The Writer and the Christian

Nobody seems to be interested in dealing with the works of Jim Wallis, so I suppose it falls to me. Of course, part of the problem might be that almost no evangelicals have heard of Jim Wallis. You can try it at home. Next time you’re at church, ask anybody if they’ve heard of him. Most won’t have.

This means I now have to introduce Mr. Wallis. Socialist, progressive, liberal, social gospeler, unabashed fan of Ron Sider. The leading voice for the liberal “mainline evangelical” left. He has recently published two books on faith and politics, both of which I have read. He maintains he is a prophetic outsider to the established governmental mindset, and also assumes that speaking prophetically to our government means screeching for higher minimum wage laws, universal health care and the U.N. But more on that later.

I would like to take this time to go through Wallis’s most recent book, out this February (2008), called The Great Awakening, which, besides being mind-numbingly repetitive, is poorly written and was badly in need of an editor, though it is a far sight better than his 2005 book, God’s Politics.

Just to give us an idea of what Wallis is doing here, in print and everything, we can merely quote Jimmy Carter, who authored the foreword – undercutting for the first of many times the idea that Wallis is a prophetic outsider. Prophetic outsiders don’t know Jimmy Carter well enough to get him to author forewords. What, we may ask as interested Christians wanting to make a difference for Christ’s Kingdom, are the implications of Wallis’s ideological rants? What kind of effect would they have on America? Why, an increased “commitment to our multiple religious faiths,” (p. x). That’s what all the Old Testament prophets thought, surely.

The solution to America’s problems is “a way to tap the power of the revival of faith in order to inspire and encourage the secular social reforms that are espoused in all the great religions,” (p. x). Secular social reforms? I hardly think the announcement that “there is no King but Jesus” is very secular. It sounds as though Carter simply wants to use all of Lenin’s useful idiots to push the secular agenda through. It also sounds like he thinks there’s a great big group hug coming on. “This is the pathway described to us in this book.” (p. x).

Comforting.