Notes from the Jim Wallis lecture

Some pieces from the lecture/discussion that took place on March 28, closely paraphrased. More to come later.

We have been engaged in a dialog, across the country. Many people are unhappy with the way religion has been used in elections, and the one-sided way religion is being portrayed in the media. People are saying, "Wait a minute, I am a person of faith too, and that is not my faith." I have good news tonight--the monologue of the religious right is over, and a new dialog has begun.

I believe there are two great hungers in the world today. One is for spiritual integrity. The other is for social justice. And the connection between the two is what the world is waiting for. And I see crowds like this across the country who don't know there are so many other people who feel the way they do, who are thinking the same things... and I hope you go away tonight feeling "I am not alone any more."

Conference today in Washington D.C. sponsored by leaders of the religious right and the most right wing leaders of the Republican party, and it was called The War on Christians. I'm concerned too--I've got a 7 year old and a 3 year old. My son called me on my cell phone earlier and said, "Dad, I want to talk about baseball." Wallis coaches son's Little League team and there's a game on Saturday. Says "I am concerned about the moral pollution of this culture. Parenting indeed in this culture has become a counter-cultural activity whether you are liberal or conservative. I care about the dignity and sacredness of human life. I care about family values. But you know what? It seems funny to me that the richest and most powerful religious leaders in America were in Washington, with their allies who are running the government of the world's most powerful nation, and they said there's a way, against them.

The real war is against half of God's children. Three billion people who live on less than two dollars a day, who are not on our agenda, and were certainly not on the agenda today at that conference.

We need to hold both sides accountable to a moral vision.

The religious right was created by the political right. Organize for power, political power. Religion became a wedge to divide us.We should not become the mirror image of that on the other side of the spectrum.

The country is not hungry for a religious right or a religious left, the country is hungry for a new moral center to our public life--not an ideological middle, but a moral center. Don't go left, don't go right--go deeper. The right is comfortable with the language of religion, faith, values, God, so much so that it seems like they think they own the territory. But then they narrow everything to one or two hot button social issues all day, every day in Ohio. I have been asked every single day about abortion and gay marriage, so let me start there. If I was an unborn child, and I wanted the support of the far political right, I should stay unborn as long as possible. Because once you're born, no child care, no health care... (couldn't hear the list over the applause, but )

Cardinal Bernadin talked about a consistent ethic of human life, a seamless garment. All of human life was of concern to him--that's what I want to do.

"I care about the family, and I'm worried that families are really unraveling in this nation. So I went to Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs. And I had a discussion with them. I said I'm with you on the breakdown of the family as a critical moral crisis. My neighborhood has 80% single parent famiies. You can't overcome poverty with 80% single parent families--it's too hard. But please explain to me how gay and lesbian people are the ones responsible for all of that.

They said, okay, we concede that family breakdown is due much more to heterosexual dysfunction than it is to homosexuals, but that doesn't help with our fundraising.

Family is too important to be used just to scapegoat the wrong people. We can be pro-parenting, pro-marriage, pro-kids, pro-family, and pro-gay civil rights at the same time.

We can build common ground. I think pro-life and pro-choice people ought to come together to do something about the tragic and shameful abortion rate in this country, if we work on dramatically reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies. Let's not just keep fighting over symbols, let's do something about decreasing the abortion rate in this country.

We can work on common ground on those two issues, but I want to say, those are not the only two issues, Ohio. They're not the only two issues, because, as an Evangelical Christian, when I find two thousand verses in my Bible about poor people, I insist, fighting poverty is a moral value."

Wallis tells of someone from the National Association of Evangelicals who had a wonderful statement a few months ago. Talking about intelligent design and creationism: "When we meet God, I doubt if God will ask us how we think he created the world. He'll ask us whether we took care of it or not."

The ethics of war--when we go to war, whether we go to war, and whether we tell the truth about going to war are religious and moral values.

Meeting young people on the book tour. Seventeen-year-old at an airport said, I want to shake your hand--you're the only minister I see on tv that I don't throw up after!" High praise from a new generation.

