Those views continued to deepen over the ensuing decades. By the 1960s, Liberation Theology, which claimed that the church’s role was not to preach salvation, but to help overthrow unjust (that is, capitalist) economic and political systems (even aligning with violent revolution if necessary), began to gain notoriety. It began among Latin American leftist Catholics like Peruvian theologian and Dominican priest Gustavo Gutierrez, who credited Marxism for focusing on a “transformation of the world.” By the 1980s, mainline Protestant officials in the United States were impressed enough to launch pilgrimages to the Sandinista promised land to learn more. One Methodist bishop denounced attacks on Liberation Theology as “an act of blasphemy.”
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, before the Soviet bloc fell, mainline Protestant officials, along with their missions and lobby agencies and groups like the National and World Councils of Churches, enthusiastically supported communist revolutions around the world. Sandinista strongman Daniel Ortega preached from a Methodist pulpit in New York to a gushing congregation, which hailed him as “Brother Ortega.” And officials from the National Council of Churches, along with clergy from sixteen Protestant denominations and two Catholic orders, enthusiastically met with Fidel Castro at the Cuban mission to the United Nations in New York in 1995.
By the end of the twentieth century, mainline churches had become sidelined. Liberal politics and theology, which deemphasized personal faith and evangelism, fueled a membership exodus that is now in its sixth decade. In the early 1960s, one in five Americans belonged to one of the seven largest mainline Protestant churches.
By 2012, it was less than one in fifteen.
Even worse, the Religious Left may have captured the imaginations of mainline Protestant church bureaucracies and elites, but they never fully captured the hearts or minds of most church members. In spite of their efforts, the rank-and-file Protestants who remained still tended to vote Republican.
THE RISE OF THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT
While the mainline denominations were fading, another group was growing rapidly: evangelicals.
Evangelical churches began to surge in the 1960s and 1970s, just as the mainline churches were turning to the Social Gospel. The 2001 World Christian Encyclopedia estimated that U.S. evangelicals numbered about 45 million in 1970, comprising about 22 percent of the U.S. population. By 2000, the number had exploded to nearly 100 million, or 35 percent of the population. Southern Baptists surged beyond once dominant United Methodists. The Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination, swept past the once prestigious Episcopal Church.
Evangelicals are now the country’s largest religious demographic. And they are overwhelmingly conservative.
Like America’s founders, evangelicals tend to believe in liberty, limited government, and entrepreneurship. A majority of the Tea Party is evangelical. Small business owners also are disproportionately evangelical. Evangelicals were central to Republican electoral victories in 2004 and 2010.
Sensing the shifting tides, the mainstream media stopped putting political pronouncements from groups like the National Council of Churches on their front pages and instead focused—not always happily—on the rise of the Religious Right, embodied by groups such as the Reverend Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and later, Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition. Policy makers followed suit (don’t they always?) and began to ignore pronouncements from the old Religious Left.
But if you thought progressives would sit back and allow this to happen, you don’t know them very well. Smart leftist philanthropies, including those run by George Soros, knew that electoral victories required evangelical votes. And once strident street radicals like longtime Religious Left activist Jim Wallis recognized that the old techniques of angry protest no longer worked, they needed a new strategy, something that could be used to co-opt suburban evangelicals and show the media and policy makers that they were still relevant.
And, with that, the Evangelical Left was born.
Targeting evangelicals with their causes like environmentalism, welfare expansion, disarming America, and ending our special relationship with Israel, leftist activists and philanthropies have, especially since the 2004 election, attempted to shift evangelicals away from their concerns about abortion and traditional marriage.
Meanwhile, the Left’s social gospel advocates have been working to capture evangelical elites, especially academics, students, ministry workers, and some larger church pastors who aspire for approval from urban secular elites. Strategists understand that peeling even a small minority of evangelical voters away could dramatically change things in their favor. And, just as important for anyone trying to influence the political system: winning over evangelical elites who claim to speak for large evangelical institutions can provide powerful images and sound bites for the media.
But, despite these campaigns, rank-and-file evangelicals remain strongly conservative—over 70 percent voted Republican in the 2010 midterm elections. Does that mean the Evangelical Left has failed? Unfortunately, no; just the opposite: it means they are just getting started.
But, if that’s the case, then this cause, this relentless push by the Evangelical Left toward, essentially, socialism in the name of Jesus, needs a leader; someone with enough street cred and experience to take a radical approach and make it look mainstream. Someone who might even have access to the president himself.
America, I’d like to introduce you to the evangelical pastor Jim Wallis.
WHAT WOULD JESUS CUT?
Organized religion is a funny thing. People can claim to “speak for” large swaths of followers when, in reality, they have absolutely no standing to do so. I guess in that way it’s a lot like politics. A politician can go on a Sunday morning talk show and pretend to speak for an entire party even though the actual voters in that party may have very different ideas.
