The amazing true story of the liberal evangelical

Like any preacher worth his salt, Jim Wallis, the self-described "progressive evangelical" leader and editor of Sojourners magazine who has lately been discovered by Democrats in Washington desperate to learn the language of "moral values," likes to tell a story to drive a point home.

In his new book, "God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It" (HarperSanFrancisco), just published this week and currently sitting at #2 on Amazon.com, Wallis recalls speaking to "a group of Boston's best and brightest Left/liberal intelligentsia" gathered in "a large living room" a few blocks off Harvard Square. Wallis, a Washington insider who has consulted both the Clinton and Bush administrations on antipoverty policy and who led a peace delegation of American religious leaders to meet with Tony Blair on the eve of the Iraq war, thought he'd given a pretty good talk on the topic of religion and public life – until he got his first question.

"But Jim, what about the Inquisition?"

"I said, 'Well, I was against it at the time. And I'm still opposed to it!' " Wallis writes with characteristic vigor. "Then I challenged him, 'Unless you want me to raise the specter of the Communist butcher Pol Pot and his brutal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia every time you talk about the need for a comprehensive national health plan, why don't we move on to a better discussion?"'

Wallis's point is about more than straw men. He uses the story to launch into a passionate critique of "secular fundamentalists" who attack politicians or public officials "who dare to speak from their religious convictions." That point of view, Wallis said this week in an interview, "has too much influence in the Democratic Party" – to the detriment of its electoral success. Such secularists, he writes in "God's Politics," "display an amazing lapse of historical memory when they suggest that religious language in politics is contrary to the 'American ideal."'

Indeed, Wallis calls himself "a 19th-century evangelical" who was born in the wrong century. Raised in a conservative evangelical family in Detroit, he got involved in the civil rights and antiwar movements in the 1960s and cofounded the Sojourners Community, a group of evangelical seminary students "committed to social justice and peace," in the early '70s. In his book, Wallis appeals to a tradition that "combined revivalism with social reform," arguing that "many of the most progressive social movements in American history – anti-slavery, women's suffrage, the fight for child labor laws, and the civil rights movement – had overt religious roots and motivations."

But don't peg Wallis as a leader of the so-called "religious left," as The New York Times did last week in the headline of a story about congressional Democrats seeking Wallis's advice at the start of the new session. He rejects the term, partly because, as he points out, he's more conservative than liberal on issues like abortion, marriage, and the traditional family. But also because the label is distracting, even defeating.

"The most popular presentations of religion in our time (especially in the media) almost completely ignore the biblical vision of social justice and, even worse, dismiss such concerns as merely 'left wing,' " he writes in the new book. Wallis wants not just Democrats but the whole country to move beyond the politics of "right" and "left." "Neither religious nor secular fundamentalism can save us," he writes, "but a new spiritual revival that ignites deep social conscience could transform our society."

Wallis claims that the stirrings of such a revival can be seen today in a new generation of young progressive Christians – including evangelicals, Catholics, and mainline Protestants – and those of other faiths who are as (or more) concerned about global and domestic poverty, and issues of war and peace, as about abortion and marriage and other issues associated with social conservatives.

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But not all Democrats – nor, to say the least, all evangelicals – are ready to sing from Wallis's hymn book.

"Democrats must not abandon vigilance in keeping separate church and state," says Robert Reich, the former labor secretary and Democratic candidate for Massachusetts governor who teaches at Brandeis. "That wall is important, both for insuring the freedom of religion, but also for making sure that religions don't get infected by politics." Meanwhile, those who study American religion and politics are split as to whether Wallis's claim of a nascent movement among progressive evangelicals holds water.

Alan Wolfe, a sociologist and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, does see "a slow but unstoppable movement to put social justice higher up in the scale of values that evangelicals adhere to." Nevertheless, Wolfe adds, "there's not much of a constituency in the country that could be called a religious left."

Christian Smith, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has written extensively about political and cultural attitudes among evangelicals, doesn't see any movement at all. "I personally do not see any 'new generation' of activists," he said in an email. "That sounds more like political mobilizing rhetoric than reality."

But John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron (and a Republican) whose polling research on political attitudes in religious America is widely cited, thinks Wallis is on to something. "If you look at the evangelical community," Green says, "it's rather more diverse than it might at first appear. . . . Religiously and politically, it's not monolithic at all."

For example, he says, "If you look at our data . . . there are lot of these people in the middle." These centrists, according to Green, are "very comfortable with the mainstream beliefs of their traditions, but they're very open to this progressive agenda. So there are a lot of folks who are open to persuasion on the kinds of issues that Jim is pushing."

I reached Wallis by phone last Monday at his home in Washington's Columbia Heights neighborhood. Fittingly, Wallis noted, it was the Martin Luther King holiday. As he writes in "God's Politics," "No one in American history ever linked religion and politics better (or more prophetically, democratically, and inclusively) than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr."

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IDEAS: You're an evangelical but not a fundamentalist. Do you think most people understand the difference?