Doing a lot of tv appearances. So, some nights you're on the O'Reilly Factor, and other nights you have fun. Says, actually, I get along well with O'Reilly--we have a rapport. But the next night was a lot more fun--was on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He's changing American media. He's funny, but he's also pretty serious. He's smart, he's savvy--he cares about so many issues. Asked smart questions backstage, and said, "I'm afraid when I get out there, I'm going to ask silly questions" and I said "John, that's your job."

Wallis goes on to describe the interview (which I think you can still watch on The Daily Show web site) saying he has gotten lots of e-mails since then, which really affected him. From thousands of young people, many of whom have never been to church. They haven't gotten near our churches, but they have impressions of us nonetheless. Said things like, I lost my faith because of television preachers , bad religious fundraisers, pedophile priests, cover-up bishops.... Other e-mails said, I didn't know that you could be Christian and care about poverty, or the environment, or the war in Iraq. They didn't know--and when they heard, they liked it, and he meets these kids all over the country.

I was visiting my home town, Detroit, Michigan, staying at a Days Inn. And the desk clerk, a 21 year old African American woman says, "You have an upgrade." Who gave me the upgrade? She said, "I did. I saw you on The Daily Show--it was awesome!"

Every major social reform movement in our nation's past, abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, child labor laws, civil rights has been fueled and driven in a large part, by religion and by faith--the progressive side. We've surrendered values and faith to the right and they've turned it into a partisan wedge--we must never make that mistake again.

A whole new generation is now ready to step up. I meet them all over the country. I see them wanting to do something big in their lives. The churches ask for the edges of people's lives, and that's just what they get. A new generation wants an agenda worthy of its time, energy, gifts. When I think of the older generation in the peace and justice movement, I think of Habakkuk...

Habakkuk's Complaint
2 How long, O LORD, must I call for help,
but you do not listen?
Or cry out to you, "Violence!"
but you do not save?

3 Why do you make me look at injustice?
Why do you tolerate wrong?
Destruction and violence are before me;
there is strife, and conflict abounds.

4 Therefore the law is paralyzed,
and justice never prevails.
The wicked hem in the righteous,
so that justice is perverted.

Habakkuk is practicing the politics of complaint. He's a liberal. He is like so many who are lamenting, complaining, "Why is is so bad?"

The Lord's response--write the vision, make it plain, so that a runner can read it. Protest is good, but alternatives are better.

Describes the fact that, in the run-up to the war in Iraq, he was one of a group proposing a 6-point plan to disarm Saddam Hussein and remove him from power, but without bombing the children of Baghdad. For a while the plan got some serious discussion, especially in Britain. But he describes how he got the news that his son was about to be born a month early and he rushed home, got home just in time, and had his cell phone on. Went into labor and delivery room and got calls from British parliamentarians, saying, "Is this a good time to discuss the 6-point plan?" My wife is a woman of peace. She said, "Take the calls--I'm not pushing yet!"

Sojourners and Call to Renewal are going to put out their plan in a few months, called A Covenant for a New America.

The young people are ready to go, they're ready to run--do we have a vision for them?

I was asked to speak at Sing Sing prison in upstate New York. I asked, when do you want me to come, and the prisonerer rep said, "Well, we're free most nights! We're kind of a captive audience here!"

I was given a room in the bowels of Sing Sing, this infamous prison, and I was left in a room alone for 5 hours with 80 guys. One of the prisoners said, "You know, Jim, all of us at Sing Sing are from just about 4 or 5 neighborhoods in New York City. It's like a train you get on in my neighborhood when you're 9 or 10 years old, and the train ends up here, at Sing Sing.

But he had a spirtual conversion inside those walls. The New York Theological Seminary offers a Masters of Divinity program inside the walls of that prison. You become a preacher inside the joint--you graduate when your sentence is up. And he looked at me and said, "When I get out, I want to go back and stop that train!"

I was in New York a few years later, and guess who I saw, back home, leading a town meeting on poverty, trying to stop that train. That's what *I* mean by faith-based initiatives.

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