by Jim Wallis

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review by Jacci Welling

HERE IN STARK COUNTY, Ohio, it was called the “Winerip effect”—that is, the media frenzy during the 2004 election season when scores of journalists from across America and abroad descended upon what New York Times reporter Michael Winerip had identified back in 1996 as “the bellwether county in the bellwether state.” The moniker is based on the fact that Canton, the county seat, and its surrounding communities have voted for the victor in presidential elections for the past century. (However, the roving reporters may not return to my hometown in 2008 because while George W. Bush won the election by a razor-thin margin in the nation and in Ohio, he did not carry Stark County.)

Jim Wallis's bestselling book, God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, suggests possible reasons for the sharp political divide within both Stark County and the nation at large. This book is for people of faith who believe that “moral values” should not be limited to abortion and homosexuality and that spirituality should still remain an integral part of the nation's political discourse. Indeed, Wallis offers a more expansive, alternative political model for Christians who care about the nation and the world.

Wallis, an evangelical who is editor of Sojourners and well known in politically Left Christian circles, argues that Republicans and the religious Right “got it wrong” because they define moral values too narrowly, focusing on sexual and cultural issues, while disregarding “weightier matters of justice” (3). On the other hand, he chides the Democrats and the political Left in general, who “don't get it,” for ignoring the role of faith in politics or deeming it irrelevant. These “secular fundamentalists,” as he calls them, fail to acknowledge that progressive religion informed and fueled the social reform movements in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, including abolitionism, women's suffrage, and the civil rights movement (4, 58). Invoking the memory of Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address, Wallis admonishes Christians on both sides of the political spectrum not to assume that God is on our side in the political arena, but to ask a more thoughtful and compelling question: Are we on God's side? (xiv).

In answering that question, Wallis suggests that we can abide by biblical teachings in our role as citizens if we abandon the prevailing forms of political posturing (conservative, liberal, and libertarian), which tend to polarize the electorate, and adopt a fourth option in public life—God's politics. He refers to this fourth alternative as “prophetic politics,” based on New Testament teachings and the example of Old Testament prophets, who did not merely foretell the future, he reminds us, but articulated “moral truth” (72-75).

The bulk of Wallis's book addresses three areas: international relations, economic justice, and social issues. He is particularly hard on George W. Bush (though he doesn't question the president's faith commitment) for inaugurating the war in Iraq, facilitating the widening gap between the rich and the poor in the United States and globally, and supporting disastrous free trade (as opposed to fair trade) policies. Admittedly liberal on most issues, Wallis opposes unilateral diplomacy, policies that further impoverish the economically disenfranchised, free trade, and capital punishment. He favors a forceful (yet international) response to terrorism, debt cancellation for poor nations, and a “consistent ethic of life” that values the sacredness of humans, whether unborn or on death row.

I liked this book a lot and recommend it for all believers, regardless of their political stripes. Of course, I share Wallis's views on most of the issues, so it is not a surprise that I would appreciate this volume. Nevertheless, I am to some extent troubled by its tone in a few places and am not sure how this book will help Wallis find “common ground” with Christians on the far right, even though he rightly notes that a number of conservative evangelicals are acknowledging that social justice is a matter of importance to people of faith.

Wallis writes that “humility is a good trait [and] self-righteousness is both spiritually inappropriate and politically self-defeating” (171). True enough. And Wallis practices what he preaches in the book, holding himself accountable and modifying some of his own positions. Yet, Wallis seems, at times, a bit elitist himself. Although he often mentions the “common folk” who have blessed him, Wallis drops a number of names of religious and political luminaries in such a way that underscores his own membership within a relatively elite circle of the powerful.

Most troubling to me was a section that recounted the fallout between Wallis and a well-known conservative Christian, now deceased, as a result of a Sojourners investigation in the 1970s. The person targeted in the investigation does not come off quite as well as Wallis, who initiated the reconciliation. While the episode offers a beautiful story of restoration between brothers in Christ, I think this should have remained personal and private. (Was mentioning the specific dollar amount of the man's donation to Wallis's ministry really necessary?)

Nevertheless, the flaws in the book are minimized when compared to the forthright and refreshing calling to Christians to act compassionately and biblically in public life. He encourages us to be hopeful, rather than cynical, during these troubling times, for Christians can change the world. “After all,” Wallis says in closing, “we are the ones we have been waiting for” (374).

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