Posted on 04/09/2006 5:35:41 PM PDT by Aussie Dasher
AUSTRALIA must beware the rise of the "religious right" in politics, American Christian activist Jim Wallis has told a Melbourne audience.
Mr Wallis said religious faith would be the most influential force in Australian politics for the next decade, but the country was in danger of allowing the religious right to dominate.
"It is clear from … the abortion debate and the rise of Family First that Australia, like many countries, is witnessing a new religious force that could change the political landscape," he said.
Mr Wallis is in Melbourne to launch the Australian edition of his book God's Politics: Why the American Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It.
"The other danger is the way Australia has so often followed in lock-step with some of America's worst mistakes and policies, defying the world on Iraq or Kyoto or torture," he told The Age. "This needs to be challenged, and it's better challenged by friends."
Mr Wallis spoke about tackling poverty at the Town Hall yesterday for the Micah Challenge, the Christian arm of the Make Poverty History campaign. "People of faith can change the nation — they've done it in the past," he said.
A spokeswoman for Family First senator Steve Fielding said Family First was not a Christian party. Brigadier Jim Wallace, founder of the Australian Christian Lobby, said he had read the first few chapters of Mr Wallis' book and agreed with everything. "Where he's coming from is exactly where the Christian Lobby tries to be," he said.
You remember that famous footage of krinton laughing, then crying at the Ron Brown funeral when he spotted the cameras? Well, he was walking and yukking it up with Tony Campollo who is another leftist, social liberation "evangelical" whose sole function is to give RAT's religious cover. Wallis is another apostle of this apostate cult.
I think this is a liberal bogeyman. I very much doubt that one in a million Christians in this country support a "theocracy".
Christian my ass.
And he's not doing very well over here so you get to put up with him for a while. Sorry. :-)
Phoop on this dweeb!
Basically Jim Wallis is the antithesis of South Park conservatives or Ayn Rand objectivists. I can respect that he opposes abortions and wants to bar legalization of gay marriage, but everything else he promotes are standard Bob Brown stuff.
You may ask what the Freeper Oztrich Boy believes. Flip his beliefs around issue by issue and you will get a picture of this Wallis guy's stance.
Ping!
Jim Wallis is Antichristic.
Wallis is like Barry Lynn, head of Americans United. They make a lot more pimping for the left than they would as ministers.
More fun with Jim "Liberation Theology" Wallis, I see...
Carter warns against fundamentalists
Mark Tooley, "Religious Left Coalitions"
Two relatively new religious coalitions are combating the burgeoning influence of Christian conservatives. The Interfaith Alliance, created in 1994, is largely a mishmash of fading, old-line Religious Left fixtures whose predictable denunciations of Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson have failed to attract sustained attention or new allies. But the Call to Renewal, which Sojourners publisher Jim Wallis helped create last year, has been considerably more successful in portraying itself as a viable alternative to the Christian Right.
SNIP
Of the Call's 100 prominent endorsers, eighteen are Roman Catholic, including Bishops Thomas Gumbleton of Detroit; Raymond Lucker of New Ulm, Minnesota; LeRoy Matthiesen of Amarillo, Texas; Francis Murphy of Baltimore; Peter Rosazza of Hartford, Connecticut; Walter Sullivan of Richmond, Virginia; and, Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee. Other Catholics are Gerald Brown of the Catholic Conference of Major Superiors of Men's Institutes, Margaret Cafferty and Joan Chittister of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, Marie Dennis of Maryknoll Justice and Peace, J. Bryan Hehir of the Harvard Center for International Affairs, and Carlotta Ullmer of the Sisters of St. Francis of the Holy Cross. Catholic conservatives will not be surprised by these endorsers, but media coverage has contrasted high-level Catholic support for the Call to harsh criticism of the Christian Coalition by some Catholic leaders.
SNIP
Cafferty was joined by Wallis and other Call founders, including Baptist evangelist Tony Campolo, who seemed to summarize the Call's objective when he said, "We want to change the purpose of evangelism. . . Political issues are at the heart of the Christian faith. We thank them [the Religious Right] for making America aware that politics is religious." Campolo, whom President Clinton has cited as one of his ten most admired preachers, pledged that the Call's "progressive evangelical caucus" would "avoid Left and Right" while advocating community programs to battle "gay-bashing, racism, and poverty." He said they would seek "reconciliation and not polarization."
