Jim Wallis / Sojourners

Jim Wallis (b. 1948) founded the Post-American magazine in 1971 with a small community of evangelical students in Chicago, arguing that authentic Christian faith required political engagement on poverty, militarism, and racial injustice — not primarily on abortion and sexuality. The magazine became Sojourners in 1976, and the organization relocated to Washington DC, where it has published and organized continuously since. Wallis's core theological argument runs directly counter to the Religious Right's political alignment: that Scripture is more consistently and extensively concerned with economic justice, care for the poor, and the conduct of war than with the sexual and gender questions that became the Religious Right's primary political identity. He has made this argument through books, speaking, and media for over fifty years. His political relationships were genuinely bipartisan in ways the Religious Right's were not. He served as a faith adviser to Barack Obama's 2008 campaign and maintained relationships with Democratic politicians while publicly criticizing specific policies of both parties. His 2005 book *God's Politics* — subtitled *Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It* — was a bestseller that documented his argument that the Religious Right had distorted evangelical values by reducing a comprehensive biblical ethic to two issues. Wallis has not been without controversy. Sojourners initially declined to run an advertisement from a gay Christian organization, drawing criticism from the left. He later apologized. His own institutional record on internal accountability has been questioned. He is not presented here as an uncomplicated figure. His significance for this network is structural rather than biographical: Wallis demonstrates that the Religious Right's political theology was constructed, not discovered. He and Jerry Falwell read the same Scripture. They built different political movements. The difference was not in the text. It was in the choices made about which parts of the text to emphasize, which to minimize, and which political coalition to serve. If the Religious Right's politics were the inevitable consequence of evangelical faith, Wallis could not exist. He does.

Documented themes

• Opposition / Resistance
• Christian Nationalism
• Political Strategy
• politics-and-the-pulpit

Connections from Jim Wallis / Sojourners

• opposed → Focus on the Family (2005) — Jim Wallis's 2005 book 'God's Politics' was explicitly and substantially a response to the political theology James Dobson and Focus on the Family had distributed to millions of evangelical families. Wallis argued that Dobson had reduced the breadth of evangelical moral concern — poverty, peacemaking, racial justice, care for creation — to a two-issue agenda centered on abortion and homosexuality, and that this reduction served a specific Republican political coalition rather than the full demands of Scripture. The opposition was intramural evangelical: Wallis was not arguing from outside the tradition but from within it, claiming that the same biblical authority Dobson invoked demanded different political conclusions. His existence and his argument are evidence that the Focus on the Family political theology was chosen, not discovered.
• opposed → Moral Majority (1979) — Jim Wallis and the Sojourners community were already operating when the Moral Majority launched in 1979 — arguing from an evangelical theological framework that Christian faith demanded political engagement on poverty, militarism, and racial justice. Wallis's opposition to the Moral Majority was not secular or liberal; it was intramural evangelical. He argued that Falwell and Weyrich had chosen to identify evangelical Christianity with a specific political coalition and a specific set of issues, and that this choice misrepresented the breadth of what Scripture required of Christians. The existence of Wallis's evangelical social justice project is evidence that the Moral Majority's political theology was constructed rather than inevitable — that the Bible could be read differently by people who took it with equal seriousness.

Sources

• God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It — Jim Wallis (2005), pp. 1–384
• The Soul of Politics: Beyond 'Religious Right' and 'Secular Left' — Jim Wallis (1994), pp. 1–310
• Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation — Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020), pp. 65–90