Around Des Moines

Catching up with Jim Wallis

March 30th, 2008 · No Comments

Jim Wallis is a Washington D.C.-based, evangelical Christian minister and national figure committed to elimination of poverty. His views and actions are rooted in Old and New Testament scripture and are noteworthy for the manner in which they cannot be blindly categorized as liberal or conservative. (If you are rigid enough and narrow enough in your left or right views, he will offend you. If you are flexible enough and open enough to the recurrent themes of the Old and New Testament, you will recover. Believe me, he jarred me out of my political comfort zone.)

To see what Jim Wallis is up to take a look at Lyndsey Teter’s article from Ohio. As you can see Jim Wallis will be one of the leaders of a “Justice Revival” in Columbus Ohio in mid-April. The revival will bring together thousands of Central Ohio church goers from diverse political persuasions in order to complete projects that serve the community. Thousands more will sign on to mentor young people through Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Ohio. This is the first of what is expected to be many justice revivals across the country, taken as a first step to eliminate injustice and poverty through cooperative action of religious groups.

So what is the Des Moines connection? - an article in The Des Moines Register. I hope you didn’t allow The Des Moines Register’s hot button headline to deflect your interest in reading the page 3A article about Jim Wallis on Sunday (3/30/2008). Other papers around the country used more neutral language in headlining the views and actions of this evangelical Christian. You can read the same article (written by the AP’s Julie Carr Smyth) on-line in the Washington Post without the Register’s politically polarizing headline, “Liberal group redefines goals of evangelicals.” On the issue of abortion Jim Wallis is as “liberal” as the Catholic Church (He is pro-life.) so how helpful was that headline? Perhaps a more fitting headline would have been “Progressive… or Religious group redefines goals of evangelicals.” He is not conveniently categorized (or dismissed) as a liberal. We all know liberal (or conservative) is a dirty word in many Iowa households, and as a consequence if someone is called a either, we sometimes think we don’t have to consider their ideas because we “know” a priori that they are wrong.

My introduction to Jim Wallis came two years ago. At Grinnell College where I teach, we invite a lot of great speakers, and one of them was a nice Midwestern boy named Peter Agre who also happens to have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2003. I got to spend a little time with him. When he was visiting, Peter wanted some exercise so I picked him up at 6 am one morning, and we swam a mile and then had breakfast; that’s where I asked him my favorite question: “What are you reading?” Peter Agre was enthusiastic about three books one of which was God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong, and the Left Doesn’t Get It by Jim Wallis. As you can see from the title, if you consider yourself left or right, you are going to get dinged. I sure did. Two years later I am still struggling with the moral and ethical questions that Wallis discusses, but I loved his book. So for you - Christian or not, church goer or not, left or right - just read it, and draw your own conclusions. The Des Moines Public Library has two copies.

Jim Wallis has three books of note.

His umbrella group called Sojourners, a network of progressive Christians, was organized with intent to translate spiritual beliefs into action. Don’t be the last to know why and how politics and religion are mixing more in the last two years than in previous decades; recall the June 2007, Sojourners-sponsored Presidential Forum on Faith, Values & Poverty on CNN or the Public Radio program Speaking of Faith where the major political candidates discussed faith and politics.

Don’t be stuck in yesterday. Times are changing.

Guest Writer: James G. Lindberg (Jim) is the Purple Wren’s sweetie and is a visiting chemistry professor at Grinnell College and retired from Drake University.