Last night I had a chance to go hear Jim Wallis of Sojourners give a talk on his new book God’s Politics. He was at the University of Pennsylvania bookstore as a stop on his book tour and it drew quite a crowd.
Wallis was a very good speaker – charismatic, warm and funny (I had expected a kind of super-earnest liberal, so the humor was a surprise to me). I was even moved to pick up a copy of his book (signed!).
A basic statement of Wallis’ position is here – he wants to move the national conversation beyond “religious right” and “secular left” and broaden the language of “moral values” and spirituality to encompass issues like poverty, concern for the environment and war & peace.
One questioner asked Wallis about his commitment to the separation of church and state, and I thought he gave a very good answer. Basically, he said, we all enter the public square as partners in a conversation who are trying to persuade our fellow citizens of the correctness of our views. We are not imposing, but proposing our views for consideration and adoption via the democratic process.
Something that remains unclear to me (and maybe this will become clearer as I read Wallis’ book) is to what extent he is proposing a distinctively Christian political stance rather than re-casting traditional liberal/progressive politics in Christian language. Or perhaps trying to transform liberalism in a more communitarian direction. That is what statements like this suggest: “The answer is to put values at the center of political discourse and, in every public debate, ask what kind of country and people we really want to be.”
To talk about “what kind of people we want to be” is anathema to orthodox liberalism (in both its Lockean-libertarian and Rawlsian-welfare statist forms) which insists that such questions must be bracketed as far as public authority is concerned. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of reception Wallis’ vision gets.
A Thinking Reed 
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