|
After the November election, polls showed that a significant percentage of voters considered "values" an important factor in their decision. Believing they own the values issue, the religious right took these polls as evidence they had received a popular mandate for their agenda.
 Though many Democrats pointed out that this wasn't exactly sound reasoning—many voted for John Kerry, after all, as an expression of their values—the whole subject seemed to make them uncomfortable. They more or less rolled their eyes and conceded the issue.
Jim Wallis considers this a big mistake. Since the publication of his new book, God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, he's been telling packed audiences across the country, "If the religious right wants to debate values, I say bring it on! Because we will win that debate."
But when Wallis says "we," it may be unclear to whom he is he referring. While his call for a national ethic based in biblical principles makes him sound like a conservative preacher, his politics are far to the left of Jerry Falwell or Tom DeLay. And, though he describes himself as a progressive, his religious convictions put him at odds with many in the (mostly secular) progressive community.
Wallis is an anachronism, a throwback to a time when Christians were at the forefront of progressive movements. Given that the country's values are increasingly based on religious faith, activists like Jim Wallis, who argue that the values expressed in the Bible are decidedly liberal, may be just what the progressive movement needs.
Jim Wallis likes to call himself a nineteenth-century Evangelical born in the wrong century. If that's true, for progressives looking to breathe new life into their movement, it was a fortunate mistake.
-
"Jim Wallis is compelling, provocative, and inspirational, with faith that can move mountains and can certainly move people and communities." Archbishop Desmond Tutu
-
"A troubling book in the very best sense of the word...urgently needed." New York Times Book Review
-
"If it will take a movement — as it always does — to challenge the status quo and bring about social justice, Faith Works. should be its manifesto. The next time a politician asks himself, 'What Would Jesus Do?,' hand him this book. Jim Wallis provides the answer." Arianna Huffington
-
-
"Jeffrey Sachs is that rare phenomenon: an academic economist famous for his theories about why some countries are poor and others rich, and also famous for his successful practical work in helping poor countries become richer. In this longawaited, fascinating, clearly and movingly written book, he distills his experience to propose answers to the hard choices now facing the world." Jared Diamond
Farley: I realized reading the book that I had some misunderstandings about the term evangelical. I'd like to begin by having you explain what defines an Evangelical and what differentiates Evangelicals from other denominations.
Wallis: Well, first of all, evangelical is not a denomination. There are Evangelicals in lots of denominations. It's more a historical and theological tradition.
Farley: So you could be an Evangelical Catholic?
Wallis: Presbyterian, Methodist... yes, in all the denominations. There's often a fight between Evangelicals and liberals within these denominations. It's also important to distinguish between fundamentalists and Evangelicals. I'm a nineteenth-century Evangelical, I often say, born in the wrong century. Nineteenth-century Evangelical Christians were revivalists and social reformers. They were abolitionists. They helped lead the battle against slavery. They fought for women's suffrage. They fought for child labor law reform. They were progressives and Evangelicals, like I am. Evangelical in more recent times is often confused or collapsed into fundamentalism. It's associated with television preachers like Jerry Falwell, who are much more fundamentalist than evangelical.
Farley: Yes, Evangelicals are often assumed to be right wing.
Wallis: Yes, but Evangelicals are much broader than the religious right. There are some Evangelicals who are in the religious right. But most are not, actually. Most Evangelicals are more moderate in their views and politics and are not in the pocket of the Republican Party.
Farley: How would you define a fundamentalist, as opposed to an Evangelical?
Wallis: There is fundamentalism in all of our traditions. Islamic fundamentalism—we see their profile more than ever—Jewish fundamentalism, Christian fundamentalism...
Farley: In the book you even talk about "secular fundamentalism."
Wallis: Yes. But religious fundamentalists were in the cultural backwaters of American life for years. And they've come out now. Fundamentalism is always a defensive movement, an effort to protect something they feel is being threatened, is under attack. Usually the common enemy is secularism, modernism. They feel their religious convictions are under attack. So they have a kind of counter attack. And a counter attack is just trying to take power of themselves, and enforce their agenda. And because they believe their cause is a divine cause, they adopt the ethics of "the end justifies the means."
Farley: Is there anything that Christian fundamentalists feel threatened by that, in your opinion, is legitimate, a genuine threat?
