“Does God Take Sides? Author Argues Left and Right Do Poor Job Mixing Faith, Politics,”
God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It
Author: Jim Wallis
Publisher: HarperSanFrancisco
Pages: 384
Price: $24.95
Religion and politics have been uneasy neighbors since Adam and Eve’s children began founding civilizations. No one and no people have developed the one best way to mix religion and politics. Jim Wallis is the latest to try.
Wallis notes that Democrats want to restrict religion to the private sphere and are generally uncomfortable with the language of faith and values when applied to their own agenda. Republicans, he says, speak the language of faith and values with ease but want to narrowly restrict religion to a short-list of hot-button social issues and obstruct its application to other matters that might threaten their agenda.
Wallis is a self-professed evangelical, so it’s not surprising to learn that he believes God is neither a Republican nor a Democrat. Who’s really going to argue with that? What’s more interesting is to read his argument that God is neither pro-Right nor pro-Left, that God is neither Conservative nor Liberal. This catches your attention in the provocative sub-title of the book, and it’s a compelling point of view primarily because a lot of Christians, including those who accept the mantle of evangelicalism, have since at least the Johnson administration vigorously argued the righteousness of either the agenda of the Right or the Left. Wallis writes about another way, because he believes the best contribution of religion is not to be ideologically predictable or loyally partisan.
Wallis begins at the beginning with the nature of God and moves to his next point, the image of God found in every human being. He also argues that Jesus knows no national preferences and that the Church—the Body of Christ or the worldwide fellowship of believers—is international in character. He then chides the Left for ignoring the moral content of politics and tells them that “the best response to bad religion is better religion, not secularism.” He chides the Right for ignoring matters of social justice and tells them “God is always personal but never private.” And he tells them both that “the real question is not whether religious faith should influence a society and its politics but how.”
In Wallis’s view, the Right focuses so much on individual sexual ethics they miss broader biblically-based concerns for the poor, conserving the environment, racial reconciliation, or the necessity for waging peace. The Left, he observes, focuses so much on political correctness they miss broader biblically-based concerns for the moral character of a politician’s personal life, a consistent ethic of life, family values, or the reality of evil in the world.
For the first eighty-four pages of this book Wallis thoroughly and at times eloquently makes his case for a Christian perspective on politics devoid of ideological and partisan trappings. He spends the next three hundred pages applying his perspective in a manner that begs the question of whether Wallis is more frustrated with fellow Christians who tend to align with the Right than he is with citizens in general aligned with the Left.
Clearly, while Wallis expresses respect for President George W. Bush and the genuineness of his faith, the author parts company with the president on most issues other than a right to life, the need for strong families, and the necessity of sexual morality. Wallis writes at length about what he calls an unjust war in Iraq and the current administration’s lack of attention to the American poor.
Whether one agrees with Wallis’s policy pronouncements, this is a well-written and thought-provoking book. When it comes to justice in this world, how Americans use our considerable material blessings, what approach we take to stopping terrorism, how we respond to the increasing crudeness of our culture, or how we deploy American power, we are well-served to ponder “What would Jesus do?”
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Published as “Does God Take Sides? Author Argues Left and Right Do Poor Job Mixing Faith, Politics,” The Grand Rapids Press, (April 3, 2005), p. J5.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved
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