Customer Reviews

God's Politics

5 star:		(99)
4 star:		(37)
3 star:		(27)
2 star:		(30)
1 star:		(42)

 

 

This book is very thought-provoking. The author sees a place for religion, arguing that the exclusion of religion from the political sphere is unrealistic. It does not reflect the way which Americans have and continue to make policy.

Even liberal politicians are motivated to enter public life and work on behalf of other people because of their own religious convictions according to this book. Denying that these are moral values and their roots in religious belief damages our own standing. This denial then feeds into a stereotype that the left is bereft of any morals or opposes religious people.

At the same time. Wallis takes on the 'religious right' who have comadeered Republican Party infrastructure since the late 1970's/early 1980's. He argues their current interpretation of 'good' public policy is also counterproductive to good public policymaking; anybody not sharing their worldview instantly becomes demonized. Because there are so many different religious perspectives in America (even among Christian denominations themselves) religious right actions actually undercut the standing of religion throughout American society, as practiced by these groups religion becomes percieved as something which is harsh, judgemental, and exclusionary.

I appreciated this book's complex view of religion. It clarifies that the problem is not religion itself, but how we employ it in public life which is the real problem.

I have waited for years for someone to finally write a well-written book on the balance between political secularism and faith. A book that does not go overboard on any issues. A book that does not go into guttersniping or is so full of proselytization that the fanaticism makes you want to run and hide under a blanket. This book is incredible because it puts common sense back into emotionally charged issues that skew people too far in either direction. I think what keeps happening is that people posture so much to the far left or far right espousing God as their compass they lose their perspective in what is realistic and factual. They are so hell-bent on making someone else see their point of view they leave no room for consideration of another option.

I found myself agreeing with so much this author had to say. We are not about being a religious-based society but we are about having faith, compassion and spirituality. We have never been about disassociating conscientiousness from religious freedoms.

I so highly recommend this book I wish I could give it ten stars.......

I've never met Jim Wallis, so unlike a previous reviewer I can't speak to his political aspirations nor to how writing this book may help him in that regard.

Speaking only for myself I can say that Jim's approach to the Christian faith, and the fact that he has given voice to that approach, is a great relief. It is leadership like Jim's and ideas and actions like those taken by Sojourners and Call to Renewall, that make it possible for me to continue to identify myself as a Christian. That has not always been an easy thing to do in liberal company.

While the writing in this book isn't always the sharpest, nor the construction the cleanest, this book is very approachable, very readable and (more importantly) extremely timely in the moral life of our country. It is time for people of "values", and Christians in particular, to stop aligning themselves with secular parties or along other political demarcations.

Jesus' message, the Good News, the Gospel, and the life it calls one to, is not about Red States vs Blue States. It's not about being a Donkey or an Elephant. It is about being on God's side, the common good. More than anything else, people of conscience need to ask themselves if they are aligned with the sheep, or the goats.

The action that Jim Wallis calls us to in this book is not about political parties. It's about taking the great commission seriously. Jesus didn't tell the apostles to go out and make converts, but disciples. He taught that when the great judgment comes we won't be questioned on our party affililations, our church membership, nor even on whether we believed that Jesus is God. But, according to Jesus, we will be questioned about how we took care of each other - especially the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, and the prisoner. Those are the "values" that we need to examine and then act upon if we are turly to be called a Christian nation.

Read this book and you will be challenged to do better in those aspects of your life and you may begin to challenge your representatives to do the same.

Wallis brings an important and much needed message to the religious and political arena. Most of what he has to say is articulate, well thought out and presents the important message that Christians must beware of the dangers of "Group-Think."

My primary criticism and the reason I give the book 4 stars rather than what would have otherwise surely been a 5, is that the title is somewhat misleading. Reading this book I was under the impression that it would seek to point out issues on both the Democrats and Republicans and indeed there are places where that seems to happen.

Far more, however, this is aimed primarily at the "Right-Wing Conservative" faction of the Republican party who have embraced religious values. What little criticism the Democrats receive is more along the line of "They don't communicate their message, well." The title would lead you to believe there is criticism all the the way around. It just isn't so. -1 Star for misleading this reader in that regard.

Granted, the Republicans are the party of power and as such are worthy of more scrutiny. Even factoring this in, I don't believe an objective reader could look at this and conclude it is a balanced and equally critical look at both parties.

That having been said it is still an important and riveting book.

