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Jesus to the Rescue?
Can a dose of Christianity stiffen the Democrats' spine, win back Kansas and bring people power to the anemic left? In the wake of the 2004 election, quite a few powerful liberals are wondering if they can frame their politics as "faith" the way the right has so effectively done. One of the people the Democrats have invited to tell them how to go about this is the evangelical Protestant activist Jim Wallis, a founder of the antipoverty group Call to Renewal and editor of the magazine Sojourners. Wallis, an early supporter of Bush's faith-based initiative, is on a roll. In late November he appeared with Al Sharpton, Jerry Falwell and the Rev. Richard Land on the notorious all-male "values" debate on Meet the Press. His new book, God's Politics, currently hovers at the top of the Amazon list....

...Wallis draws a sharp line between the God-on-our-side Christianity responsible for countless evils and the social-justice kind he favors. Yet the triumphalism and self-righteousness he condemns in the former crops up throughout God's Politics: "religion" and "faith" are usually synonyms for Christianity, and Christianity mostly means evangelical Protestantism. Evangelicals get most of the credit for everything good in US history, from women's suffrage to the civil rights movement. This would surprise skeptics like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who spent her life battling scriptural arguments for male supremacy, and the secular Jews and leftists who made up so much of the civil rights movement's white base. And what about the opponents of women's rights and racial integration? Weren't a lot of them evangelicals too? At times Wallis seems to be in a kind of denial: If it's wrong, it isn't truly evangelical, therefore evangelicalism is purely good. Today's robust evangelical right is the fault of--wait for it--"secular fundamentalists"! Blame it on the ACLU.

Wallis's God calls on Christians to fight racism, poverty, war and violence--what's wrong with mustering support for these worthy goals by presenting them in the language spoken by so many Americans? The trouble is, the other side does that too. You can find anything you want in the Bible--well, almost anything. Thus, the more insistently people bring Christianity into politics, the more political argument becomes a matter of Christian hermeneutics. Does God say gays should be executed or married? "Spare the rod" or "suffer the little children"? I don't see how we benefit as a society from translating politics into theology. We are left with the same debates, and a diminished range of ways in which to think about them. And, of course, a diminished number of voices--because if you're not a believer, you're out of the discussion. In this sense, Wallis's evangelicalism is as much a power play as Pat Robertson's.

And Wallis is as much a power player. By a remarkable act of providence, God's politics turn out to be curiously tailored to the current crisis of the Democratic Party. God, like many of the black, Hispanic, Catholic and working-class voters who voted for Bush in 2004, is an economic progressive and a family-values conservative. He doesn't like "pornography," divorce, abortion or gay marriage (civil unions are OK). It's interesting that in his earlier book The Soul of Politics Wallis cited numerous women theologians, while God's Politics mentions not one. Perhaps this is because the liberationist theologians he wrote about in The Soul of Politics are mostly very strong feminists who think women are capable of making moral decisions about childbearing and that abortion can be one such decision. Wallis constantly accuses "the left" of resisting "moral" arguments. I would say it is he who resists fully engaging moral arguments that differ from his own. ...