[Ohio] Top ministers unite on poverty fight, split on war

from The Dayton Daily News

Town meeting bolsters role of religion in politics

By William Hershey

COLUMBUS | Two evangelical Christian leaders, one identified with the political right and the other with the left, agreed Sunday that they are called to fight poverty but clashed on the United States' decision to go to war in Iraq.

The Rev. Russell Johnson of Lancaster, a conservative leading a statewide effort to register voters, and Jim Wallis, a nationally recognized progressive evangelical, spent 90 minutes in a historic town meeting that emphasized the importance of religion as a backdrop to politics in Ohio and across the nation. Organizers estimated the crowd at 700.

Wallis, founder of the Washington, D.C.-based Sojourners, a ministry that tries to integrate spiritual renewal and social justice, said there are 2,000 references in the Bible to poor people and said, "Poverty is a moral value issue."

"We could do better in addressing the issue of poverty," said Johnson, senior pastor of the Fairfield Christian Church and chairman of the Ohio Restoration Project, the statewide voter registration effort. He added, however, that churches could do better than a wasteful federal government. "It doesn't take four dollars to give one dollar away," he said.

Wallis, who invited Johnson to the session, said that he had opposed Saddam Hussein years ago when the American government was allied with him, but that going to war was wrong.

"I believe we could have removed Saddam Hussein from power without bombing the children of Baghdad," said Wallis, author of the book God's Politics.

Johnson said that the United States was trying to install a democracy in the Middle East and blamed reporters for distorted reporting that made the war difficult for American troops.

"I would call on the media to treat our president with more respect than they do Saddam Hussein," he said earlier in the program.