WALLIS: No, I think they don't, because the fundamentalists, like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, have claimed the term evangelical as their own, and they want to say that they speak for all evangelicals. Now, anybody who's in the evangelical world knows that isn't true. . . . There's a new generation of young Christian activists, including evangelicals and Catholics both, who really don't fit into these old categories.

IDEAS: What makes Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell a fundamentalist but not you?

WALLIS: Well, there's a whole history there. Fundamentalism exists not just in Christian faith, but in Islam and Judaism too. And often, there are a number of major mistakes they make. They go for power. They want to take over and then legislate their religious agenda. And they also are . . . attracted to the use of violence for their cause – whether it be terrorism on one hand or unilateral preemptive wars on the other. I would love to see fundamentalists pay more attention to Jesus. You know, how did Jesus become pro-rich, pro-war, and only pro-American?

IDEAS: Do you think that George W. Bush is a fundamentalist?

WALLIS: You know, I tend not to throw labels at people. . . . I don't quibble with his personal faith. He's a person I've talked to enough, in meetings and even in a couple of conversations that the two of us have had, that I think his faith is real. Where I disagree with George Bush is in his theology. I think that George Bush's God is a God of charity, and the Bible presents a God of justice, in terms of issues of poverty and economic justice. . . . I say budgets are moral documents. They reveal the priorities and values of a family, a church, a nation.

IDEAS: You say that "the religious right has failed," that its historical moment has passed. That's going to sound counterintuitive to a lot of people.

WALLIS: Certainly they have had a real influence in this administration. But I do think that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are figures of declining influence in American life. . . . Religion simply doesn't fit neatly in the categories of left and right, liberal and conservative. Religion is at its best when it's not ideologically predictable or loyally partisan.

Martin Luther King said, "The church" – today we'd say religion – "is not meant to be the master of the state, nor the servant of the state, but is meant to be the conscience of the state." Now that means we don't just grab the levers of power and force our agenda. I think the religious right makes that mistake again and again. James Dobson thinks he has veto power over American policy.

But neither are we the servant of the state, meaning we just clean up the mess of bad social policy, provide good social services. We're also the prophetic voice. That's what King meant. . . . Let's have a real, deep, rich conversation about moral values. If we do, it'll cut both left and right.

IDEAS: Someone could say, "Well, don't you have a 'religious agenda?' And don't you want the government to enforce it?"

WALLIS: That's a good question. . . . Religion must be disciplined by democracy. It is . ne to say, "My convictions are derived from my moral values, even in part from my religious faith." But then you've got to make an argument for the common good, you've got to persuade your fellow citizens that this is best for the country, that these are good things for all of us.

IDEAS: You use some pretty strong language to criticize President Bush's record, and the Republican Congress. How do you avoid being seen as just another partisan?

WALLIS: I think the prophets are much tougher in their language than I am on these questions. . . . say things like, "If the prophets Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah would've seen how the Senate stole a child tax credit from low-income working parents, they would have gone to the White House lawn and declared the judgment and justice of God." . . . I will say that a budget that results in windfalls for the wealthy, while the poor bear the brunt of deficit reduction and fiscal responsibility, is unbiblical. I'll just say that as an evangelical.

IDEAS: You complain that the media like to say, Oh, then you must be the religious left." You don't like that formulation. Why not?

WALLIS: When you say you care about the poor, or want to protect the environment, or challenge a nation's decision to go to war, they say you're "left-wing" – even though those convictions come right out of the Bible. I care about poverty because the Bible requires an evangelical Christian like me to care about poverty.

Now, there are other issues where I dissent from the left pretty strongly. I talk a whole lot about the importance of family and marriage, and the breakdown of family life being a critical issue – especially for poverty. Now, I don't blame gays and lesbians for the breakdown of the family. once got [Dobson's] Focus on the Family to admit that it's [happening] because of heterosexual dysfunction. You can be pro-family and pro-gays and gay rights at the same time.

And abortion is a serious moral issue, and pro-life and pro-choice must come together to try to dramatically reduce this terrible abortion rate by focusing on teenage pregnancy and adoption reform, and supporting lower-income women economically. There is so much that we can do for solutions, not just symbolic litmus tests on the right and the left.

IDEAS: The title of your book is "God's Politics." Someone might ask, "Whose God are you talking about? How does American pluralism fit into your vision?"

WALLIS: Well, I'm speaking out of my own tradition. The thrust of my argument is from the Bible, from scriptures that are Jewish and Christian, the prophets. But religious people should be the first to say that religion does not have a monopoly on morality. Never has, never will.

I want to talk in a way that says, "Here's who I am, where I'm coming from." Martin Luther King did that. King was clear, quoting the prophets and Jesus, who he was, but he made it an open conversation. Everybody was welcome to a moral discussion about politics. We live in a pluralistic democracy. That means you don't win because you're religious – or you shouldn't – you win because you've got the best argument.

Wen Stephenson is the deputy editor of Ideas. Email wstephenson@globe.com.