Getting religion

Democratic guru Jim Wallis's strategy to woo "values voters" compromises on abortion in unacceptable ways.

By Frances Kissling

Aug 12, 2005 | I was sitting in a Senate meeting room a few months ago when I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. A senator started talking about Jesus. She (and it was not Hillary Clinton, so keep guessing) said, "What I want to do is get on the floor of the Senate and ask, 'What would Jesus do about the budget? What would Jesus do about poor children? What would Jesus do about healthcare?'"

What I wanted to respond was that the floor of the U.S. Senate is not the place to invoke Jesus Christ. Most of us, whether we are people of faith or not, would vastly prefer that public policy be developed democratically, taking into account people's views (including religious views, but not exclusively) about what they need to lead healthy and productive lives in relative freedom and peace. But I said nothing as I sent a private prayer of thanks to Jesus that no rabbis, imams, lamas or other non-Christian clergy were in the room. I vowed to send some money to the ACLU and People for the American Way, which seem to have the right strategies to deal with the rising tide of religious conservatism that has gripped the United States since the 1980s.

It was in 1981 that an outraged Norman Lear and others founded PFAW as a vehicle to combat the flag-waving bigotry of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority. To counter it, they went to the core of American democratic values: the values of the Enlightenment, the idea of an America founded on a true secularism -- one that understands that the government derives its powers from the consent of the people, not from the favored religion of the president. Religious leaders who shared that view of democracy joined with other opinion leaders in attempts to uphold those Enlightenment values, and we all proved that the Moral Majority was neither moral nor a majority.

Yes, there has been some ebb and flow in the tide of religious conservatism, with premature predictions of the death of the right followed by overblown assertions about its growing power. The Moral Majority fizzled out, to be replaced by the Christian Coalition, which fused with the Republican Party -- and that party won America in 2004.

With the 2004 elevation of "religious values" voters, secular progressives and the Democratic Party decided they needed to get religion. Some deals have been cut, advice has been given, and coalitions are vying for a place at the table. Progressive religious groups claim to have registered 500,000 voters and put President Bush on the defensive with a piece of research that claimed abortion rates went down under President Clinton and up in the first two years of the Bush administration.

In the honeymoon period these groups are currently enjoying, few are examining closely what values are likely to enter the political discourse as a result of a left-wing God mediated or channeled by groups such as Sojourners and individuals like Jim Wallis (Sojourners' executive director), who has become the most (self-)promoted voice for the religious left. I have no doubt that the senator who invoked Jesus had been tutored by Wallis. Her mantra was the most frequently used sound bite from Wallis' textbook, "God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It" -- "I find 3,000 verses in the Bible on the poor, so fighting poverty is a moral value."

(In the interest of full disclosure, I have participated in an off-the-record dialogue with Wallis, Glenn Stassen and a few other progressive religious leaders to explore our perspectives on abortion. Nothing in this article comes from that dialogue, whose terms require that we not quote or characterize what participants say in the sessions.)

To a considerable extent, Wallis catapulted to success because no one else was available. And he was the new "man bites dog" story, an evangelical who claimed to be progressive. The rest of the progressive religious movement is amorphous and has not yet articulated an agenda or a set of values that can be generally agreed upon by those who enter the sanctuary. The main coalition vehicle is the Center for American Progress' Faith and Progressive Policy initiative, whose structure and policy positions are still evolving. A second vehicle is the Freedom and Faith Forum organized under the auspices of Texas-based Drive Democracy, which focuses on grass-roots outreach to people of faith through an imaginative and inclusive bus tour. Everyone is welcome on this bus, including the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community and reproductive-rights supporters, although, again, the group's agenda is not yet carved in stone.

But Wallis is king, a constant presence at Center for American Progress events, brought by the organization to Democratic Party strategy meetings and trotted out to address the growing number of high-dollar donors looking for an answer to Democratic Party failures.

What does Wallis stand for? And how will women and democracy fare if his vision prevails in the party or progressive politics? His message prior to the 2004 election was based on a strategy long discarded by People for the American Way: Ignore hot-button issues like abortion and gay rights and concentrate attention on the Iraq war and poverty, and when all else fails, invoke tolerance.

Next Page: Wallis: A religious leader who sets the teeth of feminist religious women on edge

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