God’s politics or Jim’s politics?

Doug Bandow reviews Jim Wallis’ God’s Politics. He accuses Wallis of making the same error as the Religious Right, namely trying to read a political program straight out of the Bible (caveat: I still haven’t read GP, so I leave it to the reader to decide if Bandow fairly characterizes Wallis’ views):

WALLIS PRESENTS HIS VISION as a fourth option to conservatives, liberals, and libertarians. In his view it “follows from the prophetic religious tradition.” In sum, “it is traditional or conservative on issues of family values, sexual integrity, and personal responsibility, while being very progressive, populist, or even radical on issues like poverty and racial justice. It affirms good stewardship of the earth and its resources, supports gender equality, and is more internationally minded than nationalist.”

One can make good prudential policy arguments on behalf of all of these positions. But while God says much about people’s relationship to him and each other, he says very little about when people should coerce each other — that is, what government should do. And this failure to distinguish personal moral imperatives from prudential political concerns places him squarely where he does not want to be: standing between Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.

[…]

Still, Wallis deserves praise for his effort. Today’s political debate is impoverished since Christianity does not mandate conservatism. And a truly prophetic stance by the church would confront all citizens and politicians in their behaviors, attitudes, and policies.

But Wallis is better at issuing a challenge than providing an answer. He closes God’s Politics by arguing that “we are the ones we are waiting for.” The leaders are here. Yes we are. But the right religious-political synthesis has not yet arrived, at least in God’s Politics. Unfortunately, neither the Religious Right nor the Religious Left understands that God is nonpolitical as well as nonpartisan. Instead of giving us policies, he gives us wisdom so we can work together to develop good policies. Using that wisdom is our responsibility.

My hunch is that you simply can’t get by without some kind of political philosophy. Even if you want your politics to be “biblical,” you need some way of applying those principles to circumstances that are very different. Roman Catholics and magisterial Protestants may have an advantage here because they have richly developed traditions of political philosophy that go beyond biblical proof-texting.