-> G21 GLOBAL*BEAT
 BECOME A SPONSOR OF THE WORLD'S MAGAZINE.
WHY should you advertise here? We'll tell you.
VA INFORMATION and VETERANS' MORTGAGES 
|
To read this article in Deutsch, Francaise, Italiano, Portuguese, Espanol, Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Russian, copy and paste the complete URL ("http://www.g21.net/gb31.html") and enter it in the box after you click through.
THE INFORMATION: Black & Blue JOIN OUR MAILING LIST. It contains more jokes than not. SPECIAL SECTION: G21 AFRICA TRILOGY G21 AFRICA G21 AFRICA G21 AFRICA GLOBAL*BEAT HOT LINKS IRISH EYES MY GLASS HOUSE NEW YORK STATE RADIOACTIVE RECOMMENDED DAILY REQUIREMENT ARCHIVES. MEMOIRS OF THE INFORMATION AGE ARCHIVES. LAST WEEK's EDITION MEET THE G-CREW! These are the people behind this jam-band every week. HOME TABLE OF CONTENTS & BACK ISSUES BECOME A SPONSOR OF THE WORLD'S MAGAZINE.
WHY should you advertise here? We'll tell you. We know you're lazy. Here's a button for a quick translation of this page. Just click on the flag for your country. You're welcome! OR TRY THIS GOOGLE TRANSLATION SERVICE. |
NEW ORLEANS - Jim Wallis's new book, God's Politics (HarperCollins, 2005) is a must-read for all Americans who espouse the Christian faith. I suspect that many Christians, especially that group that supported Mr. Bush in this past election, will find Mr. Wallis's thesis as challenging as this reviewer did himself. In powerful and moving examples and arguments from the Old and New Testaments, Mr. Wallis presents us with a vision of "prophetic politics," as he calls his idea, firmly rooted in the authority of the Old Testament prophets and their role(s) in society and that of Jesus himself. This book is very powerful, sometimes startling and most certainly will move you to ponder and reflect upon your own values -- today's most overused word -- and convictions.
Rod Amis It is also highly recommended for paganistic "secular humanists" like this reviewer because it provides a panoply of solutions, based on Christian doctrine, to the social justice, foreign policy and ecological issues many of us claim to champion. That these solutions are based on Christian doctrine affords us the opportunity to better understand a group of people that has recently b een called everything from inscrutable to dogmatically intolerant in the mainstream media following the results of the last U.S. election.
Wallis makes no bones about calling we secularists to account. He also has a few words of instruction for the Christian Right, the mainstream American media and the President of the United States.
All of the foregoing traits are appropriate for a book with the subtitle "Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It."
That is not to say that there are not flaws in some of his sociological analysis, his grasp of political reality or his theology, in our view. A few of these will be addressed during the course of this review; my major quibbles will be presented at its conclusion.
Wallis begins his treatise by reminding the reader that it is misguided to try to remove the religious community from American political discourse, as he claims some have tried to do in overzeal for the separation of Church and State principle, because of the facts of American social and political development. He asserts with authority that some of the most important movements for social justice in American political lifeeach and all were led by church-based activism.
- the abolitionist movement, which addressed the blight of African slavery;
- the women's suffrage movement, which enfranchised the other half of the nation's population;
- the movement to prohibit child labor and;
- the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century
Wallis argues that in each of these cases, Christians and people from other faith-based communities acted as the moral conscience of American politics, practicing a "prophetic" role much like those of the Old Testament prophets and Jesus himself. He asserts that this is the true vocation of Christians.
Wallis's stance is in keeping with his biography. Jim Wallis is an evangelical minister, an activist and preacher who resides in Washington, D.C. with his wife and two sons. He is the founder of Sojourners, a nationwide network of progressive Christians, editor of Sojourners magazine and Convener of Call to Renewal, a national federation of churches and faith-based organizations focused on anti-poverty initiatives. He has been an Institute of Politics Fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and taught faith, politics and society both there and at the Harvard Divinity School.
