PULSE: You have been an activist for decades—you’ve been arrested in anti-nuclear demonstrations, you were at the Battle of Seattle and you’ve been a leader in the antiwar movement. But you’re also an evangelical minister, and your new book is critical of how progressive activists handle religion. What do they do wrong?

WALLIS: I think the biggest mistake progressives have made in the last several decades is to cede the entire territory of values to the political right. Then the political right could create the religious right—that’s how it happened, the political right created and still runs the religious right—and they define religion and values in their own terms, very partisan and ideological. By their definition, there are only two moral values—abortion and gay marriage —and everything else is ignored.

So on one hand you have a political plan on the right, and the left has just let it happen. The left has forgotten its own progressive history, in which almost every reforming movement in American history was fueled and driven in part by faith and values. So here’s a Democratic Party, once linked to a Civil Rights movement led by black churches, now become so secular that they are unfairly portrayed as hostile to religion.

Religion does not have a monopoly on morality. There are people who come to see these meetings we’re having across America who tell me, “I’m an agnostic, but thank you for making me feel included, because I care about moral values.”

I want a broad moral discourse on politics that includes anyone who cares about moral values, and that includes people who are secular. But secular fundamentalism is something different. There are a few people who have this disdain and hostility for religious people, thinking they are stupid, and who think that separation of church and state—which I believe in very strongly—means keeping religious people out of the political realm.

Where would we be if Martin Luther King Jr. had kept his faith to himself, or Oscar Romero or Desmond Tutu? All those movements were prophetic religious movements over time. So the progressive political left makes a big mistake when they banish spirituality from public life.

PULSE: When I read the writings of the abolitionists or the Wobblies or the Civil Rights movement, they spoke very freely about doing what they did because they believed in right and wrong. But if you listen to the cable news shows, their values debates are always between religious pundits who support Bush and, say, an obscure atheist group that wants to get rid of a Nativity scene.

WALLIS: The most important thing people can do to change America is to change the terms of the debate. At every book tour stop, we are having what are essentially town hall meetings across America.

As I’m going around the country, I’m being asked to do more and more interviews, and we’re drawing bigger and bigger crowds from church people—2,000, 3,000 every night—who would never be seen at the WTO protests. A lot of people are coming forward and saying that the faith being talked about in the media and in the government is not their faith.

The monologue of the Religious Right is now over. I appeared on “Hannity and Colmes” and was getting blistered by Hannity and Jerry Falwell, and I told them that they don’t have a monopoly anymore, and they got very angry. Hannity asked me, “Jim, are you in favor of killing babies or not? Answer the question!” I said, “You don’t get to ask loaded questions like that anymore.”

That’s something we don’t think about enough—how political issues are framed. Whoever frames the debate, wins the debate. The way the media phrase the questions, you can’t win no matter what you answer. For example, are you in favor of tax relief?

PULSE: “Relief” implies that there is an affliction, that public services are a burden.

WALLIS: Exactly. Do you want more of an affliction or less? You can’t win. But you could also ask, “Do you believe in investing in the common good or not?” So that’s what we need to do—not just to take the other side of Jerry Falwell, but frame the debate differently and offer a genuinely different plan for what we want America to be. And many people have been waiting for that for a long time.

PULSE: Thomas Frank once wrote about meeting a young Republican candidate who seemed like a standard corporate hustler, but as soon as he was being interviewed he suddenly started talking like Billy Graham. To what extent do these people who have taken over the government believe what they are saying?

WALLIS: I think there is a difference between the leaders and the constituency. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and James Dobson are genuine theocrats, and they do not want to see democracy take place. But a lot of their followers are just concerned about what they see as the coarsening of society.

That is actually a genuine issue, but it shouldn’t be just a left or right issue. Being pro-family should mean you support aid for the poor, or family leave policies like they have in European countries, but when has the right ever done that? As soon as they get away from complaining about other people’s lifestyles, they are Social Darwinists.

There are a lot of people coming to these meetings from the conservative side, from the religious right, and they see their party becoming so intensely Social Darwinist that they can’t take it any more.
We are reaching and winning over such people. This movement is not just a religious left—it’s much broader and deeper than that.

PULSE: By coincidence, as we write this, Republicans are trying to intervene in the Terry Schiavo case. I can’t find another case of Congress to step in to a medical decision like this, and most Americans oppose it but their evangelical base supports it. Do you think they simply believe in their position that strongly, or do these kinds of uncompromising stands help them in the long run?

WALLIS: There was a memo leaked to the Washington Post that “this will energize our base. This will fire up our people. This will help us beat [Democratic] Senator Bill Nelson in Florida.” Bill Nelson is himself an evangelical Christian, but they don’t really care about that—they just want to beat him.

I know right now I’m going to be asked about Terry Schiavo, and what I tell people is that this is a tragic personal story, and that almost none of us know enough about the issue to be talking about it as loudly as we are. And it hits home for me—my mother died of cancer—but we don’t know what we are talking about in this case, and neither do Congressmen—they are just using this poor family.

I was debating Randy Tate, former head of the Christian Coalition, and got him to admit that family breakdown has nothing whatsoever to do with homosexuality. I got a representative of Focus on the Family to admit, after an hour and a half of debate, that “family breakup is due much more to heterosexual dysfunction than homosexuality.” But, he said, “We can’t vouch for our fundraising department.”

Most Americans recognize that the family is in a state of crisis, that family breakdown is serious and that parenting is at risk. We have to be pro-family. At the same time, most people—even most religious people—are willing to accept some kind of legal protection for gays and lesbians. We can find common ground, but only by going to higher ground.

I think a lot of people see that values are not supposed to be a wedge, but a bridge between us. Almost all of us are in favor of doing something about global warming. Last week a group of evangelical Baptist leaders met to hold a national meeting on global warming. It was something political leaders should have done a long time ago, but here pastors are doing it, and politicians in Washington took notice.

I really think that progressive spiritual voices are coming into their own again. It is a different kind of voice than anyone has heard for many years, voices that people have been hungry for and have believed in, but may have thought they were the only ones.

PULSE: Right now the group in charge is so extreme, and politics are so vicious, that we think of this as a time when people are sharply divided—but I’m always astonished at the extent to which we all agree. I saw a recent article that asked Americans what kind of budget they would like to see, and the results were amazing—everyone, Democrats and Republicans, wanted to cut military spending and spend more on jobs and health care. The average person wanted to increase spending on clean energy by 1,090 percent.

WALLIS: A friend of mine believes that 80 percent of Americans have the same politics as we do. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but I do believe there is at least a solid majority of people who agree with moral values and protecting the family and what conservatives talk about—but without scapegoating gays and others—and are also economically populist and environmentalist and feminist, and believe in a foreign policy based on international law and not unilateral invasions. And I talked once with a Republican operative and asked him, “What would you do with a candidate like that?” And he said, “We would panic, because we would lose.” ||

Wallis will speak in Minneapolis Thursday, April 7 at noon at the Westminster Presbyterian Church’s Town Hall Forum, an event the church has offered over the last 20 years to feature speakers on ethical issues.

Broadcasts of the Forum can be heard live on Minnesota Public Radio stations across the state, including KNOW 91.1FM in the Twin Cities. For more information call 612-332-3421 or e-mail Susan McKenna at smckenna@wpc-mpls.org. The town hall forum is free and open to all.