Wallis's politics: not to be confused with God's. Or are they?

IN 1995, Jim Wallis was arrested for protesting against welfare reform in the Capitol Rotunda. In 1983, he was arrested in the Rotunda for protesting the MX missile. But these days, Wallis is more likely to be meeting lawmakers than breaking laws when he is on Capitol Hill. Senate Democrats invited him to a conference in January, and Senate Republicans have consulted with him about their anti-poverty agenda. His influence is even more pronounced in the media. Wallis has shared his insights with Tim Russert and yukked it up with Jon Stewart. His new, best-selling book, God's Politics, has been widely reviewed.

His basic message is twofold: Democrats should be more accommodating of religion in public life; but religion does not have to be understood as Jerry Falwell understands it. One of the constant refrains of his book and his op-eds is that Jesus is not "pro-rich, pro-war, and only pro-American."

Wallis has long edited Sojourners, which is generally described as a magazine for left-wing evangelical Christians. In recent years, however, he has moved, at least rhetorically, to the center. He insists that he has no partisan agenda. He says he has no interest in being part of a religious Left. "People are hungry for a better dialogue," he says, "not the monologue of the religious Right."

But it's Democrats who have been most interested in his ideas. Republicans have talked to Wallis about a few discrete issues--such as Bush's faith-based initiative, which Wallis supports. Democrats, on the other hand, are listening to Wallis's advice on how to "frame" issues and borrowing his lines. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid has said that he wants to make the budget "a moral document." The words come straight from Wallis. The Democrats seem to think that Wallis offers a way to overcome their deficit among "values voters," a topic on which they have been fixated since the election.

So does Wallis. As he writes in his book,

   If the Democrats could take the opportunity
   of a political defeat to really reassess
   their language and style, the way they
   morally frame public policy issues, and
   their cultural disconnect with too many
   Americans including many people of
   faith, they could transform the political
   discourse. But it will require a serious
   re-assessment. And if they are further
   willing to re-examine their positions on
   some of the cultural/moral issues the
   Republicans beat them with in 2004, they
   could virtually change the political landscape.
   If the Democrats could be persuaded
   by both good political sense and
   sound moral values to moderate some of
   their positions by becoming anti-abortion
   without criminalizing an agonizing and
   desperate choice, and being pro-family
   without being anti-gay, they would
   change politics in America by giving permission
   to millions of voters who would
   naturally vote for them except for the
   cultural and moral divide they feel with
   Democratic language and policies.

Many Democrats find elements of the Wallis strategy attractive. It indulges their sense that Christian conservatives are hypocrites, betraying Jesus by smiting the downtrodden and exploiting the environment. It caters to their belief that they are already doing the Lord's work by helping the poor, and need only advertise the fact.

But Wallis's major advice to the Democrats is likely to prove unhelpful. Some of it, indeed, they will ignore. About a third of Wallis's book is concerned with foreign policy. He is, if not a pacifist, a near pacifist. He is also anti-military. In 2003, he wrote, "There is no doubt in my mind that the importance the churches and the peace movement placed on protecting the innocents during the pre-war debate was very influential in keeping them from being directly targeted by military planners." (Wallis's move to moderation in rhetoric is not complete.) Democratic politicians are well aware that pacifism is not the ticket to electoral success and are not going to follow Wallis in declaring that God commands it.

What seems to be catching on among Democrats is the idea that they should present the standard liberal arguments about government programs in moral and religious terms. "Reframing" issues is very in with Democrats these days. Their other major post-election guru, Berkeley linguistics professor George Lakoff, is peddling the notion that what Democrats need to do is present the same ideas they have always had in new language (though in Lakoff's case the new language would remain secular). That's not what Wallis has in mind. "I have been clear from the start that this isn't just about language," he says. "If you want a few Bible verses or a few good hymns to repeat, then I'm the wrong person to talk to." He is not "just trying to get Democrats to sound different and then maybe win elections." But that's exactly what the Democrats are interested in.

Yet a religious "reframing" may not achieve their goal. If Republicans openly defended the view that successful people should not be concerned about poverty or that the environment does not deserve protection, then Wallis's "prophetic" challenge to them would make sense. As it is, Republicans will always be able to retort that they too believe in lifting the poor and stopping pollution--that they simply disagree with Democrats about methods. Jim Wallis predicted that welfare reform would cause a "hurricane of human suffering." Republicans and moderate Democrats in Congress thought it would do the poor a world of good. The Bible does not settle who was right about the reform, but the evidence of post-reform poverty rates seems to favor the politicians.

