Left behind.

God's Politics

Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It

Jim Wallis 

HarperSanFrancisco, $24.95, 384 pages

Return to Greatness

How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs to Do to Recover It

Alan Wolfe 

Princeton University Press, $22.95, 239 pp.

Jim Wallis and Alan Wolfe are clearly among that substantial minority of Americans reduced to despair by the reelection of George W. Bush. "It is difficult for me to recognize the country I love in the Bush administration," Wolfe writes in his introduction. Wallis, for his part, is indignant at Bush's "theology of empire" and his cynical exploitation of the Evangelical tradition to which Wallis belongs. So it hardly comes as a surprise that both Wolfe and Wallis have produced books aimed at resuscitating American liberalism, or that they are as one in their authorial passion. "What do I do about my feelings?" asks Wolfe. "I write a book." Still, their books could hardly be more different in tone and assumptions.

I turn first to God's Politics, largely because of its optimism. (Thinking about last fall's election has plunged this reviewer into a funk.) American Evangelicals, in Wallis's view, are rapidly discovering what used to be called the social gospel. "On at least three key social issues--poverty, race, and the environment--Evangelicals are exhibiting a growing conviction and conscience." Why, then, did self-identified Evangelical Christians vote overwhelmingly to reelect George W. Bush? Wallis never really answers the question, at least in my view. But he does hold liberals partially responsible. By refusing to affirm the role of faith in public life, by refusing to modify the individualistic and indeed instrumentalist language with which they address hard issues like abortion, liberal politicians have alienated constituencies who would otherwise "naturally vote for them." Thus the very large number of Evangelicals who, whatever their hunger for social justice, have enlisted as Republicans in what they perceive as a culture war.

Despite his scolding of liberals, Wallis's book appears to be aimed at mainly his fellow Evangelicals. How else to explain the occasional lapses into what I can only describe as Evangelical triumphalism? But Catholics, Jews, and liberal Protestants would do well to heed Wallis, simply because he provides a language by which they might try to bridge the values divide. Wallis exhorts his readers to what he calls prophetic religion, "in which a personal God demands public justice as an act of worship." Prophetic religion requires both structural reform--tax policies that work against the concentration of wealth, for example--and the exercise, by all adults, of sober responsibility in their families and communities. "Prophetic religion always presses the question of the common good." It means care for the poor, tolerance, and a commitment to peacemaking. Neither party today measures up to such standards; God is neither a Republican nor a Democrat, to make the point in bumper-sticker fashion. But movements grounded in prophetic religion could reorient our politics, as Wallis sees it. He is short on specifics in this regard, citing mainly the Jubilee 2000 campaign to reduce the debt of the world's poorest countries--a surprisingly successful endeavor. Americans on both sides of the culture war, Wallis argues, could be brought together in equally successful fashion around such issues as the welfare of the nation's children. Both parties would have to take notice.

God's Politics has serious flaws. It is repetitive, far too long, and lacks much sense of the country's complex political history. Evangelicals, after all, did not suddenly become Republicans in 1980, although it often seems that way to despairing Democrats. Wallis's analysis of foreign policy and especially the Middle East is disturbingly naive--a litany of drearily familiar accusations, virtually all of them directed at the United States. What Wallis has really written is an extended sermon. Read in this spirit, his book is a bracing antidote to cynicism--no small thing in these parlous times. Simpleminded it may sometimes be. And yet God's Politics left this reader hopeful that the future could still be redeemed.

Alan Wolfe speaks a very different language in Return to Greatness. We have, he argues, as a nation nearly always preferred "the good" to "the great"--a choice that Wolfe deplores. By "the good" he refers primarily to the moralizing strain historically central to American culture and identity. Advocates for "the good"--and these range from Thomas Jefferson to William Jennings Bryan to Antonin Scalia--invariably opt for principles at the expense of national cohesion and power. As a result, they have seldom done much to advance either liberty or equality. Greatness resides in a strong central government that thinks in terms of the national interest and can realize its objectives. "The ideal political system," Wolfe argues, "should consist of a conservative party modeled on the British Tories under Benjamin Disraeli and a liberal one based on the social democratic idea brought to fruition in postwar Europe." The United States is kept from greatness in part by its antiquated constitutional machinery, but more fundamentally by the reluctance of its people to endorse the pursuit of power "as an end in itself." American conservatives, as Wolfe sees it, have, since the 1920s, been motivated largely by fear and loathing--of cosmopolitanism, heterogeneity, and technologically driven change. With regard to the globe, their deepest impulses have been isolationist. As for liberals, they have lost both confidence and ambition since the early 1960s. Suspicious of American power, too many liberals today have nothing to offer but defensive bromides on the order of "small is beautiful."

Wolfe's heroes--Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, the two Roosevelts--suggest the kind of political leadership he has in mind. The advocates of greatness are not hobbled by dark fears about human nature; they are guided by experience rather than ideology; they are realists who can live with compromise. Most important, the advocates of greatness are not afraid of power. Each of Wolfe's heroes was a dedicated centralizer, leaving behind him a strengthened federal government. Despite their best efforts, though, our present-day government is still too weak to "deliver public goods either efficiently or universally." Hence our status as the only industrialized nation in the world without a publicly subsidized health-care system that covers every citizen. "In America, a national state that is never quite big enough fuels endless advocacy to make it smaller."

Wolfe is a bit too cavalier about principles for my own taste. (Many Commonweal readers will be chilled by his brusque dismissal of religious arguments against stem-cell research.) As for his approach to the past, it smacks too much of proof-texting for my sensibilities as a historian. Nor, despite his occasionally savage thrusts at the Bush administration, does he leave the liberal reader in an energized state. Wolfe's tone is almost elegiac; he frankly doubts that liberals will rise to the demands of greatness. He would certainly number Jim Wallis among the enemies of greatness--hardly a happy portent for the Democratic future. Wolfe and Wallis are as one with regard to their domestic agendas, especially reform of the health-care system. But their shared vision stops at the water's edge--at just the point where bipartisanship used to begin. For all his professed multilateralism, Wolfe believes that America's greatness depends on its willingness to project power abroad. Wallis is far more cautious in this regard, suspicious both of American purposes and the public's apparent tolerance of "collateral damage" in the form of civilian casualties. Can liberalism thrive if its proponents are united on domestic issues but deeply divided over foreign policy? Wolfe thinks not. "Domestic and foreign ambitions, as much as liberals these days like to separate them, are inevitably linked." So much for the optimistic glow induced by Jim Wallis's sermonizing.

Leslie Woodcock Tentler, professor of history at the Catholic University of America, is the author of Catholics and Contraception (Cornell).