Wallis: Well, many of the things that religious fundamentalists are against are things that many of us are alarmed about: hedonism, the reduction of sexuality to shallow, exploitive, recreational behavior, as opposed to covenantal relationships. You know, the coarsening of the culture, where things are much more banal than they were before. More violent. There's a lack of respect in the culture for traditional values, for marriage, for family, for faith. Modernism, if you will, isn't an unmixed blessing. The pragmatism, the belief that the ends justify the means, the greed, the abuse of sexuality—all of these are things that many of us are concerned about, or alarmed by, even. Fundamentalism is trying to protect itself from those values. But theocracy becomes the political goal of fundamentalisms. Though that would be denied by people like Jerry Falwell, they act in a theocratic way.
Farley: I loved your comments on homosexuality. I don't necessarily agree with the specifics of your position, but I love two things that you have said. First that the issue of gay marriage has become a "surrogate" for legitimate concerns about the family, but that it's grossly unfair to scapegoat gay people for the breakdown of the heterosexual family. You then call for an open, honest dialogue about this issue, one that is rooted in compassion and justice.
Wallis: Well, there are two energies fueling the anti-gay, I would say, hysteria. One is very ugly, homophobic, prejudicial. More than that, it's hateful. The Matthew Shepard energy. It's ugly and violent. And that's just got to be opposed as a justice issue. A human rights issue. There'll be no toleration for that kind of hateful behavior. The other is a concern about the family, and that it's being undermined.
Farley: Few would disagree that the family has changed radically in the past few decades.
Wallis: And so it became a surrogate in the election. The anti-gay marriage became a surrogate for caring about family. But it's just the wrong surrogate for that issue. But we should care about family.
Now, most of my gay friends would agree with me that we need a critical mass of healthy heterosexual families to have a good society. Most people are heterosexuals, and so if their family relationships are not healthy, it's bad for society. If they are healthy, it's good for society. But you shouldn't scapegoat or penalize gay and lesbian people for not fitting the majority pattern. And they should feel safe; they should feel protected; they should have equality under the law. But I've never run into some sort of anti-heterosexual-family feeling among gay people.
Farley: The religious right, though, regularly claims that the "gay agenda" wants to destroy the family. That's where the hysteria comes in.
Wallis: But I've not found that. My gay friends are also friends with my family. And they're glad that we have a healthy heterosexual relationship and a healthy relationship with our kids. But they want to be respected too—their rights, their relationships—and not be scapegoated for things that have nothing to do with them.
I had this conversation with Focus on the Family, and I said I agree with you that family breakdown is a huge crisis, a serious crisis. And I don't think the Left talks about that enough. My neighborhood is eighty percent single parent families. You can't overcome poverty with that, with eighty percent single parent families. But how do we reweave the bonds of marriage, family, extended family, and community, to put our arms around the kids? And it's not just in poor neighborhoods. Kids are falling through the cracks of fractured family in all classes and neighborhoods. So I said to them, I want to rebuild family life and relationships, but explain to me how gay and lesbian people are the ones responsible for all that? which is what their fund-raising strategy suggests. And after about an hour and a half they conceded the point. They said, Okay Jim, we concede that family breakdown is caused much more by heterosexual dysfunction than by homosexuals. But then they said, We can't vouch for our fundraising department, which says a lot, I think.
Farley: If you don't mind shifting back a little bit, you referred to the coarsening of the culture. In the book you went so far as to say that the culture is broken. You hear all the time from the Right that the cause of this coarsening is "liberalism," which I think is just more self-serving scapegoating. But, I'm curious if you have any insights where this coarsening is coming from? What is the real cause?
Wallis: Well, that is exactly the right question. And I would like to get a number of religious leaders together from across the political spectrum who would agree that the coarsening of the culture is a problem and say here's the common project. Let's agree on the things that are most offensive in the culture—the gratuitous sexuality, the hedonism, the greed, the banality... all these things—and trace them back. What are there points of origin? I believe their points of origin, by and large, are the corporate culture.
Farley: What do you mean by that?
Wallis: I mean, these problems are mostly tied to an economic motivation. It's the Fox network. Fox is the favorite network of the conservatives. But how do the conservatives just give a pass to Fox? Some of the worst shows have been Fox. The other networks, too, but Fox has been praised by conservatives, Murdock runs it, so why not better programming?
Farley: I would suggest that conservatives give Fox a pass because conservatives believe so strongly in market forces as a moral good. And Fox's programming is clearly dictated by market forces.
Wallis: But is that a religious conviction, or not? I would say it's not.
Farley: Do you think some people would say that it is?
Wallis: They act like it is. There's nothing in the Bible about it, if anything the Bible is very critical of market forces, and market mentality, and market ethics, and profit maximization. Profit maximization is not a particularly religious value. So what would the people do who care about this? Dobson and I could probably agree on the things that are most offensive, but what would we find if we started to trace back the sources of this coarsening? Where does it come from? Who's putting it out there? I don't think you're going to find that it's liberal professors at large universities that are putting out all the crap, all the garbage.