Wallis is nothing if not passionate and his lifestyle and actions as reported by him, are in line with what he is saying which I respected immensely and chose to accept at face value. Of particular note, and resonating with this reader were these important points:

1. No reading of the Bible can miss the prevelent theme of how Christians respond to the poor as a primary tenet of Christians and their role in society.

2. Any Christian response to terrorism that is based on fear and focuses on external threats without addressing the legitimate needs of the poor, misses several primary teachings of Christianity and may, in fact, be planting the seeds of our own internal demise by what the response will be from those so neglected.

3. There is no one party that espouses all legitimate values of the thinking Christian, therefore, decisions must be made based on a preponderance of issues and not just a few packaged for public consumption.

4. Christians must come forward into the political process and bring with them their Faith-based values. Society needs them. Our faith demands it. To do otherwise is to leave the field to packaged populism which unfortunately, far too often allows itself to be drawn into the mold that the major parties prepare and the media conveys.

Very much worth the read. Just be aware that the bias of the author is not particularly veiled and certainly not hard to see.

After the 2002 midterm elections, Jim Wallis asked a Republican political operative the following extended question:

"What would you do if you faced a candidate that took a traditional moral stance on the social and cultural issues? They would not be mean-spirited and, for example, blame gay people for the breakdown of the family, nor would they criminalize the choices of desperate women backed into difficult and dangerous corners. But the candidate would be decidedly pro-family, pro-life (meaning they really want to lower the abortion rate), strong on personal responsibility and moral values, and outspoken against the moral pollution throughout popular culture that makes raising children in America a countercultural activity. And what if that candidate was also an economic populist, pro-poor in social policy, tough on corporate corruption and power, clear in supporting middle-class and working families in health care and education, an environmentalist, and committed to a foreign policy that emphasized international law and multilateral cooperation over pre-emptive and unilateral war? What would you do?" I asked. The Republican strategist paused for a long time, and then said, "We would panic!"

That sums up the spirit, the "angel" of this book. For Wallis, there is a fourth way in politics, beyond liberal, conservative & libertarian. It is a "prophetic politics" rooted in tradition. Jim Wallis is not a radical theologian. He's not trying to overturn The Apostles' Creed & reinterpret the Resurrection of Jesus Christ to make it compatible with the laws of physics as we understand them. He does understand, as so many Christians from Paul of Tarsus to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King have understood, that just to live truly as an authentic Christian is a revolutionary act. Can you imagine a society that really does comfort the afflicted, feed the hungry, heal the sick, & bless the peacemakers?

Both the Right (who get it wrong, but not all wrong) & the Left (who don't get it, but still get some of it) have to expect & demand more, much more, from our leaders, who are shallow when they are not deceitful, absurd when they are not hypocritical, inarticulate when they are not stringing together cliches.

It's too easy to say Jim Wallis is liberal because he backs away from some "button" issues & wants the government to partner with us as an agent for helping those desperately in need of practical & emotional sustenance. The middle & wealthy classes of America are loaded with entitlements we are loathe to sacrifice, & would willingly keep at the expense of those who have little or nothing. Through his own group, Sojourners, he also wants to bring people to Christ, but in the manner of the old Jewish saying, "No bread without Torah, no Torah without bread." That is, if Christians do what Christians are supposed to do, it's a lot easy to explain just what the "Good News" really is: That God's love is for everyone, & is most visibly expressed through our love for each other in community. By the standards of popular culture, Wallis is quite old-fashioned; neither a "make your own religion" new ager nor a mega-church pastor trying to fill the coffers & the parking lot, but a visiting preacher with real world experience who is justified in wanting to make us squirm a little bit & do some thinking when the service is over.

Wallis gets it, and I think in truth so do most Americans. It isn't really about right, left, liberal conservative, it's about rational thinking and doing the right thing and no political ideology has a corner on that. A must read for those who are tired of one sided rightwing/leftwing screeds and writers who use tastless titles meant to anger as selling tools - pay attention Ann Coulter!

I can't think of a better time for a book like this to come out. Jim Wallis has long stood for a reasoned and yet passionate, engaged faith. At a time when the world cannot afford the squabbling and name calling that have shadowed American political and religious for years, GOD'S POLITICS says something we all need to hear: that American political life needs caring people of faith to talk across political lines, rather than from behind the barricades. Read this book and then get engaged!

