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The Sunday Forum, February 24, 2008 Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America |
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Sunday Forums
Sunday Forum On-Demand:
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Sunday, February 24, 2008, 10–10:50 am Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America with Sojourners’ Jim Wallis
“The good news is that the dominance of the religious right over our politics and our religion is finally finished—over—in America,” Wallis pronounces simply. Better news, he says, is that “a new generation is stepping up, wants to make their voice and their faith heard, wants their faith to make a difference.” The new generation of the faithful, he asserts, is starting to address huge problems of poverty, environmental degradation, pandemic diseases, and “the exclusive use war to combat evil.” Wallis terms poverty the “new slavery.” He offers a shocking set of figures about people worldwide living in great privation and human trafficking, and those who perish daily from preventable and curable disease. Involvement to solve such problems is sometimes called “political”; many people of faith do not want politics to be drawn into the messages of the church, or into their own beliefs and actions. Wallis asserts that the Bible is inherently “political,” because it talks about justice.
“The religious right is being replaced by Jesus, and that’s progress,” Wallis says. He discusses one new term, “red-letter Christians,” now being used to describe people who seek to follow to Jesus’ teachings, independent of simplistic old political labels. Wallis cautions that Jesus’ teachings are not simple, and are not I’m OK, You’re OK. Wallis’s newest book is The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America. 
About the GuestJim Wallis is an internationally recognized author, activist, public theologian and founder of Sojourners, Christians for peace and justice. He is a sought-after commentator on the intersection of faith and public life, whose columns have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and many other publications. His most recent book is The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America. More about Jim Wallis: Jim Wallis is a bestselling author, public theologian, speaker, preacher, and international commentator on religion and public life, faith and politics. His latest book is The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America (HarperOne, 2008). His previous book, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It (Harper Collins, 2005), was on the New York Times bestseller list for 4 months. He is President and Chief Executive Officer of Sojourners; where he is editor-in-chief of Sojourners magazine, whose combined print and electronic media have a readership of more than 250,000 people. Wallis speaks at more than 200 events a year and his columns appear in major newspapers, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and both Time and Newsweek online. He regularly appears on radio and television, including shows like “Meet the Press,” the “Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” the “O’Reilly Factor,” and is a frequent guest on the news programs of CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and National Public Radio. He has taught at Harvard’s Divinity School and Kennedy School of Government on “Faith, Politics,s and Society.” He has written eight books, including: Faith Works, The Soul of Politics, Who Speaks for God?, and The Call to Conversion. Jim Wallis was raised in a Midwest evangelical family. As a teenager, his questioning of the racial segregation in his church and community led him to the black churches and neighborhoods of inner-city Detroit. He spent his student years involved in the civil rights and antiwar movements at Michigan State University. While at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Illinois, Jim and several other students started a small magazine and community with a Christian commitment to social justice which has now grown into a national faith-based organization. In 1979, Time magazine named Wallis one of the “50 Faces for America’s Future.” Jim lives in inner-city Washington, D.C. with his wife, Joy Carroll, one of the first women ordained in the Church of England and author of Beneath the Cassock: The Real-life Vicar of Dibley; and their sons, Luke (9) and Jack (4). He is a Little League baseball coach.
(also listed in Cathedral worship service leaflets) For more information, please contact Deryl Davis at (202) 537-6382 or e-mail ddavis@cathedral.org. |
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“Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right
America” is the topic of this discussion between Jim Wallis and
Cathedral Canon Howard Anderson.
As a teenager in Detroit, Wallis was troubled to observe racial
divisions and inequality in his city. One day an elder said, “Jim,
you have to understand Christianity has nothing to do with racism.
That’s political. And our faith is personal.” The experience
gradually drove Wallis away from the church for a time. Today his
reaction to that elder’s mentality is, “God is personal but never
private, because the biblical prophets deal with—well, look at their
audience. They’re talking to kings, rulers, employers, judges, princes.
They’re talking on behalf of widows, orphans, workers, those left out
and left behind. They’re talking about land, labor, and capital: the
stuff of politics. Our faith is personal, but it explodes into the world
with public consequences.” 
Americans, according to Wallis, are yearning for a “moral
center:” “Don’t go left, don’t go right, go deeper.”
Left and right, he asserts, are merely broad ideological and political
categories that thrive on simplistic argument but do not point to
solutions.