Evangelical political views

[Bikewer]

Terry Gross' Fresh Air had an interesting segment today:

http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=13

Two different Christian/Evangelical viewpoints on the current political situation here in the US.

The First guy, Land, came across as both smug and arrogant.
"Listen up, liberals, we won!"
He also pretty much sounded like a Bush administration cheerleader, going point-for-point down Dubya's agenda.


The second fellow, Wallis, was still from the Evangelical standpoint, but wondered, "Would Jesus be for tax breaks favoring the wealthy, or ignoring the uninsured, or paying little attention to the impoverished?
He saw the administration's policies and actions as rather hypocritical.
An interesting show.

 

[Nova Land]

Here is a nice biographical sketch of Jim Wallis, from the Sojourners web site. (There's a link at the Sojourners site to an interview with Wallis on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, plus a number of other items that might be of interest to JREFers.)

Besides being the long-time editor of Sojourners, Wallis is the head of The Interfaith Alliance.

Katha Pollitt has a good column about Wallis, "Jesus To The Rescue", in the current (Feb 7, 2005) issue of The Nation. In it she reviews (and pans) his new book God's Politics. Here's a small taste:

Can a dose of Christianity stiffen the Democrats' spine, win back Kansas and bring people power to the anemic left? In the wake of the 2004 election, quite a few powerful liberals are wondering if they can frame their politics as "faith" the way the right has so effectively done. One of the people the Democrats have invited to tell them how to go about this is the evangelical Protestant activist Jim Wallis, a founder of the antipoverty group Call to Renewal and editor of the magazine Sojourners...

Wallis draws a sharp line between the God-on-our-side Christianity responsible for countless evils and the social-justice kind he favors. Yet the triumphalism and self-righteousness he condemns in the former crops up throughout God's Politics: "religion" and "faith" are usually synonyms for Christianity, and Christianity mostly means evangelical Protestantism. Evangelicals get most of the credit for everything good in US history, from women's suffrage to the civil rights movement. This would surprise skeptics like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who spent her life battling scriptural arguments for male supremacy, and the secular Jews and leftists who made up so much of the civil rights movement's white base...

Pollitt is one of my favorite columnists, and would possibly make an excellent TAM speaker. But I guess I should mention that in a different thread.