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Evangelicals to debate right vs. left

Ministers may show divide in Christianity

By Joe Hallett, The Columbus Dispatch, March 25, 2006

If interviews this week with the two evangelical Christian titans are true to form, Sunday’s debate might go something like this:

The Rev. Jim Wallis, author, lecturer and Harvard professor, will declare the Christian right’s political movement dead and contend that Republican politicians who remain its disciples could find their candidacies imperiled.

Wallis will quote the Bible to support his assertions.

The Rev. Russell Johnson, senior pastor of the Fairfield Christian Church in Lancaster, will counter that the religious left has no corner on compassion and that Democratic politicians who support same-sex marriage and abortion rights could find their candidacies imperiled.

And then Johnson will quote the Bible to support his assertions.

More broadly, it could provide a window into the role that religion will play in the 2006 gubernatorial and 2008 presidential campaigns, particularly in a pivotal state where political ideas must gain acceptance if they’re to get traction nationwide.

"What this debate likely will reveal is that the evangelical community is not monolithic, that it has a good deal more diversity than a lot of people realize," said John Green, a University of Akron expert on religion and politics.

"With two articulate leaders like Rev. Wallis and Pastor Johnson, who represent that diversity, the extent to which they can persuade people could have an impact on the 2006 and 2008 elections.

"The challenge for religious liberals and moderates like Rev. Wallis is to change the priorities. Clearly, the religious right has given priority to gay marriage and abortion, and they’ve been able to mobilize voters around those issues."

Wallis called the event an opportunity for a dialogue, while Johnson characterized it as a town-hall meeting. But the forum has all the earmarks of a political debate, with a moderator and a four-member panel of journalists.

Then, of course, there is the ritualistic tamping-down of expectations.

"I’m very much an underdog here," said Johnson, founder of the Ohio Restoration Project, a movement to enlist "patriot pastors" and register "values voters" for conservative causes. "He is an editor of a national magazine and a Harvard professor, and I come from a hillside in eastern Kentucky."

A Detroit native who now lives in Washington, Wallis founded Sojourners, a network of progressive Christians, and is editor of Sojourners magazine. He also is author of the book, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It.

Wallis, however, portrayed himself humbly: "I’m just a Midwest kid and my heart is still there."

Both evangelicals are passionate spokesmen for their religious and political points of view. Wallis has emerged as a powerful critic of the religious right, contending that its message of intolerance has run its course in the public square.

"The monologue of the religious right is finally over and a new dialogue has just begun," Wallis said, contending that an obsession with abortion and same-sex marriage has left no room on the religious right’s agenda for moral issues such as poverty, third-world hunger and disease, sex-trafficking, despoiling the environment and the ethics of the war in Iraq.

"I’m a conservative evangelical, too, but I make a distinction between evangelicals and the religious right," Wallis said. "They are a political phenomenon designed to win victories for the Republican Party. ... The country is hungry for a moral center.

"If you want to put Jesus back in the public square, talk about what Jesus would think about 30,000 children dying today of hunger and disease related to poverty. I doubt that in the face of 3 billion people living on $2 a day, which is now what we face in the world, that Jesus’ top priority would be a capital-gains tax cut or school prayer or gay marriage."

Asked if Republicans who align themselves too closely to the religious right’s agenda could face a voter backlash, Wallis said, "I think so. What I’m telling Christians is that they should vote all their values, not just one or two."

Wallis also was critical of the Democratic Party for excluding the anti-abortion agenda of evangelicals: "The left is perceived as secular and hostile to faith and people of faith. So, the Democrats have got to stop conceding the territory of moral values and a moral vocabulary to the right."

Johnson bristled at the notion that Christian conservatives are shortchanging the poor. He said Wallis favors "big-government solutions versus a local congregation solution" to poverty.

"To say that our only concern is about gay marriage and abortion is to misrepresent the truth. I can tell you right now that evangelical churches are giving more per capita to charitable causes than any organization on the left."

Johnson rejected Wallis’ assertion that the religious right is running out of steam: "The media has done the talking points for the left and their problem is that nobody’s listening. They’re losing members from their churches because they’ve abandoned basic Bible teaching."

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