The comparison to the politics of abortion is instructive. Republicans have used that issue to pry religious voters from the Democratic coalition. Democrats may think they can use poverty and the environment to win them back--after all, the Lord said more about poverty than about abortion. But while Republicans claim to be interested in protecting the environment and fighting poverty, and even in deploying the federal government in both efforts, most Democrats do not, as a matter of principle, believe that the law should protect human fetuses against abortion.

Then there is the question of what new voters Wallis-influenced Democrats would be picking up. There is a religious Left in American politics, but it is small, and it is already reliably Democratic. Democrats could try to get more left-wing religious voters to the polls, but the payoff would be low. If the constituency the Democrats have in mind is the red-state values voters, on the other hand, they have a different problem. That group does include a lot of voters, but they are unlikely to vote for the Democratic platform, even if it is described in religious language. A person who is voting Republican because he opposes abortion and same-sex marriage is unlikely to vote Democratic because Howard Dean or Jim Wallis tells him that God wants him to protect the environment.

Some voters, meanwhile, would be put off by an explicitly religious appeal. Nonreligious swing voters who generally vote Democratic because of their concerns about "theocracy" might stop preferring the Democrats if they were constantly quoting the Gospels. And even mildly or strongly religious voters might not like Democratic God talk. They might decide that Democrats were presenting themselves as morally superior to them, and reject them accordingly.

Republican God talk has the same potential drawback, of course, but it might be worse for Democrats for two reasons. The Democrats already have the burden of being seen as cultural elitists who look down on Middle America. And conservative moralism tends to be allied with tradition, whereas liberal moralism tends to be innovative. The former can thus be presented as humble submission to the wisdom of the past, whereas the latter inescapably has the air of a vanguard trying to pull backward and unenlightened people into agreement with a new orthodoxy.

Democrats could, of course, try changing some of their positions on cultural issues as well as making their rhetoric on all issues more religious. Wallis wants Democrats to criticize sex and violence in movies and video games. They would probably profit by doing so, and by calling for more measures to help parents monitor their children's leisure time (such as the V-chip) and for restrictions on the entertainment industry's marketing of its products to children. Some loss of Hollywood donations would be worth the extra votes.

But on other issues, the advice seems faulty. Wallis's preferred stance of opposing same-sex marriage while supporting civil unions was tried, last year, by John Kerry. Perhaps because Kerry was unwilling to do much to forestall same-sex marriage--an unwillingness that seems, on the evidence of God's Politics, to be shared by Wallis--it did not do him much good.

Wallis believes that we should fight abortion by providing poor people with jobs and health care. Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy have recently taken a somewhat similar line. They place more emphasis on promoting contraception than Wallis does, and they are vocal supporters of legal abortion while he is not one. But all three share a belief that the abortion rate should be reduced without criminalizing the choice to abort. When Senator Clinton gave a speech along these lines, pundits swooned. But "safe, legal, and rare" has already been a Democratic mantra for 13 years now. Doubtless it is a smarter political slogan than "abortion is wonderful" would be. That doesn't mean that repeating it will win new votes. And it raises an obvious question: If Democrats think abortion is such a tragedy and want to reduce its incidence, why are they against any legal restrictions on it and, indeed, for its subsidization?

A few liberal writers have given Democrats better advice than anything Wallis offers: What Democrats need to do about social issues, they say, is to get them out of the courts. Liberals' political muscles atrophied, these writers say, because they relied on courts to do the heavy lifting; they failed to build strong popular followings for abortion rights and the like. Law professor Burt Neuborne recently noted in The American Prospect that church-state litigation has cost liberals dearly in return for very little.

   When I was national legal director of the
   American Civil Liberties Union during
   the Reagan years and the board had sent
   me out to argue my umpteenth creche
   case, I wrote a memo saying that I didn't
   take the job to stamp out the Virgin Mary.
   Is it worth alienating people in the red
   states who might vote for a minimum-wage
   bill or back economic policies that
   do not savage the poor just to make a
   lawyer's point about separating church
   and state?

Wallis complains in his book about "secular fundamentalists" who deny religion a voice in the public square, but he doesn't say much about the courts. If I were a Democratic politician who wanted my party to thrive in the future and had enough clout with liberals to speak my mind--if I were someone like Ted Kennedy--I would sponsor a constitutional amendment to take the same-sex marriage issue away from the courts. Most Democrats believe the public will come around on its own to supporting same-sex marriage. So why spend the next ten years losing elections because courts are forcing the issue ahead of schedule?

It may be that the modern liberal conception of individual rights, and of the courts' role in vindicating those rights, is too deeply rooted in the Democratic psyche to be removed. But what the Democrats need isn't Jim Wallis's "prophetic voice." What they need is for Roe to fall.