Young people have broader agenda for change now
America's faith community has become disillusioned with the religious right and is looking for leaders who will address a new, broader political agenda, said the Rev. Jim Wallis.
"The issues that the faith community wants to see on the agenda are about poverty and health care and war and peace," Mr. Wallis said in an interview this week.
"The Bush Administration was the administration of the religious right, and between Iraq and Katrina and so many other disasters, people lost confidence in this administration," he said.
"There's a new generation making itself known now, and they care about the environment, about HIV and AIDS, about foreign policy, about health care," Mr. Wallis said. "You have a new generation making itself felt, and the religious right has been replaced by Jesus, and that's progress as far as I'm concerned."
Mr. Wallis, 59, has written eight books, including the 2005 bestseller, God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, and takes a critical look at the moral state of America in The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America, recently published by HarperOne.
"In God's Politics, I said our faith has been hijacked and we're going to take it back. This new book is about the great awakenings of the past. When faith comes alive, revival occurs and we see changes in society - the abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, civil rights. That may be happening again," he said.
Mr. Wallis said there are more than 2,000 verses in the Bible that deal with poverty, while only 12 Scriptures address homosexuality.
"It's unbiblical to ignore the poor," he said. "Right now young evangelicals think Jesus probably cares more about those 35,000 kids that died today globally because of poverty and disease than he cares about whether two gay adults want to get married."
It's not that people of faith don't care about the sanctity of human life, one of the key issues addressed by the religious right, Mr. Wallis said. But the concerns about human life are not limited to the issue of abortion.
"I think it includes the genocide in Darfur. The agenda is much broader and deeper and nonpartisan than it was before," he said.
Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister whose run for the White House came to a halt this week, is a politician who addressed the concerns of the new generation of Christians, according to Mr. Wallis.
"The religious right didn't support him but the grass-roots evangelicals did. That's why he rose so far. He had no money, no campaign structure. But he reflected the broader agenda I'm talking about. He attacked the right for those views. He defended undocumented people. I think he did very well given what he was up against.
"In the end, the grass-roots evangelicals saw that he didn't have enough votes to win and they went elsewhere. But as he said, 'I've gone further than anybody with a staff this small has ever gone.'•"
Mr. Wallis said one of the first steps Americans need to take to help eliminate poverty is to provide health care for the poor.
"There are 47 million Americans who don't have any health care and that's not right," he said. "And there are 9 million American families that have someone working full-time in their house and they're still poor. We need to make work work. It should pay to go to work."
Before any significant changes will take place, however, the nation's leaders must truly have compassion for the poor, he said.
"There is a lack of priority for the poor. We saw this in the wake of Katrina. People who were left behind were those who were already left out. How do we make the poor a priority? I think that's happening now in the Christian community, more than ever before," Mr. Wallis said.
He said one obstacle to enacting change is that people in leadership roles are isolated from the nation's poor.
"Most lawmakers - Republican or Democratic, conservative or liberal - don't know any poor people. Many church people don't know any poor people either," he said.
Tackling poverty on a global level will require fair trade and forgiveness of debt, Mr. Wallis said.
"We're making progress there, but there has to be more aid and smart aid," he said.
Countries that receive American aid must be transparent and show that the money or goods are being put to use as planned.
"We need less corruption on the recipients' side and more generosity on our side," Mr. Wallis said.
Regarding immigration, he said the United States must find a balance between being a nation of laws and a compassionate people.
"Putting up walls and ripping families apart, separating parents and children, is not a fair system," he said. "We need to find a path for earned citizenship."
Mr. Wallis is a graduate of Michigan State University, where he was president of Students for a Democratic Society and involved in civil rights and anti-war movements.
He attended Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Illinois, where he and other seminarians started the magazine and community called Sojourners.
A frequent commentator on TV news and the Internet (www.GodsPolitics.com and www.sojo.net), Mr. Wallis lives in inner-city Washington with his wife, Joy Carroll, one of the first women ordained in the Church of England, and their sons, Luke, 9, and Jack, 4.
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