Of course, the media doesn’t care. Trot out someone with a fancy title and they’re more than happy to give that person a microphone. The Left knows how to play this game very well.
For example, remember the recent crisis over the statutory limit on our national debt? Congress was deadlocked over tax increases and spending limits on welfare and entitlement and it was all serving to put President Obama between a rock and a hard place. How, given America’s exploding national debt, could he possibly be seen as reckless enough to allow the spending party to continue? But, on the other side, he had another election to worry about. Caving to Republicans would put him in a terrible spot. How could he get out of this mess?
Enter longtime Religious Left activist Jim Wallis.
Wallis led an ecumenical delegation into the White House to offer their spiritual solidarity with the president. Claiming to speak for most of America’s Christians, Wallis’s spiritual photo op with President Obama included representatives of the National Association of Evangelicals, the National Council of Churches, the Salvation Army, and the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops. The group’s rhetorical appeal to the country was “What Would Jesus Cut?” as they announced that they would stand as a “Circle of Protection” around federal antipoverty programs.
“If you’re going to come after the poor, you have to go through us first.”
These religious elites collectively represented over 120 million American church members—at least on paper. In reality? Who knows. And, honestly, if you’re the media, who cares? The photo op and sound bites (like this one from Wallis: “If you’re going to come after the poor, you have to go through us first”) were all the Left needed. Ultimately Congress and the president agreed to theoretical “cuts” of perhaps $2.5 trillion over ten years. “It appears that the voice of the faith community was at least heard and made some difference in the outcome of the default debate,” Wallis announced, commending the White House for having “protected low-income entitlement programs” and Medicaid. He complained that the deal’s “most glaring problem” was no tax increases. But, whether the deal met his approval or not, Wallis had made himself the most
prominent face in the Circle of Protection’s coalition.
And, with that, Jim Wallis, a man who’d spent his life toiling in obscurity and craving mainstream appeal, had become the face of the Evangelical Left.
OBAMA’S LEFT-HAND MAN
Pastor Wallis is an interesting choice for a leader. Raised in a small evangelical church called the Plymouth Brethren, Wallis himself has rarely, if ever, publicly detailed his own personal faith beliefs. He typically defines himself as “evangelical,” though he represents no church, except for a small circle of leftist activists who sometimes meet for prayer in his Washington, D.C., office. He has also led a liberal activist group called “Sojourners” for over thirty years and publishes a magazine by the same name.
* * *
Hanoi Jim?
Sojourners is the successor to Wallis’s journal that he originally founded in 1971, titled the Post American, which celebrated the ostensible end of American dominance. “To be Christian in this time is to be post-American,” it rejoiced, while trumpeting Wallis’s anti-American opinions and siding with global Marxist revolutionary “liberation” movements throughout the 1970s. “I don’t know how else to express the quiet emotion that rushed through me when the news reports showed that the United States had finally been defeated in Vietnam,” Wallis characteristically gushed after North Vietnamese tanks rolled into conquered South Vietnam, solidifying police state communism over Indochina. “There was an overwhelming sense of relief and thankfulness that the American intruders had finally been thrown out and that the desire of the U.S. government to control the destiny of Indochina had been thwarted.”
* * *
Over the years, Wallis has turned into one of America’s most politically prominent religious voices, representing the new, more polished brand of Religious Leftists who now appeal not to post-Woodstock hippies in Volkswagen vans, but to minivan-driving suburbanites who worship at megachurches. The pinnacle of his mainstream success came in 2009 when he was tapped by President Obama to be part of a handful of spiritual advisers who, according to the New York Times, he would consult with “for private prayer sessions on the telephone and for discussions on the role of religion in politics.”
If you were concerned that Wallis and the other advisers might be radical Leftists who would try to push Obama even more toward Marxism, you can relax. It turns out that Obama doesn’t need the push: “These are all centrist, social justice guys,” said the Reverend Eugene F. Rivers about the group of advisers. “Obama genuinely comes out of the social justice wing of the church. That’s real. The community organizing stuff is real.”
Jim Wallis might not have been mainstream enough for the White House had he not experienced success four years earlier with the release of his bestselling (and presumptuously titled) book God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It. The book audaciously aligned Christianity with big-government liberalism, even as Wallis himself professed nonpartisanship.
Wallis’s orchestrated political theater at the White House may have been his greatest public stunt, but it wasn’t his only one. Earlier that year he deftly exploited the Christian season of Lent, which is traditionally focused on quiet self-denial, by embarking on a very public Lenten fast to protest “cuts” in the 2011 federal budget by sinister congressional Republicans.
He was joined by over two dozen spiritually awakened U.S. House Democrats, along with the radical left group MoveOn.org, which is not typically known for its religious devotion. MoveOn’s executive director, Justin Ruben, solemnly announced that he and other “progressive” groups were joining religious leaders to “protest the brutal and unjust budget cuts being debated in Washington.”