Farley: And it wouldn't just be liberals.
Wallis: Most of the people putting out most of the garbage are probably Republican voters. They're the people running our major corporations; they put out most of the garbage. I wonder what the politics are of most of the pornographers.
Farley: Pornographers like money; they probably vote Republican.
Wallis: So, if you care about the coarsening of the culture, and a lot of us do, whether religious or not, where is that coming from and how do we change it?
Farley: Of course, many on the left become leery when religious people begin talking about offensive programming. We're very leery of censorship, because my idea of what is offensive, and why it's offensive, will not be the same as Jerry Falwell's, or even yours. Though (laughs) I suppose reality television has given both right and left a lot to agree about.
Wallis: Yes, Survivor, Temptation Island, Bachelor, Bachelorette, they are just offensive.
Farley: Yes, though they probably offend me for different reasons. Those shows don't offend me because they are too sexual, or have bad language. They offend me because they are so vapid, because they are just so offensively low. For me, they are more aesthetically offensive than morally offensive.
Wallis: Yes, this isn't a left right issue. But the assumption is that there is a sort of left wing conspiracy of Hollywood, of liberal professors, and of gay people. Now that may be good for fundraising letters, but it doesn't begin to describe the reality of where this threat to our kids is coming from.
I do hold Hollywood accountable on the values question. And I think sometimes liberal Democrats are much too connected to that, too uncritical of the Hollywood garbage that comes out. But, again, where does that go back to? Corporate America. Hollywood is owned by corporate America. It's not owned by the faculty at Oberlin College.
Farley: And, of course, as many have speculated, the so-called liberals that run Hollywood probably vote Republican. They're very money-oriented people.
Wallis: And their defense is always that it's market driven. It's not us, it's what people want.
Farley: Well, isn't it true? If it is what people want, or will go see, why should we tell them what they can and can't produce?
Wallis: But my theology is that human nature is very paradoxical. You can appeal to the best of our angels, and the worst of our angels. And you'll find resonance with both. Martin Luther King, Jr. can say "I have a dream" and appeal to the best of our instincts. But another politician will appeal to the worst of our fears and our prejudices. But we're both. We can aspire to the heights, or we can descend to the depths. Both are part of the human condition. And so what we're appealing to is a critical issue. So if you're appealing to the worst in people and it works, and you say, Well, I'm market driven. No, even though it works, you're still appealing to the worst in people. There is a worst in people. That's my Christian theology: people aren't just sort of all wonderful and good, and there's no evil. We're a mix of good and evil. It's not out there and in not here. Solzhenitsyn said that evil runs through the heart of every person and every nation. Now, I think there probably is a time when some people have wholly given themselves over to evil, you know, the Saddam Husseins and the Hitlers. And there also are people who, you know, are still human (we're all sinful and fallen), but they've given themselves over to good.
Farley:You did know Dorothy Day.
Wallis: I knew Dorothy Day. And Desmond Tutu, I know. And I know them both enough to know they're not perfect. But they've given themselves over to good. Mother Theresa, too. And a society can do the same.
I want to break the political categories, break open the conversation, so we can talk about what it means to really test a society by how it treats its poorest and most vulnerable. That challenges both parties, because neither has done this.
Farley: In the US, more people per capita consider themselves religious, and base their political views on religious faith, than in Europe, where much of the population doesn't believe in God and doesn't go to church. Yet it seems to me that the values you consider biblical—attention to the poor, placing value on the common good, aversion to violence and a means to solve problems, etc.—you actually find these values lived out in European societies more than you do in the United States.
Wallis: Well, you would have liked this last session this morning, where my English, Anglican priest wife was making that point. She said, "Now I'm in the most religious country in the world. I'm coming from so-called secular Europe, which is often disdained here. But here I find 55 million Americans haven't got healthcare. In our system, which might not be perfect, healthcare is a human right, not a commodity to be bought and sold. I come here and I have kids out in the streets shooting each another outside my front window. Most British people have never seen a gun in real life."
I said today in response to that that there's a tradition of Christian socialism in Britain, so called—it's not really socialism in the American image of that word, it's not about totalitarian, or Marxist elites taking over the world. It's about social concern of a religious sort. Most socialists in Britain were Methodists, not Marxists. And what they created, in fact, was the social welfare state. A reflection of Christian values, they would say. Now, that's become very secular, but Joy would say her country, in terms of care of the poor and healthcare, exemplifies Christian values more than we do, where Christianity has become very individualistic and often critical of the question What ever became of the common good?
