Why Jim Wallis is Awesome

In my last blogpost I mentioned Jim Wallis, a nationally-renowned Evangelical Christian writer and badass extraordinaire. In this secular-obsessed nation of ours it become rarer and rarer we find open praise for such a great example of what a contemporary spiritual leader should be. So I’ve decided to write my own little praise for a great figure entitled “Why Jim Wallis is Awesome.”

You don’t have to read a past a few paragraphs his Wikipedia entry to get a note of how awesome he is from the get-go. Political activist, fighter for social justice, active in the actual civil rights movement, professor at Harvard, leader in the new evangelical Christian movement, this man just is just 180 pounds of sexy. I could take forever listing all the things that makes Jim Wallis awesome, but one of his best notes of accomplishment, with all due respect to Waillis, is what he is not.

Jim Wallis is NOT Jerry Falwell.

Why is this significant? The past decade or so has made it difficult to affiliate oneself with the term “religious” without quickly defending or defining what it means, and Jerry Falwell, along with others, is why.  Fundamentalist Christianity, or as Wallis describes it, a “defensive movement” against modernity, has been front and center thanks to its loudest and most controversial leaders. Unfortunately, over time these front-and-center people became not only the faces of Fundamentalist Christianity but the entire Religious Right…and eventually just the Religious.

It’s no wonder the Left was weary using religious language entering the new millennium. The 2000 and 2004 elections proved disastrous for the Democratic Party, and part of the reason was its reluctance to reach out to the religious populace. Yet Jim Wallis is one of the few that noticed that stripping religious affiliation from the Left allowed the Right to define Christianity however it wanted, and eventually dwindled it down to a few hot-button issues like sexual ethics, homosexuality and abortion. Then, instead of getting down to business on the kinds of issues that are relevant to Christian morals (Wallis notes eradicating poverty and finding peace as the highest priority) we get bogged down in legislation that is attempting to ban gay marriage and abortion.

But he doesn’t just stop there. Because pointing out the obvious propagandistic distractions of the current administration isn’t enough. He takes it down to language. Jim Wallis detests the labeling of the “religious Left” and “religious Right” with great reason:

“The best public contribution of religion is precisely not to be ideologically predictable or a loyal partisan. To always raise the moral issues of human rights, for example, will challenge both left and right-wing governments that put power above principles” (God’s Politics).

Oh yes, well said. Sure, he’s just trying to push forth his own religious agenda, but if the rewards are peace and social justice here on Earth, sign me up.

I conclude with a note that whatever your stance on Christianity, religion in general, poverty, abortion, etc, you have to admit Jim Wallis and the emerging army of contemporary religious leaders are a much-needed breath of fresh air to the American stage. One of many who can revive the spiritual heart of a progressive America, for those who want it. He also has a pretty cool blogsite, which you should visit.

And that is why Jim Wallis is awesome.

Christian Buzzwords and the Political Arena

Religion and Politics are that dysfunctional couple that bicker and argue so constantly in public no one believes they really belong together. But like most couples, their arguments are a matter of differing definitions on keywords and mean nothing above the foundation that holds them together. Really, these guys would be nothing without each other.

 

Jim Wallis argues that without a society without a moral ground leaves us “bereft of meaning and purpose in our social relationships, we lose all sense of the common good and our shared humanity, and the bonds of society themselves become so frayed that each individual feels forced to fend for themselves” (God’s Politics). Essentially, to progress as a society, we need to be led by a set of values, a common morality, a uniting purpose. Finding communities with a common set of values and purpose is pretty easy when joining a religion. The inclusive nature of mainstream religion is part of its appeal.

 

Yet when anyone jumps in the public political arena with a moral agenda and religious buzzwords, people freak out. There is a clear social stigma against religious intervention in politics – and with good reason.

 

 

Religious language is divisive, so the Clerical public intellectual is always viewed by his peers with a raised eyebrow. When it’s argued that abortion should be illegal because life begins at conception, or that shoving taxpayer money into localized welfare programs is “the right thing to do,” it’s easy to dismiss these views because they can easily be categorized as subjective. But when arguing ethical issues that involve morality and ethics, it’s not easy to use neutral scientific evidence to promote them.

 

Hence, clerics resort to using jargon they are comfortable with and end up alluding to vague and abstract concepts whose definitions are best identified to those within their special community. God. Morality. Values. Ethics. Righteousness. Justice. Right. Wrong.

 

Like this guy says:

 

…when terms of identity become the focus of intellectual practice within a religious community they give us tangible evidence of just how “special” our group is—and how unspecial, ungodlike, or un-American everybody else is.

 

After all, who are these sons-of-bitches to define morality for us? No one likes someone who claims to know the high ground in the name of some abstract concept they call “God.” We pretend to understand that religious followers live under a doctrine in which spreading a gospel is mandatory, yet we brush them off because the lack of secular language makes their arguments seem outdated and exclusive.

 

But the rest of us must do our part and understand that some arguments are always going to have allusions to the vague, the mysterious, the indefinable, the frightening. Along with asking others to cut their vocabulary, we must also expand ours to read between the lines of religious jargon and into the deeper, more common philosophies it carries.

 

Case in point: Rick Warren is awesome. He’s just one of the many famous Clerical leaders who understands that faith is a matter of building personal belief and politics is a matter of finding common values. Yet when he tells Larry King or Nightline he could never vote for an atheist president, people go batshit insane: 

 KING: Does a person have to believe in god to be president?

WARREN: I would say so. I couldn’t vote for a person who was an atheist, because I would think — I think the presidency is a job too big for one person. I would think there’s a little arrogance that says, I don’t need anybody else. I could vote for someone of different religions than mine, but I don’t know that I could personally vote for somebody who denies that we need somebody greater than ourselves to help us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rick Warren could not personally vote for somebody who does not believe in a power greater than him or herself. Let’s look into the philosophy of this for a minute. Platonic philosophy indicates that those in power should not be those who simply seek power (a selfish motive) but philosopher kings who seems something greater. The utopia, the ideal, “truth,” whatever, I fell asleep in class. Rick Warren clearly alludes to something similar (though not as articulately), that those in power should seek to serve a greater power, though subjective, like God, other people, truth, justice and so forth.

Yet many refused to intake this interpretation of it, and atheist communities everywhere lost it. For fuck’s sake, even Bill Maher gets it.

 

When looking past the buzzwords, chances are everyone can see a more secular philosophy to contemporary American religious ideas. In addition to asking everyone to seek a common language, the others cannot expect it to happen overnight. We must also learn to listen, because common ground can be found where we least expect it, even between the lines.