Soros Funding of Sojourners is Only The Tip of the Iceberg

Acton Institute ^ | 8/26/2010 | Jonathan Witt

[markomalley]

I blogged about the Jim Wallis funding controversy here and here. Now Jay Richards, a former Acton fellow, has more at NRO, beginning with a look at Wallis’s “clarification” of his earlier denials:

Note that Wallis does not apologize for falsely accusing Marvin Olasky of “lying for a living.” Instead, he blames his own misrepresentation of the truth on the “spirit of the accusation.”

The “clarification” of his earlier statement is equally unsatisfying. First, Wallis is still trying to claim that his organization transcends the Manichean political divide of left and right. They just do “biblical social justice,” he insists. But again, as I show in much more detail elsewhere, Wallis and Sojourners regularly couple strained, narrow readings of scriptural texts and a vaguely Marxist economic foundation to arrive at political and economic positions that are well left of center and far afield of a far more nuanced charity and justice tradition stretching back through almost 2,000 years of orthodox Christian thought.

Second, it’s implausible for Wallis to claim that grants between 2004 and 2007 totaling $325,000 are “the tiniest fraction” of Sojourners’ funding. Worse, the three grants from Soros’s Open Society Institute are only the tip of the iceberg. Based on publicly-available 990s, I’ve discovered that Sojourners received at least forty-nine separate foundation grants between 2003 and 2009, totaling $2,159,346. Not one of these is from a discernibly conservative foundation. Very few are from discernibly Christian foundations.

To be clear, the problem isn’t that Sojourners is less than apolitical. It’s that Wallis persists in claiming that Sojourners doesn’t rest anywhere on the political spectrum, and isn’t heavily funded by members of the secular left. Sojourners is a left-wing organization, and it should be judged in no small measure by the success or failure of its left-wing ideas in the course of world and American history.

UPDATE: The Weekly Standard also has a new article on the controversy, which includes a summary of Wallis’s ideological journey beginning in the 1960s:

Unlike Cizik, Wallis was grudging in his admission of a Soros connection. Cizik over the years has shifted from right to left, so his affiliation with Ted Turner, and then Soros, seem natural. Wallis began as a campus radical with the Students for a Democratic Society, touted the Sandinistas during the 1980s, and denounced Clinton for signing Welfare Reform in 1996. But over the last decade Wallis has reinvented a new, cuddlier image as the graying, post-ideological prophet who shuns temporal political labels. When evangelicals became an especially key constituency during the George W. Bush years, Wallis rediscovered and advertised his evangelical roots, though he generally avoids theological self-revelation and describes his evangelical beliefs in political terms. Appealing to evangelical colleges and suburban mega-church yuppies, Wallis probably prefers not to become known as George Soros’s favorite evangelical activist.

[Kansas58]

got it, sorry, very tired.

[stephenjohnbanker]

” (Of course, if I take this anywhere, I am going to call it the “Foreign Agents Registration and Propaganda Act” it sounds better, don’t you think?)”

It lends a certain air of dignity to it ;-)

[CutePuppy]

George Soros recently sold its entire Petrobras stake, to help finance the purchase of 4% stake in Bombay Stock Exchange. Buying and selling of non-US listed companies, including ADRs on US stock exchanges, is not required to be registered on the SEC forms.

Soros Fund Management LLC (888 7th Avenue, 33rd floor, New York, NY 10106)

Title	Name	Age
Chairman	George Soros	80
Deputy Chairman	Robert Soros	45
Deputy Chairman and President	Jonathan Soros	38
Chief Operating Officer	Abbas F. (Eddy) Zuaiter	43

Abbas F. "Eddy" Zuaiter is a member of the Boards of Directors of the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) and Middle East Institute (MEI). His brother Ahmad F. Zuaiter (42) is also a high ranking executive in Soros Fund Management. Their youngest brother Waleed F. Zuaiter is a Hollywood actor; he had small roles in 2008 BBC mini-series House of Saddam, series The Unit, NCIS and Lie To Me.

[Kansas58]

Thank you!