So, How does faith affect our cultures and our policies and structures? is a fair question. And the individualistic ethics of twentieth century Evangelicalism, I think, betrayed the ethics of nineteenth century Evangelicalism. And eighteenth-century British Evangelicalism, which was responsible for John Wesley, who was a revivalist. Or John Newton, the author of "Amazing Grace." He was a slave trader. So when he said "Save a wretch like me" he wasn't just suffering from existential angst. He was a slave trader, and he turned his life around. And through him William Wilberforce got converted, who was the parliamentarian who fought for thirty years to end slavery, and did. All that was Christian revivalism put into a social reform context. Individual ethics doesn't really solve those issues. So, there's a paradox there. Joy just said in the last session, "Well, you all may have the numbers of religious people, but we have a more compassionate society." And it's true.
Farley: So, if "secular Europe" is more Christian than "Christian America," why is faith important? What does religious faith offer to building a just society that secular ethics, or secular humanism, doesn't?
Wallis: Well, as many people who are religious will admit, religion has often been hierarchical, patriarchal, divisive, violent, depressive—it's been all that. Some of the worst things we've done to each other in our common history have been done in the name of God or religion. It must break God's heart, the things that have been done in His name. Yet there has also been transformation. There have been catalytic, liberating, empowering, creating things that would otherwise not have happened.
I was there for Nelson Mandela's inauguration, and he had a service the day before thanking all the faith communities for their role in the fall of apartheid: Christian, Muslim, even Jewish ("even Jewish" meaning that there were a small number of Jews, but they were powerfully prophetic). Mandela is not overtly religious himself, but he said, We could not have done this without you. Without the energy of faith, the persistence, the ethic, the risk, the suffering, the sacrifice, the vision—the hope that you provided. And Desmond Tutu was the master of ceremonies at every event, including the inauguration, the speech, the opening of parliament the day before. He was the number two person in South Africa during the birth of this nation. And he's a person of faith. He provided a kind of spiritual under-girding to that day. And so I think religion and faith have a role. But religion does not have a monopoly on morality. I say that every time I speak. Yet, religion, to be faithful and true to itself, must have a vibrant social conscience. And when it does, it moves things forward in dramatic ways. Every major social reform movement in American history was fueled, driven in part—not in whole, but in part—by religion and faith. I was asked the other day, How can secular progressives partner with religion progressives, given our differences? And I said, that's up to you, more than to us. I've partnered with secular progressives for years.
Farley: The values of secular humanism are strongly indebted to Christian values. They are part of the same Western tradition.
Wallis: But that's where I differentiate between people who are "secular"—that's not a very good word; I admit it's kind of loaded—and people who are "secular fundamentalists." There's nothing wrong with not being religious; some of my closest friends and colleagues have not been religious. But secular fundamentalism is different. That's a disdain for religion. An journalist said to me yesterday, We have an allergy to spirituality, and that's not helpful for us. And I said, No one is saying that to join the struggle for global poverty reduction you have to get converted first. None of us is saying that.
I talked to Jeff Sachs last week, who wrote this new book, The End of Poverty. Jeff is secular Jewish. But he is very excited about what's going on with God's Politics. Now he's brilliant; he's just very, very bright. He's Kofi Annan's advisor, Bono's advisor. And when he talks about global poverty, his first half is analysis. But whenever he moves into the moral imperative, his eyes begin to shine; he gets animated. I was at dinner with him and he spoke, and I said, "Jeff, no one's better at analysis than you are. But when you began talking about our response—our moral response—your eyes lit up, your face began to shine. That's your driving passion, not the analysis." I said to him, "What fires you is a moral agenda, not an analytical agenda." And he said, "You're right. That's what fires me, not the analytical agenda." That means that I trust his moral compass, and affirm it. Bono is clearly becoming more religious the more he engages world poverty and HIV/AIDS. He's coming back to his faith. He's an Irish Catholic kid, we call it backslidden, but he's come back to Jesus. He would probably say it's the encounter with suffering that's bringing him back to faith.
I know Bobby Kennedy's daughter Kathleen Townsend. She's got a new book coming out that's about her dad's religion. Bobby Kennedy was the most religious of the Kennedys. Well, maybe that's tied to his pilgrimages to Mississippi, Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York, the farm workers in the Delano fields of California. She thinks it was. So the common ground is the moral ground, the spiritual ground. For some of us it's religious. Others it's not.