As part of his analysis of why the involvement of the Christian churches in America's political discourse has fallen into disfavor -- or, at least, gotten such bad "press" -- during the last few decades, Wallis contrasts the approach of the civil rights movement with that of the so-called Christian Right early in the book. He says that the two movements might also indicate a profound difference between how the Black Christian church and the White Christian church perceive the message of the Scriptures. Wallis asserts that this difference in doctrinal perception also affects how each group approaches issues. Black churches, in Wallis's view, see the Bible as the inspiration to achieve social justice whereas the White Christian Right have seen the same texts as a justification to curry favor with power in order to achieve their social goals.
Wallis notes that the Biblical prophets, almost to a person, and up to and including their fulfillment in Jesus of Nazareth, always stood in opposition to the powers of their respective eras. The prophets spoke for God in calling for repentance and correction and the common good of "the least of these" in society. He thus says that he finds it both ironic and shameful to observe the spectacle of American church leaders today coveting invitations to the annual White House Prayer Breakfast and jockeying for positions near or photo-ops with the power-players of the day.
In defining what he means by "prophetic politics," Wallis describes America's political landscape this way:
There are now three major political options in our public life. The first political option in America today is conservative on everything -- from cultural, moral, and family concerns to economic, environmental, and foreign policy issues. Differences emerge between aggressive nationalists and cautious isolationists, corporate apologists and principaled fiscal conservatives, but this is the political option clearly on the ascendancy in America, with most of the dominant ideas in the public square coming from the political Right.The second political option in contemporary America is liberal on everything -- both family/sexual/cultural questions and economic, environmental and foreign policy matters. There are certain differences among the liberals (from pragmatic centrists to green leftists), but the intellectual and ideological roots come from the Left side of the cultural and political spectrum -- and today most from the liberal/Left find themselves on the defensive.
The third option in American politics is libertarian, meaning liberal on cultural/moral issues and conservative on fiscal/economic and foreign policy. The "just leave me alone and don't spend my money option" is growing quickly in American life.
I believe there is a "fourth option" for American politics, which follows from the prophetic religious tradition we have described. It is traditional or conservative on issues of family values, sexual integrity and personal responsibility, while being very progressive, populist, or even radical on issues like poverty and racial justice. It affirms good stewardship of the earth and its resources, supports gender equality, and is more internationally minded than nationalist -- looking first to peacemaking and conflict resolution when it comes to foreign policy questions....
Having made his opening statement, Wallis gets to the institutional barriers to the fourth option.
The media is indicted for only wanting two sides to any issue, thus portraying a fight, an adversarial viewpoint of right and left or liberal and conservative and ignoring all perspectives and positions that don't fit their model. The public, Wallis argues, is thus never given a clear view toward solutions to the issues raised.
Politicians are indicted for operating in crisis mode. As Wallis sees it, politicans build up fear around an issue, first, calling it a "crisis" and then they move to placing blame for the crisis rather than researching actual solutions.
(First quibble: I found this a gross oversimplication of the political process, almost as much of a caricature as those Wallis deplores from other quarters. He completely ignores the work of the staffers, aides and outside advocacy groups who often actually draft the legislation for which their political patrons take credit and that actually move on to become our laws. At the same time, he must know -- later admitting to trying to influence such people himself -- that these staffers are painfully aware of how politicians are motivated by sexed-up headlines, hot button issues and usually occupied a minimum of fifty percent of their time with raising money for the next election from past donors and/or currying favor with potential donors and advocacy groups like Wallis's own who might be capable of delivering substantial blocs of voters. No mention is made at all , finally, of the horse-trading inherent in all effective legislative politics.
I felt that Wallis omitted these details of how politicians operate in the real world -- a topic he is clearly familiar with -- in order to make his argument more compelling, by pandering to popular prejudices -- and that is a failure of honest advocacy.)
