by Beck, Glenn
“The president and Congress are engaged in an intense debate over the national budget,” Wallis announced after his pilgrimage to the White House, “with an upcoming vote on raising our national debt ceiling being used as a tool in a political and ideological battle. Programs for the poor and vulnerable are caught in the middle. But risking our social safety net for political advantage isn’t just irresponsible—it’s immoral.”
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Practice What You Preach
Just four months before calling Republicans “bullies” and “corrupt,” Wallis coauthored an op-ed titled “Conviction and Civility.” He wrote: “[W]e, as leaders in the faith community, affirm with one voice our principled commitment to civil discourse in our nation’s public life.”
I hope his fast lasted longer than his affirmation.
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It’s amazing how that word immoral keeps popping up, isn’t it? Religious Leftists typically don’t ever like to be judgmental or denounce “immorality” except, of course, when condemning those who don’t believe that the Welfare State is the answer.
Wallis and his religious allies at the White House profess to speak for “real people who are struggling, some of whom are poor; families, children, and the elderly.” But for the materialistic Religious Left, only government entitlements and taxes seem to qualify as true Christian charity. Religious Leftists don’t usually fret over working families oppressed by high taxes, entrepreneurs fighting to navigate waves of regulations to create new businesses, or the chronically unemployed who prefer jobs over welfare. Americans of any economic bracket who believe in personal liberty and responsibility evidently don’t qualify for Wallis’s “Circle of Protection.”
THE CIRCLE MEETS THE OVAL
In July 2011, prior to a meeting with lawmakers about the budget, President Obama spent forty minutes meeting with a group of “Christian leaders” to, as one paper put it, “seek their advice and ask them to pray for him.” Those leaders were, of course, the Leftist “Circle of Protection” group headed by Jim Wallis.
After the meeting with Obama, Galen Carey, of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), gushed about the president to reporters, saying, “He agrees with us that the ‘least of these’ and the most vulnerable citizens should not have to sacrifice for the well-being of our country.” Obama must have appreciated the support from envoys claiming to represent tens of millions of American Christians. But how many churchgoers actually believe their churches should always bless an unlimited Welfare State?
Wallis’s White House religious summit recalled a strikingly similar political photo op by the once important National Council of Churches (NCC) with President Clinton in 1995. Back then, churchmen and women joined hands with Clinton in the Oval Office and prayed he would be “strong for the task” of resisting the newly elected Republican Congress and their evil cutting ways. Foreshadowing Wallis sixteen years later, the NCC even touted Holy Week protest “fasts” between Palm Sunday and Easter.
There is, however, one big difference between the 1995 and 2011 White House stunts. Back in the 1990s evangelical groups like the NAE abstained from the NCC’s embarrassing political exploitation of the passion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But now, thanks in large part to persuasion by Wallis and others, many evangelical elites now want to follow old, discredited Religious Left groups like the NCC into eventual irrelevance by confusing God’s Kingdom with the Welfare and Regulatory State.
Other Christian leaders (who were not invited to the White House during the debt ceiling crisis) weren’t all that happy that Wallis and his “Circle of Protection” were claiming to speak for all Christians. The group Christians for a Sustainable Economy (CASE), which includes prominent evangelicals such as Chuck Colson of Prison Fellowship and Southern Baptist leader Richard Land, countered Wallis in their own letter to President Obama.
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Cut Spending . . . Except the Stuff I Like
Carey also told reporters that government officials have a “spiritual and moral” responsibility to reel in government spending. “I talked about the importance of fiscal responsibility, which the president articulated very clearly, so we’re with him on that,” he said.
Just three months earlier, the Circle of Protection had issued its own statement that echoed those tones. “As Christian leaders,” the statement read, “we are committed to fiscal responsibility and shared sacrifice.”
So, let’s get this straight: According to the Religious Left (or “Christian leaders,” if you want to play their word games), which is now somehow running our budget and dictating our morality, we need to be “fiscally responsible” but we can’t really cut any social programs. So that leaves tax increases (on the wealthy only, obviously) and, let me take a wild guess: cuts in defense spending? If so, the “Circle of Protection” sounds like they have a lot in common with run-of-the-mill progressives. They should get together sometime.
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“Just as we should not balance the budget ‘on the backs of the poor,’” they wrote, “so we should not balance the budget on the backs of our children and grandchildren.” Warning against the evils of “stagnant economy and the enslaving power of debt,” and clearly taking a shot directly at Wallis, they declared, “To the question, ‘What would Jesus cut?’ we add the question, ‘Whom would Jesus indebt?’ The Good Samaritan did not use a government credit card.”
PAST IS PROLOGUE?
Jim Wallis does not have the kind of past that you might expect from someone who considers himself to be a mainstream religious leader. In the 1960s he had been a strident agitator in Students for a Democratic Society. In the 1970s he gushed over the Viet Cong and the Sandinistas and saluted the accomplishments of Fidel Castro. In the 1980s, under the dreaded President Ronald Reagan, he urged neutrality between America and the Soviet Union, explaining: “We must refuse to take sides in this horrible and deadly hypocrisy,” since a “totalitarian spirit fuels the engines of both Wall Street and the Kremlin.”