For decades now, Jim Wallis has been taking the left to task for discarding faith, and the "religious" right to task for shortchanging hope and charity. A robust, biblical Christianity stands on all three legs. But the criticism naturally falls hardest on the right, because (as the ideologues of "faith" so readily forget) "the greatest of these is charity."

Wallis's message is the same as it's always been. Secular liberals may be a little readier to hear it after the recent string of progressive defeats. Wallis believes - but then he's hopeful by nature and vocation - that evangelicals are readier to hear it these days, too. Here's hoping he's right on both counts.

The book falls roughly into three parts. The first discusses war and peace, and the Iraq war in particular, in the light of the blindingly obvious fact that Jesus and the prophets stood for peace. Unlike many critics of Bush's policies, he makes no judgments on the President's character; Wallis has met with him and liked him just fine.

But on war and peace he takes very strong issue with the President's bad theology. That theology is bad on at least four counts. First, one of Jesus' most frequent commands was "Fear not"; but the administration has encouraged Americans to be in perpetual fear of the terrorist enemy. Second, the President appears to subscribe to what theologian Walter Wink has called "the myth of redemptive violence": that evil lies only in "evildoers"; that there is no evil in us; and that we can be saved completely from evil by killing the evildoers. Needless to say, this is squarely opposed to the New Testament prescription.

Third, our current leaders have rejected both the pacifist and the "just war" sides of the Christian tradition, to wage a war that has been identified as unjust by every church and religious body worldwide which chose to comment on it, with the sole exception of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Fourth, although Bush lards his speeches with language from the Bible and from old Protestant hymns, he misapplies the language. The old hymn speaks of "the wonder working power" of Christ's sacrificial love. Bush speaks of "the wonder working power" of America. Again and again, he takes language originally reserved for God, and applies it to the nation. The correct theological term for this is "idolatry".

The second main section deals with the biblical attitude toward poverty. Again, Christians throughout the world understand what is emphasized throughout the Bible in continual drumbeat: God judges men and nations primarily by how they care for the weakest and the poorest. Only in America, under the influence of the religious right, have most theologically conservative Protestants forgotten this, or at least forgotten to preach it. The secular and those in mainline churches underestimate how easily that dormant concern could be called forth.

Wallis urges a solution oriented approach to ending poverty, which discards labels of left and right, recognizing that poverty cannot be ended without insisting on both personal responsibility from the poor, to fix a broken culture and broken families; and social responsibility from the government, to fix the structural evils that lock the working poor in place.

The third, shorter, section of the book deals with the "family values" issues. Himself pro-life and opposed to gay marriage, Wallis argues that the way the media game of "Let's you and him fight" is played forces people to opposite ends of the room, when there is plenty of leeway to work on goals both sides would agree on. (Here, I think he is right about abortion, where the goals of both sides would be furthered by providing single mothers with economic supports; and overly optimistic about middle ground on gay rights.)

Some secular reviewers have been made uneasy by Wallis's message. That's okay; a prophet who fails to make everyone uneasy isn't doing his job. But I think they miss the way the book presents Martin Luther King Jr. as the model for religious engagement in politics. King spoke always and proudly from his own religious convictions; but his appeal to others was always to reason and a shared sense of justice. His speeches and actions were drenched in his faith, but they excluded no human being. Progressive men and women of faith should enter the public square in the same spirit today.

Wallis cuts through political pandering to get to the heart of the matter: what Christians REALLY want to see in government and what Christian government really is! A welcome reminder of what Christian faith can and should do in the public arena rather than the lip service most politicians give us, and the extremism of both right and left in the secular arena. A practical, common-sense approach to what politicians of faith could do instead of what they are doing without the negativism and exclusion currently practiced by both parties. Insightful and though provoking. Highly recommend.

This book qualifies as serious political writing and thereby deserves a place in the Political Science libraries of mainstream colleges and universities. The author has an impressive command of current events and economics, and he critically addresses the salient political, military and economic policies of the present in terms of Christian ethics, that more often than not fall in line with the Progressive agenda of the Democrats, notwithstanding the abortion issue.

Father Wallis discusses how the Radcons and fundamentalists espouse what amounts to bad theology in respect to present economic policies that favor the wealthy at the expense of the poor. He also describes what constitutes a just war from the perspective of traditional Judeo-Christian philosophy. Needless to say, the conflict in Iraq is no such war. Also, the impressively researched chapters on world poverty are well worth the price of the book alone. For these reasons and others too numerous to mention, I highly recommend this book to people of faith and secularists alike.