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Jim Wallis tells a tired tale: the faith-based politics of a liberal activist are as suspect as Bush's
... As much as I admire the other-centered work of Jim Wallis--as a husband, father, community organizer and writer--I think he's wasting his time and energy arguing in his latest book that he has an inside line to the thinking of his God. "Here's the big news," he writes: "The politics of God calls all the rest of our politics into question.... Clearly, the politics of God is different from ours."

I'd be more accepting of Wallis' views if it weren't for the old saying, "Pay heed to those who seek God but watch out for those who say they've found him"--whether the finder is Bush, Wallis or whomever.

It's futile to mix politics and religion. Ask a dozen people, or a dozen dozen, to define either and no answer is the same. Politics is about perception: yours, mine and everyone else's, and all of it flavored with the subjective. Isn't religion, too, about perceptions--hunches that a God, or gods, exists. With more than 10,000 organized religions now in operation on a planet that Alfred North Whitehead called a third-rate rock spinning around a second-rate sun, we have little more than a jumble of hunches on what may or may not be divine. Does evidence exist that faith-based social justice is more productive than faithless-based?

I realize this is a secularist argument, and it should be. The first mistake of Wallis is to push the idea that public policy and personal theology can not only be compatible but can be mutually supportive--so long-as it's the policies and theological preferences backed by Wallis and not those of the Bush administration. Wallis labels Bush's foreign policy as "bordering on the idolatrous and blasphemous." True enough, except that's been true of every president, all of whom believed in military killing and violence to solve international conflicts.

Wallis's second mistake is to place his faith in government. What will it take for him and other conventional liberals to wake up and see that Tolstoy was right: "Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us"? Instead of fruitlessly hoping to shape up both the political right and the left--as in his book's subtitle, Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It--it might be better for Wallis to join those who oppose, resist and defy the militaristic U.S. government. How? Dozens of ways, from the public witness of the traditional peace churches--Quakers, Mennonites, the Brethren--to those engaged in war tax resistance, boycotts of products of antisocial corporations, civil disobedience, peace education, simple living, refusing jury duty and supporting those who have broken free from the stale notion that government can be reformed with just a little prayerful tinkering....