left all by yourself,” the preacher thundered down at the children.
“Got my attention,” Wallis added, saying: “I realized as a six-year-old that I would have a five-year-old sister to support.” But his mom later spoke of God’s love — of how much God wanted to be close to him — and that stuck, “and I signed up.”
Later, he was 14, beginning to read the newspapers, to pay attention to the world and to ask questions. He wondered why the white Detroit he knew was so different from the black Detroit he’d heard about. He was told he was too young to ask questions, that his questions would get him in trouble.
So Wallis took a bus into the city, and went to another evangelical church — a black congregation. He made friends, started asking new questions.
When he went back to his old church, a man there told him: “Christianity has nothing to do with racism . . . That was it for me. I couldn’t push the questions away any more. I left that night.”
Today, many years later, Wallis still raises questions, still advocates for a view of Christianity that can see more than two sides to an issue. He is an organizer of Call to Renewal, an organization that has brought Catholics and evangelicals and mainline Protestants and Jews and Muslims and others to work on issues that Wallis argues are definitely moral issues — such things as protecting the environment, seeking fair wages and tax policies, and deciding when and how a country goes to war.
Some of what he has to say is smooth and well practiced — he has made the rounds of book-signings and interviews. But Wallis invariably speaks with passion.
He tells of people coming up to him all across the country — “even Texas” — and saying that how White House folks describe religious faith does not represent their own faith or their values. “Religious values ought to be bridges that bring us together on important issues, not wedges and weapons that divide us and destroy us,” Wallis said.
Some contend that abortion and gay marriage are the only important moral values.
But as an evangelical Christian, “I can’t ignore 3,000 verses in the Bible on poverty,” Wallis said. “Fighting poverty is a moral value too.”
So Wallis asked, “What does God care about?” And he takes his answer in part from the 65th chapter of Isaiah — “they shall not labor in vain” — and the 4th chapter of Micah. “Micah is my favorite prophet for national and global security,” Wallis said. “Micah and (Donald) Rumsfeld are offering conflicting visions.”
Wallis says that God cares about land and labor and equity, that Isaiah 65 “is about good wages, living wages . . . Housing, health, safety and security. This is about the stuff of life, the agenda of politics.”
Wallis said he can’t forget a woman he saw one day, working the fast-food lane at a Burger King. He noticed some children at a nearby table, heads down, doing their homework — and he figured out that those were the woman’s children, that she didn’t have any choice but to bring her children to work, and that at the wages she earned she would probably have to choose between buying winter boots for those children and paying the rent.
In the last election, politicians talked about soccer moms and Nascar dads, but not about those like “Burger King Mom” — people who work full-time but still live in poverty, Wallis said.
“A budget is a moral document,” he said, because how a family, a church, a school or a nation spends its money reflects its values, because it matters who benefits and who suffers, who wins and who loses, who gains at whose expense.
Before now, “the nation hasn’t known there was a progressive religious option,” Wallis said. People said, “I didn’t know you could be a Christian and care about poverty, care about the environment, to be against the war in Iraq.”
So he’s getting people talking — a group that includes, as Wallis put it, evangelicals who don’t feel represented by Jerry Falwell; Catholics who want to vote on more than just abortion; mainline Protestants who feel discounted; blacks, Latinos and Asians who feel left out; Jews, Muslims and other non-Christians who want a more tolerant, inclusive view of religious faith.
“This isn’t about a book, it’s about a movement,” Wallis said — a movement not “against everything being bad,” but one which offers ideas for solving difficult problems.
“When it comes to religion and values and politics,” he said, “the monologue of the religious right is finally over and the new dialogue has begun.”
Recently, Wallis told the Louisville audience, he looked up at a book signing to see an 11-year-old girl standing before him.
“I think we’re just going to have to change the world,” she told him.
“Who will do that?” he asked.
She answered: “I think people just like me.”
