The Soul of Politics: Beyond "Religious Right" and "Secular Left"

by Jim Wallis

Wallis draws on his experience in urban ghettos to show why traditional liberal and conservative options that emphasize either social justice or personal values fall short. He looks outside the traditional corridors of power to find solutions. Foreword by Garry Wills; Preface by Cornel West.

Genres: Politics, Religion, Nonfiction, Christianity, Christian, Spirituality, Political Science

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

JIM WALLIS is a globally respected writer, teacher, preacher, justice advocate, regular international commentator on ethics and public life, and mentor for a new generation. He is a New York Times bestselling author of twelve books, including Christ in Crisis, America's Original Sin, God's Politics and The Great Awakening. Wallis is the Founder of Sojourners. He served on President Obama's White House Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships and has taught faith and public life courses at Harvard and Georgetown University. "Coach Jim" also served for 22 seasons as a Little League coach for his two baseball playing sons.

Reviews

[Brandon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I believe the author had something very valid and important to say ... he just used way too many pages to say it.

[Liv · Rating 4 out of 5]

“To speak only of moral behavior apart from oppressive social realities, just blames the victim; and to talk only about social conditions apart from moral choices, is to keep treating people only as victims.”

[Tucker · Rating 3 out of 5]

"To benefit from domination is to be responsible for doing something about it," writes Wallis (p. 108), referring to his responsibility as a white male in a culture that privileges whiteness and maleness. He describes how he awakened to the problems of poverty and racism: asking, as a young man, why his family's white church did not associate with local black churches (pp. 88-89), and later noticing, when arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience, that the jail intake cards had been pre-filled to indicate black hair and brown eyes. (p. 95)

Wallis's work has been especially attuned to the problems of street violence and gangs. His lifelong activism on behalf of poor people is faith-based in origin:

"One zealous seminarian in our group decided to try an experiment. He found an old Bible, took a pair of scissors, and then proceeded to cut out every single reference to the poor. * * * When the seminarian was finished, that old Bible hung in threads. It wouldn't hold together; it fell apart in our hands." (p. 178-180)

For Wallis, Christian concern for the poor becomes the heart of a worldview that requires him to beware of greed and consumerism in his own personal habits.

"Another bumper sticker I've seen is the one that reads, 'Live Simply, So Others May Simply Live.' That slogan gets close to the heart of things. We are all connected. As long as some can talk only about their materialism, others can talk only about their survival." (p. 169)

He believes that equality of race and sex can best be achieved through people of diverse races and both sexes collaborating on projects for social change. "Both men and women need to learn the responsible use of power--power that is shared and offered in service of justice...Gender partnership is essential to social transformation." (p. 147) Similarly, "[racial] equality will come from partnership in a shared struggle more than through integration for its own sake. (p. 218)

Wallis falters, in my opinion, in attempting to formulate a position on abortion. Pregnancy seems to pit women's rights against unborn children's rights, and he acknowledges that this is an agonizing choice. He suggests that the values of life and feminism should not be "posed as conflicting choices," but he does not fully develop a framework in which they do not conflict. "Backing women into desperate corners by criminalizing desperate options is not a good answer," as he puts it, but what is a good answer? He also quotes Joyce Hollyday's dream of a world in which "abortion is unthinkable." (p. 131) This troubles me, not from a cynical perspective that reads such an outcome as desirable but unlikely, but from a logical perspective that perceives it as impossible in principle and therefore not even necessarily desirable. Yes, many women are spurred by poverty and social stigma to terminate their pregnancies, and yes, we should combat the poverty and stigmatization so that these situations are not responsible for desperate choices about life, health, and hope. But there are other reasons some women do not wish to carry pregnancies to term, including the desire to maintain a certain hormonal profile, not to endure childbirth, or not to bring a particular baby into the world. As long as women take in an interest in the specifics of their own bodies and the specifics of their progeny, abortion will always loom on the "thinkable" horizon. To hope that abortion will somehow become "unthinkable" by women, so that men of faith like Wallis will no longer have to struggle with the conundrum, seems to unfairly put the philosophical burden on women and to transform the moral question into an impossible cognitive task. If abortion is a challenging question for men, it is at least as challenging for pregnant women. The conclusion that would make more sense in the context of Wallis' book is not that women should stop thinking about complex moral deeds, but that men and women should think collaboratively. This would place redemptive value in the work we do today in the moral gray area, instead of idealizing some distant utopia where the gray area has already been magically overcome.

Aisde from that one dissatisfaction, I found this book especially helpful in formulating how to think beyond the American dichotomy of "liberal" vs. "conservative".

"As social critic Cornel West points out, the 'liberal structuralists' and 'conservative behaviorists' are both right and both wrong. To speak only of moral behavior, apart from oppressive social realities, just blames the victim; and to talk only about social conditions, apart from moral choices, is to keep treating people only as victims." (p. 24)

Speaking of moral behavior and social conditions, while pressing for change together with people of other genders and colors, is something we can achieve.

[Robert Clay · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book would have been great as a pamphlet. As a 250-plus page book, I was relieved to finally finish it. It was wordy, and many words and phrases were used over and over (e.g. transformation, societal, racial, gender equality, our best religious traditions, etc.) and often listed in succession (e.g. "the social, moral, religious, racial, and political implications of this ...").

Wallis is a bit idealistic, but I don't think that's a bad thing. I don't agree with him on some issues (such as an indictment of racism for all individual majority members of a society in which there exists any racism, or a general antipathy towards the military), but I respect his sincere desire to stand based on moral and spiritual convictions, rather than partisanship. It seems I'm a bit more conservative than I thought. Perhaps I should read something of Glenn Beck's next to reassure myself that I'm really a moderate.

One of the book's themes which I did find particularly profound was the idea of what Wallis calls a "prophetic spirituality", that is, a role in which the church pronounces judgement on the acts of government while standing apart from partisan politcs. Based on the role of the Old Testament prophets in ancient Israel, the church would thus act as a sort of moral check upon government through its prophetic criticism, rather that choosing a side and battling within the arena (e.g. the Religious Right).

[Kevin Holmes · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I think that the problems of the right and left were pointed out the solution was not to be found. To quote the Police: "There are no political solutions to our troubled evolution."

[Belle Meade School]

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