c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Evangelical left leader Jim Wallis has hit The New York Times best-seller list and the national talk shows with his new book, “God’s Politics.” All this has triggered even more conversation about the role of religious values in American politics.

I met Wallis in the early 1990s when I worked at Evangelicals for Social Action, a progressive evangelical organization based in Philadelphia. Wallis, who heads the Sojourners community in Washington, often could be found at events where my boss, Ron Sider, also was present. Together with Tony Campolo and a handful of others, Wallis and Sider were the main leaders of the evangelical left as it struggled to find its voice in an era dominated by conservative Christian groups such as the Christian Coalition.

The arguments Wallis is now making are not new, either to him or to the evangelical left. What has changed is not the message, but the context. For the first time since the rise of the evangelical movement to prominence in American public life during the 1970s, the left wing of that movement is finally getting some serious media attention. The reason for this is the obvious fact that Republicans have captured the great majority of conservative evangelical voters, and have done so with appeals to both the substance and the symbols of religious and moral commitments.

Wallis is the most visible of those who seek to break the connection between evangelicalism and the Republican Party before it cements into an irreversible identification of interests and values. He also seeks to call Democrats back to the moral and even religious basis of many of their own cherished commitments.

The basic message of progressive evangelicals is that Christians must engage politics with a biblical vision as broad and deep and wide as the Bible’s moral vision itself. This means that we must be concerned about anything that God is concerned about, as this concern is revealed in Scripture.

Therefore, we must care about poverty, war, injustice, assaults on God’s creation, education, the aged, marriage, families, human rights and the sanctity of life. For three decades or more, progressive evangelicals have been saying that God is anti-poverty, anti-war, anti-injustice, and pro-environment, pro-marriage and pro-life, just to name a few of the most relevant issues.

In the face of this “divine platform,” the politics of both major political parties look dubious, at least in part. Republicans get some of the issues but miss others. Democrats get some but miss others. In some cases, neither major party seems to care much about issues that matter a lot in the Bible. If this is the case, thoughtful Christians should refrain from an easy identification of the convictions of their faith and the platform of either political party. Instead, they should bring a more fully biblical moral vision into public life and urge both parties to consider it seriously.

In recent years it has become clear that even the evangelical left vs. evangelical right distinction is not quite adequate. There is a quite large evangelical center that has done better at avoiding the errors of both the left and right wings. The left tends toward a quasi-pacifist rejection of all wars and a constant critique of American foreign policy. It can also sometimes go squishy on issues of sexual morality, especially homosexuality, as it is pulled to the left by its constituency and fellow-travelers. The right sometimes tends toward opposite extremes on those two issues, while demonstrating consistent blind spots related to environmental protection and economic justice.

The evangelical center, anchored in such magazines as Christianity Today, such organizations as the increasingly important National Association of Evangelicals and the vision of many churches of various denominations, offers the most promising direction for evangelicals today. As it attempts to articulate a thoroughly biblical vision of “God’s politics,” it has the potential to break through ideological and political boundaries and change our nation for the better.

(David P. Gushee is the Graves Professor of Moral Philosophy at Union University in Jackson, Tenn.)

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