In the book I talk about one of my best friends, Chuck Matthei, who died. He was one of my closest friends, but he wasn't Christian. He actual lived at The Worker for awhile and was close to Dorothy Day. He loved The Worker. At Chuck's funeral, I talked in my eulogy about E. Stanley Jones, who met Mahatma Gandhi as a missionary. He went to India to save the Indians, and he met this guy. He said he was more Christian, more Christlike than anybody he'd ever known in the church. And in my eulogy I said that, like Jones said of Gandhi, this man was more Christlike than most Christians I have known. He wasn't Christian, but he knew more about Jesus than most Christians do. So I just don't have this kind of dogmatic litmus test. I'm looking for what's most human.
Farley: You're a very unusual Evangelical, then, aren't you?
Wallis: Yes, but if Tony Campolo was sitting here, you know, the Evangelical Baptist, you'd find Tony saying the same thing. Brian McLaren, this young rising star in the Evangelical world, Brian would be saying the same thing. But the baggage, the cultural perception, is of a judgmental fundamentalism, which is true. The perception is based in some reality. What I'm saying is there is a whole different kind of Evangelical faith, that really wants to—I don't want to be pietistic, or trite or simplistic—but that really wants to ask What would Jesus do? What would Jesus say?
You know, Jesus survives the church, again and again. You go out in the street and you ask anybody, Christian, non-Christian, whatever, what did Jesus stand for? And people will tell you he cared about the poor, the outcast, the prostitutes, the vulnerable people. And he certainly wasn't for war; he was for peace. He was loving. He was compassionate. Everybody felt welcome. These are non-Christians, but Jesus somehow survives.
Farley: Jesus was the Sermon on the Mount, not the Ten Commandments.
Wallis: Yes. That's interesting. The Sermon on the Mount was critical for my conversion out of the movements: the anti-war movement, the Civil Rights movement. I read the sermon, and I thought, Oh, this is the most radical thing I've ever read. So, rather than having Ten Commandment monuments in courthouses, why not the Sermon the Mount?
Farley: Kurt Vonnegut wrote an excellent piece saying the same thing: why this obsession with the Ten Commandments? Wouldn't it make much more sense for Christians to obsess about the Sermon on the Mount? But this brings up another issue. Kurt Vonnegut is the archetypal cynic. And I loved your comments in the book about cynicism vs. hope. I liked that you didn't put cynics down.
Wallis: No, I'm very sympathetic to cynics. You know, last night there was an overflow crowd at the event, which says something about what's happening with this dialogue. But the kind of people who come to this kind of event, I think, are probably struggling with this: hope vs. cynicism. A word about the cynics: They're against all the bad stuff. They really are. They're against all the bad stuff. They don't agree with it. They think it's wrong. And maybe they tried to change it for awhile. They were out there, and they got tired, disappointed, disillusioned. But they were out there and nothing changed. And commitment makes you feel vulnerable. It just does. You say, I'm against it all, but I don't think it can change. So why am I out here, naked and vulnerable? I've got to pull back a little bit and look after my own security. They're still against it all. There are no rose colored glasses here. They don't say, Things are great. They just say, I don't think it can change. Commitment makes you feel vulnerable, so cynicism is a buffer against commitment. It's a safe place. A sanctuary. You can still be against the bad stuff. But you want to protect your own security. But hope is a decision you make.
Farley: As is faith, correct?
Wallis: It's a decision because of faith. Hope is a choice, a decision, not a feeling, a state of mind, or a personality trait. The Bible says, "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." I love that. Or my paraphrase of that is, Hope is believing in spite of the evidence, and watching the evidence change. To me this is very real. The reason I was at Nelson Mandela's inauguration is I was there for all the hard times. I snuck into the country to stand with a persecuted church. They were struggling and suffering. But they believed that day, that big party of Inauguration Day was possible long before it came to be. They saw through the eyes of faith that that day would come.
I remember when I got picked up at the airport by friends. We turned a corner and saw the South African security police. Now I've been interrogated by those guys, and they're scary. They're ugly. They're vicious. And I said, "Quick, get away, get away." And my South African friends said, "Oh, they're ours now." They're ours now! It was amazing. I've never seen history change in front of my face like that before.
Farley: It makes me think of the despair many are feeling today about the environment. The more you learn about the issue, and our refusal to take appropriate action, the more hopeless it seems. Unless you want to fall into complete despair, you need to find some way to believe we can turn things around.
Wallis: Yes, but look what happened three weeks ago. The National Association of Evangelicals released their statement and the environment was a part of it. The National Association of Evangelicals! It said global warming is a religious issue. So I choose to be hopeful, because I've seen how powerful hope rooted in faith can be.
| 
Don't Miss