SNIP
"The National Council of Churches has gotten a warm reception from the Clinton administration. I welcome it," said Granberg-Michaelson. "Clinton is a Bible-believing Baptist who has been vilified by fellow Christians. . .
Jim Wallis
http://tinyurl.com/q4efy
Wallis was a founder of Sojourners - Christians for justice and peace - more than 30 years ago and continues to serve as the editor of Sojourners magazine
Wallis is part of evangelicalism's left wing, which finds acceptance in such places as Regent College at the University of BC, the Mennonite Central Committee, Atlantic Baptist University and, to a lesser extent, Trinity Western University.
******
The Right has been allowed to hijack faith and moral values, argues the editor of Sojourners. It's high time the Democrats got religion.
http://tinyurl.com/ljtnx
Jim Wallis, editor of the leftish religious magazine Sojourners, whose new book, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, argues that Democrats, if they ever want to win an election, must learn how to talk about moral values, indeed, to talk the language of moral values, in a way that remains true to the party’s principles.
Meet the "new faith adviser" for Democrats
Jim Wallis is a Christian leader for social change. He is a speaker, author, activist, and international commentator on ethics and public life. Wallis was a founder of Sojourners - Christians for justice and peace - more than 30 years ago and continues to serve as the editor of Sojourners magazine, covering faith, politics and culture. In 1995, Wallis was instrumental in forming Call to Renewal, a national federation of churches, denominations, and faith-based organizations from across the theological and political spectrum working to overcome poverty.
Wallis also talks about the president's personal faith and how he is putting that faith into action. He worries that after 9/11, the president seemed to turn from being a "self-help Methodist" to a "Messianic American Calvinist speaking of the mission of America, and even of his perhaps divine appointment to be president at a time such as this." Wallis also criticizes the religious language and hymnology used in the president's speeches which is "often misused or often put in a different context and the meaning changed."
Too many evangelical Christians are like affluent, upper-middle class suburban dwellers more than they are like those who love and cherish and follow the Bible.
Now, they think they are. They believe they are. They love the Bible. But they're not paying attention to whole vast areas of biblical teaching that call for economic justice. You can't be evangelical and associate yourself with Jesus and what he says about the poor and just have no other domestic concerns than tax cuts for wealthy people.
I mean, these are good people. But this is not biblical thinking. What's changing -- and it is changing all over the country -- is a new generation of evangelicals are discovering the poor in the Bible.
http://tinyurl.com/zxn9a
Wallis got married late in life: he's almost 60, and his two little sons are 2 and 6 years old. I thought that would make him more pro-life: paternal surges of love and protective feelings for babies often transform good men into vocal prolife advocates. It hasn't seemed to happen with him.
In fact, for the past 25 years I have not read or heard of one more instance of the Sojourners crew either writing or speaking out against the killing of children before they are born.
I have heard that he is still sorta kinda against abortion, and also against same-sex marriage, but he never alludes to this except to argue that the Big Bad Right "uses" the abortion and gay issues to maximize political coalitions, money and votes, and for no other reason.
A number of the supporters of Wallis' "Call to Renewal" organization are nominally opposed to abortion, but you only hear about it in the context of bashing conservative prolifers. All the time saying they "hate labels" and seek "reconciliation and not polarization."
I don't know how he can be so cynical. I don't understand it. I had truly expected better from him.
Wallis along with Ron Sider and Tony Campolo (sp?) were regarded as heroes of faith by many Asian Christians. I grew up under that environment with Bible teachers and Christian weiters exhorting that they are where Christians should stand in politics.
I have always opposed Communism and supported war against terrorists/rogue states and at one time the teachings by these Christians made me wonder if I were being theologically liberal. This belief accelerated when I came to New Zealand and understand free market works in practice while the welfare state doesn't. Eventually I came in contact with more mainstream American evangelical Christian thinkers and conservative pundits with Catholic backgrounds that made me realize that the Asian Christian stand, rather than free market, is in error.
"Jim Wallis is a leftist Liberation Theologian who wants a Socialist Theocracy."
I concur. I would imagine Wallis wants a society that is just like Maoist China or Brezhnev-era Soviet Union, but with Christianity (preferably Mennonite) rather than atheist Marxism as the state religion, banning all porn, abortions, gay marriages and drugs, and no military as a reflection of their pacifism.
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