In the chapter entitled "Be Not Afraid," Wallis reminds us that this was a constant admonition of Jesus to his disciples. He goes on here to question American conduct of "the war on terrorism" and remind us that Jesus blessed peacemakers. He says at one point:
In bringing to justice the few thousand estimated to be involved in murderous terrorism, our response must not inflame and infuriate the tens of mil lions more in the Arab world (and elsewhere) who, to use even former Secretary of State Colin Powell's words, "hate our presence in parts of the world that they we should not be in." It means that many people in the world may not be mad at us for "our values," as the Bush White House continues to say, but for "our policies." But the U.S. policies that most anger people around the world are generally unknown to most Americans -- and therein lies the problem of talking about this issue.Perhaps the religious community can play a crucial role here because it is itself an international community and not just an American one. We also should have the capacity for self-criticism and even repentance, while national governments are seldom good at either. The truth that most of the world knows is that the U.S. government has far too often supported military dictators in Latin and Central America, Asia, and Africa who have murdered as many or more innocent people as Saddam Hussein. The truth is that the United States has not been an honest broker for Middle East peace and human rights. The truth is that American and Western appetites for oil have led to a corrupt and corrupting relationship with despicable Arab regimes. The truth is that the United States sits atop and is the leader of a global economy in which half of God's children still live on less than two dollars a day, and the United States will be blamed around the world for the structures of injustice that such a global economy daily enforces. To speak these truths is very hard, sometimes especially in American middle-class congregations, but speaking hard truths is a part of the prophetic religious vocation.
Wallis rightly, in the chapter "Not a Just War," challenges the cycle of violence precipitated by the U.S. occupation of Iraq and calls -- as do many other people of conscience -- for the resignation of U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his neoconservative coterie of empire-builders. He asks for the repeal of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans rather than making that fiasco for our economy permanent. He does so on purely Christian grounds that are forceful and commendable.
The rationale for his statements are clear in this section of the book regarding Mary's Magnificat from the gospel of Luke:
Mary's stunning announcement about the high and mighty being brought low and the lowly exalted is at the heart of the Christmas story -- this is how the scriptures portray the social meaning of the Son of God born in an animal stall. Mary is herself a poor young woman, part of an oppressed race and living in an occupied country. Her prayer is the hope of the downtrodden everywhere, a prophecy that those who rule by wealth and domination, rather than by serving the common good, will be overturned because of what has just happened in the little town of Bethlehem. Mary's proclamation can be appropriately applied to any rulers or regions that prevail through sheer power, instead of by doing justice.Using these criteria, it is not surprising that Wallis might feel that certain pronouncements of American President George W. Bush, in which he replaces Biblical references to Jesus explicitly with references to the United States of America and his own administration, border on blasphemous and idolatrous. Wallis makes this assertion several times throughout his discourse. Listen to this from the chapter "Dangerous Religion:"
The real theological problem in America today is no longer the religious Right, but the nationalist religion of the Bush administration, one that confuses the identity of the nation with the church, and God's purposes with the mission of American empire ...In the chapter "Blessed Are the Peacemakers," Wallis advises that those of us who espouse nonviolent solutions to conflict must provide practicable solutions as alternatives to the "war on terrorism." In this passage, he reminds us that there are lessons of successful peacemaking:
We always should be reminded that Jesus did not say, "Blessed are the peace lovers," (which, of course, everybody claims to be). He rather said, "Blessed are the peacemakers," which is always a much more difficult task. History, especially recent history, is demonstrating an abundance of practical, nonviolent strategies, techniques, and practices that are yielding positive results. Nonviolent victories against the tyrannies of communism in Eastern Europe, overthrowing military regimes in Latin America, and bringing down powerful dictators like Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, have shown great promise and possibilities for the future. Various strategies of nonviolent resistance have actually proved to be more effective than counterviolence and war in bringing down oppressive regimes. The idea that such powerful states are simply too brutal for nonviolence to work has been proved false.So Wallis believes that peacemakers need a counter-argument to that of the proponents of the American empire when asked, "How do you deal with the unique threat of terrorism?"
