The Soul of Politics: A Practical and Prophetic Vision for Social Change.

The "preferential option for the poor" has been associated with the "base Christian communities" and the liberation theologies of Latin America, yet the same kind of commitment to compassion, solidarity, and social transformation can be found in two recent books about life among the poor in the United States.

Jim Wallis's The Soul of Politics is the product of his years of struggling against poverty and violence on the streets of Washington, D.C., Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Wallis, founding editor of Sojourners magazine, argues for the development of a viable political morality that is transformative, substantive, and religiously grounded. His discussion is divided into prophetic and visionary components. For many commentators, "public" is equated with "secular," but not so for Wallis, who argues that the moral vision of politics must be rooted ultimately in a spirituality that emerges from the concrete human experience of the poor. It is precisely the experience of the poor that endorses a communitarian commitment to social change based on the moral values of personal compassion, grassroots citizen politics and political mobilization, respect for cultural diversity, sexual and gender inclusivity, community-based economic development, and ecological conservation.

Wallis develops a prophetic mode of moral discourse, and therein lie his strengths and weaknesses. He effectively recounts the human suffering encountered in face-to-face meetings with inner-city residents to underscore our profound failure as a society to live up to the American ideals of equality and liberty, and he persuasively demonstrates that racism has produced a two-tiered system of education and economic opportunity. Moreover, The Soul of Politics is a passionate testimony to progressive evangelical Christianity, and a helpful corrective to the widespread identification of evangelical Christianity with the Religious Right and the defenders of the "gospel of prosperity." Its strength lies in a consistent call to conversion and an unmistakable commitment to the politics of compassion. Wallis effectively challenges his readers to scrutinize their own integrity as Christians and, in particular, to examine whether their concrete life decisions, from family structure to the uses of money, are consistent with professed Christian faith. Wallis is quite effective in the role of Christian "gadfly," particularly regarding the dangers of consumerism and the "commodification of human life."

But two difficulties attend this prophetic perspective. First, Wallis tends to be simplistically moralistic and excessively ideological. He reduces a vast array of human problems to simple moral and spiritual failures. "The crisis of the global economy is, at root, a moral one"; "a failure of ethics is at the root of our many related crises." Reading Wallis one has the impression that a transformation of moral consciousness would solve all of our economic, political, social, and ecological problems--from unemployment in Washington, D.C., to the threatened extinction of the California condor. Wallis is correct to maintain that morality and spirituality are crucially important, but they are not the only challenges confronting us.

Second, the prophetic stance is quite different from a public policy perspective, or from the responsibilities of a person in a position of political power. Wallis is clearly more adept at making sweeping moral indictments and visionary proclamations than at offering policy proposals that advance concrete, incremental changes. The difficult question regarding the specific relevance of distinctively Christian spirituality for matters of public morality is never entertained. Instead, Wallis operates at a very high level of generality. "The way of Jesus and the prophets," he writes, "isn't just a welfare program; it calls for a change of heart, a revolution of the spirit, a transformation of our consciousness." Spirituality is not reducible to a "welfare program," to be sure, but what is its real import for the policy maker facing various proposed reforms of monthly payments for AFDC recipients or for determining eligibility requirements for the administration of Medicaid?