Jim Wallis: Unpartisan Liberal

As liberal democrats (I know. It's a tautology.) cast about for an authentic religious voice with which to persuade the red state voters that they're not all militant secularists eager to destroy everything that evangelical Christians hold dear, they have brought Jim Wallis of Sojourner's magazine to the nation's attention.

As a result he's been the topic of conversation recently in blogs and in journals like the The Weekly Standard. He's also been making appearances on television, most recently on Tim Russert's Face the Nation a week ago.

Jim Wallis presents himself as a man of neither the left nor the right but as one who desires simply to follow the scriptures. Yet, to listen to him speak he sounds for all the world as if he's a liberal first and a Christian second. Consider, for example, his responses on Face the Nation:

MR. RUSSERT: Reverend Jim Wallis, how do you see the Democrats, the Republicans, both of which you have written about, in terms of faith and spirituality and religion, approaching the Schiavo case?

JIM WALLIS: Well, first of all, our hearts go out this morning to Terri Schiavo and the family. It appears she's near the end of her life, and so deep compassion for the family, and all of us care so much about this.

Having dispensed with the necessary amenities, Wallis quickly heads for the fertile political territory Russert's question brought into view, and seeks to score political points by decrying the scoring of political points:

In principle we should always err on the side of life...that's the safer moral course, but we also should worry about the politicizing of any case, and I'm alarmed by memos that talk about firing up the base or defeating the Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of Florida. That's way out of bounds for a case like this.

I think the conversation about life is a good conversation. But then let's talk, as the Catholics do, about a consistent ethic of life. Today a silent tsunami will take the lives of 30,000 children because of hunger. Lives are lost in Iraq. On death row innocent people are executed. The bishops this week launched a new campaign against the death penalty. I think a consistent ethic of life is a good moral guide for politics and it cuts both ways, cuts Republican and Democratic. Religion should be able to critique left and right, not be ideologically predictable or loyally partisan.

Let's not talk about Schiavo, Wallis seems to be urging, since the Republicans were largely on the proper side of that one. Let's talk instead about those issues where we can be tacitly critical of Republicans even as we claim that as Christians we are not ideologically predictable(!), and let's at the same time disavow any intention of trying to score political points off the Schiavo tragedy.

Russert the reminded his audience that during the 2000 campaign candidate Bush was asked to name the political philosopher or thinker he most identifies with and why, to which he responded: "Christ, because he changed my heart."

When asked to elaborate, Bush replied: "Well, if they don't know, it's going to be hard to explain. When you turn your heart and your life over to Christ, when you accept Christ as the savior, it changes your heart. It changes your life. And that's what happened to me."

Russert then asked Wallis: "Can you imagine a Democrat responding in the same way?" Given a wonderful opportunity to amplify to a national secular audience George Bush's words about the importance and life-changing effect of a Christian commitment, Wallis quick-kicked, apparently unable to muster much enthusiasm for discussing the implications of Christian conversion on national television if it would make Bush look good:

REV. WALLIS: Well, there's no reason why [Democrats] shouldn't [answer the same way]. The part of that [Bush's answer] that I don't like was when he said, "And if people don't understand that, I'm sorry." As you know, I believe in bringing religious values into the public square. Where would we be if the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. kept his faith to himself? But, you know, religion must be disciplined by democracy. We have to argue on the basis of the common good, not say, "I'm religious, you won't understand, but I'm going to be talking Jesus."

Not only does Wallis misrepresent Bush's perfectly sensible concern that secular listeners might fail to understand the life-transforming power of the gospel if they haven't experienced it themselves, the rest of Wallis' answer is almost indecipherable:

Jesus talked about blessed are the peacemakers. Love your enemy. He talked about the poor over and over and over again. So I want to see the words of Jesus be part of our discourse. But we're a pluralist society now....so how do you argue on the basis of what's best for the common good to convince a very pluralistic nation that what we think is good for all of us, not just the Christians?

He seems to be saying that he doesn't want to talk about how Christ can change peoples' lives, he doesn't want to talk about a personal encounter with Christ, he prefers instead to talk about the corporate political obligations Christianity imposes upon one, and those obligations are evidently to adopt left-liberal social and foreign policies.

So much for being ideologically unpredictable and non-partisan.

Wallis may not mean this, but he certainly seems to imply that the value of employing the language of evangelical Christianity is that it can be used as a code to put the denizens of Jesus Land more at ease and make them more amenable to the left's political project. The value of God talk, Wallis seems to aver, is that it befuddles the unsophisticated into thinking that liberal democrats are really at one with the folks in the pew. It's a way of winning their trust, of deceiving them, actually, so that they won't be so resistant to liberal political candidates and ideology.

Maybe this is unfair to Wallis, maybe he was just clumsy in expressing himself on Russert's show. I would like to give him the benefit of the doubt, but a visit to the other sites linked above does nothing to reassure one that clumsiness is a satisfactory explanation for Wallis' apparent political partisanship.