He advises that we in the pacifist and nonviolent communities need to make the distinction between force (targeted and restrained) and violence (wholesale destruction.) We, he argues, should advocate for the strength of international cooperation and the rule of law. This leads him to the conclusion which this reviewer has espoused as regards dealing with international terrorism -- that it is a police rather than a military matter and should be handled as such. Armies only create new terrorists, police stop them.
Wallis acknowledges repeatedly in this chapter a point which this reviewer has harangued about in Jeremiads for over a decade: that in modern warfare, many, many more civilians (women, children, the old) are killed than actual soldiers. (That fact has always been my problem with "modern warfare;" it is little more than the slaughter of innocents.)
To buttress his argument, he presents us with three takes on the police model response from John Howard Yoder, Walter Wink and Gerald Schlabach, eminent theologians all, who have reached the same or similar conclusions.
Chapter 11, "Against Impossible Odds" was the most powerful and moving chapter for me, personally. When discovering the superb writing and analysis of the late Edward Said some years ago, I felt a sense of guilt that your World's Magazine had not substantially addressed the tragic plight of the Palestinean people. (I have attempted to redress the omission by featuring the writings of DR BERNARD SABELLA here regularly in recent years and by such efforts as our recent interview with Alison Weir of IfAmericansKnew.org.) Each time I encounter new information about the situation in Israel and the Occupied Territories, my sense of shame and remorse is deepened. No less so with Wallis's account of his experiences there.
This chapter is a must-read for any person of conscience, whether you are a Christian, Jew, Muslim or non-religious. It is a personal, "on the ground" look at a horrifying situation in the way the preceding chapters of the book are not. I found myself crying, soul-wounded, through most of the chapter.
We Americans must acknowledge our responsibility for the plight of the Palestineans for the sake of world peace and atone for this great crime. We must be as forceful and dedicated in this situation as we were in the fight against apartheid.
Wallis comes to the crux of his thesis in chapter 12, speaking on the vision of the Old Testament prophet Micah, when he states unequivocally:It is important to recognize that the assertion of American domination of the world is a "moral" claim. It goes much deeper than merely accusing our leaders of shedding blood for oil. Certainly, economic self-interest is a real factor here. But if crude imperialism were all this was, the policy would be much easier to challenge. Rather, I think the proposition for American domination must be taken seriously as a moral assertion about the things that make for peace -- then challenged at that level.The real question becomes, Is there another vision? In particular, can the religious community help to offer a better way? Do the people of God have a vision?
When political leaders speak and act this way, the issues at stake are more than just political. When you say peace depends solely on unquestioned military preeminence, you're contradicting the biblical prophets. The prophets do not agree.
In this chapter, Wallis makes the case that has been a theme of your World's Magazine for years: I cannot be full if you are hungry, nor can I be secure if you live in fear.
Madame DeFarge is not in some Arab souk, she lives down the street from you, my friend; and if you are not careful, she will take up her promise of slitting your throat in your sleep.
In the chapter entitled, "Truth-telling About Race," we find this:Restitution to African Americans for slavery and discrimination has never been done. Indeed, almost all the racial progress made in America has come at African American initiative -- through various movements for black legal and civil rights. Whites, rather than supporting proactive racial justice, have mostly been grudging in their acceptance of black progress -- even the most famous white political supporters like John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson had to be pushed to make black civil rights their priority. Blacks have led; whites have eventually acquiesced, with a few white leaders showing real courage by doing the right thing. With notable individual exceptions, real white leadership on racial justice in American has been largely absent.Amen.
