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The Morals of the Story
Does Jim Wallis' leftist, Bible-based book get it right?

...There are also good reasons for approaching Wallis' biblical vision with caution, reasons having primarily to do with the tendency of his evangelical Protestantism to use up all the oxygen in the room. God's Politics consistently engages in rhetorical slippages that will certainly be troubling to people outside of Wallis' Christian frame. "Religion," "spirituality," and "faith" are used throughout the book generically, but also synonymously with "gospel faith," "prophetic religion," and "Christianity." There are occasional token references to Jews (specifically Abraham Joshua Heschel, Sen. Joe Lieberman, and Michael Lerner), Islam (whose adherents are sometimes "Moslems" and sometimes "Muslims"), and a vague confraternity of "religious seekers."

Meanwhile, an important foundational layer of his argument requires the acceptance of a particular evangelical Protestant theological claim about the nature and character of God. Indeed, it is in the midst of this discussion that the "evangelical" character of the book shifts from the prophetic (calling to account) to the proselytizing (calling to conversion). Moreover, it is also in the midst of this discussion that "religion" morphs into what Wallis is really talking about: "the religion," that is, Christianity. If his intended audience is other evangelical Protestants, this elision is simply shorthand. If the audience is the rest of us, then we may have a problem.

For Wallis, religion is not one possible source among many for influential narratives of justice; the Bible is the source. (There is one place in the book where he speaks of "our biblical and other holy texts," but he doesn't elaborate or clarify the reference.) He does allow that the United States is a pluralist society and that it includes citizens who do not share his theology, his religious conviction, or his embrace of the Bible as Scripture. Moreover, he argues that Christians ought to engage in democratic public debate, to bring themselves under what he calls "democratic discipline," rather than attempting simply to take over the mechanisms of the state. Yet Wallis states again and again his overarching perspective: "The real question is not whether religious faith should influence a society and its politics, but how." Religious faith is no generic category here; it means biblical religion.

Even were one to concede that when Wallis uses the term "religion," he means it generically, the resulting mapping of both U.S. history and the contemporary political terrain is skewed. Wallis is correct to remind us that the civil rights movement drew much of its energy and vision from the black church and that Martin Luther King Jr. carried the U.S. Constitution in one hand and the Bible in the other. But the history of African-American resistance in the United States is not reducible to a narrative of Christian activism. One need only think of other iconic figures from those struggles—Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Paul Robeson, among others—to recognize that biblical religion was only a part of a rich and much more textured and complex picture that also included deep critiques of biblical religion as well as profound commitments to radical and secular political philosophies (particularly Marxism).

In another example of epochal political change, Wallis argues that evangelical Protestantism was the moving force behind many of the great social and political reforms in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including women's suffrage—a claim that would certainly surprise Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Alice Paul, among others. Religion did play a crucial role in first-wave feminism, but neither was it decisive for that movement (which also harbored a strong critique of hegemonic Christianity), nor were the forms of religiosity (including the embrace of practices like spiritualism) likely to conform to Wallis' definition of what counts as "true religion."

But what is more troubling is the degree to which Wallis frames "religion" as the sole source of a legitimate political vision for social change in the United States. Throughout the book, he argues that "vision" only emerges from religious conviction and that everything else is either cynicism or complaint. One result of this framing is that he cannot describe the current regime's program as being grounded in a "vision," though clearly the neocons who are running the show possess quite a thoroughgoing one. (It may be a revolutionary, even fascist vision—but it is a vision.)

Moreover, people without religious convictions or affiliations are largely reduced in Wallis' schema to complaining secularists with "no vision." He calls nonreligious people "secular fundamentalists" with "absolutist" views on the separation of church and state, or else he describes them as "withdrawing" from "moral lessons" and "depriving" Americans of important debate about ethical issues. Wallis goes so far as to hold secularist critiques of Christianity in particular and religion in general partially responsible for Christian fundamentalism's right-wing character. By framing forms of political expression such as protest and dissent as mere iterations of "the politics of complaint," Wallis marginalizes and ultimately dismisses any nonreligious perspective as merely ideological or partisan, claiming for religion all of the terrain of "the politics of hope."...