By the mid-1990s Wallis had founded “Call to Renewal,” an annual interfaith jamboree for liberal activists. It professed a “third-way” transcending ideology but, more predictably, it bashed America, capitalism, and religious conservatives while equating true faith with old-style class warfare.
The “Call” originally featured politically inconsequential, old Religious Left fixtures like the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop and officials of the National Council of Churches, along with aging “Social Gospel” Catholics. One early stunt was a protest of “Call” activists inside the U.S. Capitol Rotunda to protest Republicans’ “Contract with America.” But nothing seemed to be breaking through. The “morning zoo” type stunts were doing nothing to reach the mainstream of America, and without those voters, his real agenda had no shot.
So, he changed tactics.
Wallis realized that more softly appealing to churchgoers, especially suburban evangelicals, was much more politically viable. That shift in strategy was pretty evident in his actions. When denouncing President Clinton’s endorsement of welfare reform in 1996 as a “great national sin,” Wallis, in an obvious precursor to the “What Would Jesus Cut?” campaign of 2011, said that Jesus would be demonstrating outside the White House against welfare reform. He complained that “[b]y sacrificing hundreds of thousands of poor children to his bid for reelection, Bill Clinton failed the most serious test of his presidency. . . . We’re now about to experience a hurricane of human suffering.”
It was vintage Wallis—a direct plea to yuppies and middle-class families on behalf of America’s most vulnerable.
The problem for his message was that the hurricane never came. Soup kitchens were not deluged, Depression-era bread lines did not return. Welfare reform, in fact, was widely considered to be a success.
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According to Jim
“The truth is that most of the important movements for social change in America have been fueled by religion—progressive religion.
. . . As the religious Right loses influence, nothing could be better for the health of both church and society than a return of the moral center that anchors our nation in a common humanity.”
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When challenged on his old rhetoric and stances, Wallis is careful. In a 2010 debate with American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks at evangelical Wheaton College, Wallis somewhat sheepishly insisted that the welfare reform of 1996 was “inadequate” but was helped by the “good economy” of the 1990s. “So I still don’t think that welfare reform, though the right direction, had in it . . . things that really would have helped people move out of poverty, and not just off the welfare rolls.”
Whether Wallis admits it or not, the success of welfare reform (backed by a Democrat, no less) ultimately persuaded Wallis by the late 1990s that he had to shift to the center, at least in imagery and rhetoric. So, when George W. Bush took the Oval Office, Wallis was initially half friendly to the new president. He embraced Bush’s faith-based initiatives and featured that program’s first chief, John Dilulio, to speak at a Call rally. In a 2001 interview, Wallis said he found it “encouraging” that the Bush administration was listening to the “faith community” about poverty. “My hope is that we will have a partnership,” he said.
It wasn’t long after the inauguration that Wallis was part of a clergy group that met with Bush to talk about inner-city ministry, an issue that fit neatly with Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.” With his typical flair for self-promotion, Wallis reported his Bush meeting in seemingly any newspaper that would publish him. In a 2001 Washington Post op-ed, he proclaimed that he was pleased the new president was “reaching well beyond his base of conservative Evangelicals.” In a New York Times op-ed, he wrote, “I didn’t vote for President Bush, but I welcome the new White House office that will coordinate ‘faith-based and community initiatives.’” In a Washington Times column, he opined: “I think many of us in the churches are inclined to give Mr. Bush a chance.”
In 2001, Wallis contrasted the Bush administration with the Clinton administration, which he said was “very solicitous” of religious groups like Sojourners and the Call but failed to offer “much content.” Both Clintons had sent Wallis notes and invited him to White House prayer breakfasts, he recalled, but he wanted more than photo ops. Bill Clinton “had no space for critical dialogue” and “no moral compass,” Wallis lamented, saying the White House circulated an internal memo cutting him off from further contact after he had publicly condemned welfare reform.
In 2010, World magazine revealed that George Soros, himself indifferent to religion but a key player in the rise of the Evangelical Left, had funded Wallis with $200,000 in 2004, $25,000 in 2006, $100,000 in 2007, and $150,000 in 2011 through his foundation. While it’s probably unfair to exclusively credit the Soros funding, Wallis’s soft heart for the Bush administration did not last.
Initially restrained about the U.S. military response after 9/11, Wallis, a pacifist (despite his enthusiasm in earlier years for Marxist revolution in Southeast Asia and Central America), became more critical while still trying to avoid the hard-left rhetoric of his earlier days. He also began to urge white evangelicals, nearly 80 percent of whom voted for Bush in 2004, to make issues like poverty, the environment, and peace their priority over things like abortion and same-sex marriage—a shift that would obviously push them toward the left.
“[America is] not a Christian nation. It’s never been a Christian nation. . . . That’s bad theology. Just bad theology.”