In the concluding chapter of the book, "The Critical Choice," there is a passage which this reviewer took as Jim Wallis's Statement of Purpose. Please indulge the sharing of a good bit of it here:When I was growing up, it was continually repeated in my evangelical Christian world that the greatest battle and the biggest choice of our time was between belief and secularism. Everything was under attack from "secular humanists," and believers had to defend whatever was sacred and significant from the onslaught. That kind of thinking led to the rise of the religious Right, which I have challenged many times in this book. But I have also been critical in these pages of what I call "secular fundamentalism" among too many of our liberal elites who seem to have an allergy to spirituality and a disdain for anything religious ...Later on:Prophetic faith does not see the primary battle as the struggle between belief and secularism. It understands that the real battle, the big struggle of our times, is the fundamental choice between cynicism and hope ...AndFirst, let's be fair to the cynics. Cynicism is the place of retreat for the smart, critical, dissenting, and formerly idealistic people who are now trying to protect themselves. They are not naive. They tend to see things as they are, they know what is wrong, and they are generally opposed to what they see. These are not people who view the world through rose-colored glasses, the ones who tend to trust authority or who decide to live in denial. They know what is going on, and at one point, they might even have tried for a time to change it. But they didn't succeed; things got worse, an they got weary. Their activism, and the commitments and hopes that implied, made them feel vulnerable. So they retreated to cynicism as the refuge from commitment ...And finally:Perhaps the only people who view the world realistically are the cynics and the saints. Everybody else may be living in some kind of denial about what is really going on and how things really are. And the only difference between the cynics and the saints is the presence, power and possibility of hope. And that, indeed is a spiritual and religious issue. More than just a moral issue, hope is a spiritual and even religious choice. Hope is not a feeling; it is a decision. And the decision for hope is based on what you believe at the deepest levels -- what your most basic convictions are about the world and what the future holds -- all based on your faith. You choose hope, not as a naive wish, but as a choice, with your eyes wide open to the reality of the world --- just like the cynics who have not made the decision for hope.I cannot but recommend this impressive and thoughtful book to you. Buy it and read it and give a copy to a good friend who you believe cares as much about the world and the future as you do.
THE QUIBBLES: I shall attempt to be brief here. I enjoyed this book and by no means want to discourage you from doing so as well.Nonetheless, it is only natural that a much maligned "secular humanist" who studied theology from an historical-critical rather than a doctrinal perspective would take exception with what could be considered an idealization -- yea, a romanticization -- of the principle text of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Mr. Wallis has the advantage of having referred to this text every week of his life, while This Writer -- though having combed the text on multiple occasions and having a working knowledge of the entire narrative -- would shrink from being called upon to quote "chapter and verse," as the saying goes.
Nonetheless, I use the word "idealization" because of questions that immediately come to mind. For example: Did the prophets call for "humility, loving-kindness and mercy" toward the Canaanites, who did not attack them first and whom they dispossessed of their land? I don't recall hearing such admonitions from anyone from Joshua up through Samuel. I do recall that Samuel proclaimed that one of the reasons that God found Saul unfit to be King of Israel was his failure to follow the instructions to kill every man, woman and child as well as every horse, pig, cow, rabbit, dog or cat of the Amorites.
Mr. Wallis has a favorite tale that originates from his seminary days about a team of students deciding to look for every reference to the treatment of the poor and oppressed in the Bible. They are amazed to find thousands, in fact the vast majority of the Old and New Testaments are centered on just these concerns. This leads them to the conclusion -- since they had never heard any of these passages referenced during their years in their own home churches -- that the American version of the Bible appeared to have lots of "holes." It's a great tale and you'll enjoy reading it.
BUT when I consider omissions from the prophetic tradition -- and there are many more, similar to those referenced above, in Mr. Wallis's presentation in this book -- I must be concerned.
Another brief example: When, before Jesus, was stoning an adultress to death ever precluded from "just social practice?"
It is omissions like these that make the "prophetic politics" argument fall most historically, ethically and logically short, in my view. Sadly, this is where Wallis appears to sacrifice theological accuracy for religious persuasion.
© 2005, GENERATOR 21.
E-mail your comments. We always like to hear from you. Send your snide remarks to rod@g21.net.
writelikegod.com