c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) There was a time, not so many election cycles ago, when popular wisdom said it wasn’t possible, in good conscience, to be a born-again Christian and a Democrat.

God was a Republican. Jesus was a member of the religious right. And all liberals were godless, anti-religious, baby-killing heathens.

Well, in the words of one left-leaning, sometimes-Jesus-follower, the times, they are a-changin’.

“They used to say that I was a `progressive evangelical’ and that it was a misnomer,” said Jim Wallis, the theologian/activist founder of the Washington, D.C.-based Sojourners/Call to Renewal. Wallis was in Philadelphia, where he’s promoting his new book, “The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America.” “It was a misnomer. Now, it’s a movement,” he said.

Praise the Lord.

For most of my life, I’ve been told _ sometimes explicitly and almost always implicitly _ that my faith and my politics don’t jibe. I was either a rebel in evangelical circles because of my “liberal politics,” or I was an outsider in political circles because of the “Jesus thing.” I felt like a believer without a country, or a progressive without a pilgrimage.

Wallis has heard much the same in the years since he helped found Sojourners, the progressive Christian social justice magazine that began publishing in Chicago in 1971. (Wallis and Sojourners moved their operation to Washington in 1975.) For three decades, Sojourners has been defining the social gospel as something more than a handful of hot-button issues championed by a few big, bellicose religious voices on the extreme right.

“A lot of people like you are saying, `Wait a minute! I’m a person of faith. I’m even an evangelical, and those people don’t represent me. I care about moral values, too, but not just two,”’ Wallis said.

Speaking across the country since his best-seller, “God’s Politics: A New Vision for Faith in America,” was published in 2005, Wallis has met many people who thought they were anomalies. If a Zogby poll last week, commissioned by the nonpartisan organization Faith in Public Life, is any indication, we’re not.

In Super Tuesday exit polls in Missouri and Tennessee, a third of Democratic voters said they were either evangelicals or born-again Christians. Another recent poll, by the evangelical Barna Group, found that 40 percent of born-again Christians would vote for a Democrat if the presidential election were held today.

This week, Wallis took his misnomer-movement to Park Street Church in Boston, the same house of worship where Charles Finney, father of the Second Great Awakening, preached in 1830. “The room was full of 600 20-something evangelicals,” Wallis said. “And history, you could feel, was repeating itself.

“Those young evangelicals really think that Jesus probably would care more about the 30,000 children who died today because of poverty and disease than he would have about gay marriage amendments in Ohio. This is a new generation of new abolitionists, you might say. And they are applying their faith, using their faith, addressing their faith to the challenges we face: the moral scandal of poverty; the degradation of the environment, which they call `God’s creation’; the threat of climate change; human rights; Darfur; pandemic of diseases like HIV/AIDS; war and peace issues _ the exclusive use of war to fight evil and the foreign policy disasters that has led us to. Their agenda is so much wider and deeper.”

We’re looking for a platform that defines what a pro-family agenda really is. (Neither party has one.) We want to look past litmus-test election-year posturing about criminalizing abortion to a plan that will actually reduce the abortion rate, a plan that realistically addresses teenage pregnancy, adoption reform and support for low-income mothers.

Most spiritual progressives don’t want a religious left that simply counters the religious right. We’re looking for something new, different, smart, nonpartisan, revolutionary.

We want to be part of a movement that recognizes spirituality is always independent.

And that faith is the ultimate swing vote.

(Cathleen Falsani is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and author of “The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People.”)

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