—Jim Wallis
Despite Wallis’s efforts, white evangelicals still voted overwhelmingly for John McCain in 2008—but a larger minority of younger evangelicals did vote Democratic. And Wallis’s activism coincided with a growing Evangelical Left elite on Christian college and seminary campuses.
By 2009, everything had changed. Not just for the country, but for Wallis himself. “My prayers for decades have been answered in this minute,” Wallis breathlessly announced after Obama’s 2009 inauguration, boasting of his multiyear friendship with the president. “We’ve been talking faith and politics for a long time.”
Wallis seemed to have access to the administration right from the start. “This White House wants our advice,” he rejoiced in early 2009. “Leaders from the faith community have been virtually inhabiting the offices of the Transition Team over the last weeks, with our advice being sought on global and domestic poverty, human rights, criminal justice, torture, faith-based offices, foreign policy, Gaza and the Middle East. A staffer joked one day, ‘We should have just gotten all of you bunks here.’”
The imagery of Wallis’s devoted corps of progressive liberal activists populating and guiding Obama’s White House transition team must have delighted the onetime radical outsider, who forty years earlier was likelier to have been arrested outside the White House.
In return for the access, Wallis has rushed to support Obama whenever he’s needed it. When Obamacare faced political turbulence, for example, Wallis helped host a 2009 conference call to energize religious support. “I’m going to need the help of all of you,” Obama said on the call. “I’m going to need you to spread the facts and speak the truth,” he continued, complaining that “our religious faith” is inconsistent with America’s current health-care system.
When Obama claimed that his plan would not fund abortion or facilitate “death panels,” Wallis supportively interjected: “We are in danger of losing the moral core of the health care debate.” When the Roman Catholic bishops and many evangelicals opposed Obamacare’s facilitation of abortion funding through insurance exchanges, Wallis obligingly stumped for the administration’s claims to have compromised on abortion. He helped organize liberal evangelicals to back the last-minute maneuver, giving some religious cover to pro-life Democrats who had caved, and ensuring Obamacare’s passage.
GOING MAINSTREAM
Despite his clear alignment with Obama, Wallis’s claims to be a post-ideological, nonpartisan evangelical have continued to gain him entrée into new, traditionally conservative circles. In 2010, he addressed the annual “Lifest” evangelical festival in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, which typically attracts seventy thousand people. One Christian radio station very publicly canceled its support, protesting Wallis’s proposed “unholy alliance between the Church and Government,” but the event’s organizer still introduced Wallis enthusiastically. “I’ve read his books,” the organizer announced, “I’ve studied with him, I’ve been on retreats with him. This is my brother in Christ. I believe he has a message from God for the church today.”
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According to Jim
“We are accountable to God’s purposes and God’s principles but there’s no special covenant with America here. It doesn’t exist and to say so is really, well, it’s a heresy. American exceptionalism, theologically, is a heresy.”
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On the podium in Wisconsin, Wallis responded with self-deprecating humor and a rare reference to his radical, sometimes pro-Marxist past. “I heard somebody around here thought I was an avowed Marxist. Well, I’m not. But I was reading them when I was a student—Karl Marx, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara. But then I began to read the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus said, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!’” Citing Jesus’s command to care for the “least of these,” Wallis explained: “That’s how He knows whether we love Him or not. That was more radical than Karl Marx and Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh. And I signed up to be a follower of Jesus.”
The mostly young audience responded enthusiastically. They were probably never taught about the Sandinistas or other Marxist groups that once inspired a more openly radical Wallis in previous decades.
Wallis had achieved another evangelical breakthrough and now, with growing confidence, he’s been actively engaging and targeting conservatives. In his 2010 debate with the American Enterprise Institute’s Arthur Brooks at evangelical Wheaton College, he reasoned that a “new generation is tired” of the
“argument between big government and small government” and the emphasis should now be on “what is smart and effective government.” Wallis insisted he is not reflexively a “government person,” proudly citing his twenty-two arrests over the decades. Instead, he is more a “movement person” supposedly akin to Martin Luther King Jr.
In 2011, Wallis debated conservative commentator and Kings College president Dinesh D’Souza over American “exceptionalism.” Wallis extolled “God bless the world” over “God bless America,” warning that many Americans advocate a “kind of exceptionalism” that creates “self-delusion” and “disasters.” He professed love for America’s “values” but lamented “I don’t love when we violate those values . . . acting like an empire.”
D’Souza exuberantly countered that “We should be jubilant, [as] American foreign policy has made the world much better.” In response, Wallis simply changed the subject back to his ongoing fast in protest of proposed budget cuts.
Later in 2011, as Occupy Wall Street gained steam, Wallis could not help himself. Despite his carefully crafted new moderate image for the twenty-first century, he could not avoid publicly admiring the Occupiers. “When they stand with the poor, they stand with Jesus,” he rejoiced. “When they talk about holding banks and corporations accountable, they sound like Jesus and the biblical prophets before him who all spoke about holding the wealthy and powerful accountable.”