* * *
You Can Judge a Book by Its (Back) Cover
The back cover of God’s Politics is a sight to behold. Right under the heading “God Is Not a Republican . . . Or a Democrat” are five endorsements that, I guess, are supposed to prove how nonpartisan the book is, but instead read like the guest list to a Rachel Maddow cocktail party: Bono, of the rock band U2; Bill Moyers; E. J. Dionne, the liberal columnist from the Washington Post; and Cornel West, an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America.
* * *
In case Wallis himself had omitted any of the White House’s talking points, Ruben melodramatically explained: “All week long I’ve been looking into the eyes of my 2-year-old daughter, and thinking about the hundreds of thousands of kids who will get kicked out of preschool, who will lose access to health care, who will go to bed hungry each night if these cuts pass.” Metaphorically opening up his Bible, Ruben then quoted the Prophet Isaiah about fasting, claiming: “I joined because, according to my faith and my conscience, letting children starve while giving handouts to giant corporations is wrong, plain and simple.”
Other endorsers of Wallis’s fast were United Methodist Church agencies, the sometimes radical Islamic Society of North America (named by the U.S. Justice Department as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation terrorist financing case—see the chapter on Islamists for more), and the evangelical relief group World Vision, along with trade union groups like SEIU, the aforementioned MoveOn.org, and former Ohio Democratic congressman Tony Hall. Hall, himself a liberal evangelical and frequent Wallis cohort, likened this fast to President Lincoln’s call for national fasting during the Civil War. “On Easter Sunday I will start eating again,” Hall brazenly intoned at a press conference with Wallis. “But millions of people here in America and around the world will not have the same luxury; they will continue to go hungry.”
* * *
Facts Are More Stubborn than Rhetoric
Explaining the fast on his blog, Wallis said that he felt compelled to do this “Because those of us who are Christians are bound by Jesus’ command to protect the least of these. So people of faith ask, ‘What Would Jesus Cut?’ The extreme budget cuts proposed to critical programs that save the lives, dignity, and future of poor and vulnerable people have crossed a moral line.” He offered nine other reasons that all gave a similar rationale: the poor’s safety net is being targeted so that we can declare more wars or make sure millionaires keep more of their money.
There’s only one problem: his logic is completely wrong—at least if you want to rely on actual numbers instead of a progressive activist’s blog post. I don’t want to turn this into an economics chapter, but Brian Riedl, the Heritage Foundation’s budget expert, and someone I know and trust, had this analysis in 2011, right around the time of the Wallis fast:
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reports that the richest 20 percent of taxpayers now shoulder a record 86 percent of the federal income tax burden. This is substantially higher than when Ronald Reagan took office (64 percent) and even higher than when George W. Bush took office (81 percent).
The flip side of the “tax cuts for the rich” mantra has been “spending cuts for the poor.” Again, the official government data flatly contradict the conventional wisdom.
According to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, federal anti-poverty spending has soared from $190 billion in 1990 to $348 billion in 2000, and to a staggering $638 billion this year (all adjusted for inflation). The growth since 2000 has been particularly remarkable in the Children’s Health Insurance Program (470 percent), food stamps (229 percent), energy assistance (163 percent), child care assistance (89 percent) and Medicaid (80 percent).
These expansions have been bipartisan: Mr. Bush—unfairly derided as bad for poor people—became the first president to spend more than 3 percent of the nation’s income on anti-poverty programs. President Obama then pushed it above 4 percent. In fact, since 1990, anti-poverty spending as a share of national income has expanded as fast as Social Security, Medicare, defense, and education—combined.
So why the perceived “spending cuts for the poor”? Because anti-poverty spending increases (as large as $60 billion annually) occur automatically, and therefore go largely unnotic
ed. Yet any lawmaker proposing to shave even $1 billion off that growth is loudly attacked for “declaring war” on the safety net.
* * *
For Wallis, every aspect of sacred faith often becomes just another prop for ideological battle for big government. And for him, even a holy season is the right time for harsh name-calling. Wallis denounced Republican budget cutters as “bullies,” “corrupt,” and “hypocrites.”
* * *
Your Music Is “Incredibly Offensive”
MoveOn.org later posted a video from the musician Moby, who solemnly explained to Americans that he found it “incredibly offensive” that “Republicans have a budget that gives tax breaks to huge corporations and . . . to millionaires but yet it hurts veterans and the elderly and the children and women’s rights.”
* * *
Wallis and other committed Religious Leftists believe that justice for the poor is impossible without endlessly expanding centralized state power at the expense of individual liberty. Remember, the 2011 federal-budget and debt-ceiling controversies were over limits on future growth of federal programs—there were virtually no actual proposed “cuts” in most spending programs. But even that couldn’t be tolerated because this is not really about the poor, it’s about ideology.