Jim Wallis on Morals and Values -- Sightings

Over the past decade or so we've been told that the Republican Party is the party of morals and values.  The definition of these words is focused on two issues -- abortion and homosexuality.  Since the platform of the GOP opposes abortion and gay marriage, they get the moniker of the Party of Moral Values.  But, is that the only way to define the words?

Jim Wallis and other like-minded Evangelicals have long disputed the narrowness of that definition, and Jim now has a new book out that explores the issue of money and finance and its effects on society -- as a moral issue.

In today's Sightings piece, Martin Marty reports on a conversation with Jim and the message that Jim gives to society.  I welcome your responses to the esteemed historians ruminations!

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Sightings 2/1/10

Jim Wallis on Values and Morals

-- Martin E. Marty

In 1957, young Harvard-bred historian Timothy Smith, of the Church of the Nazarene, knocked a lot of us budding ordinary historians – secular, “mainstream,” and whatnot – off our library stools with his book Revivalism and Social Reform.  We had been trained to look for the roots of American social Christianity in the liberal Protestant Social Gospel (post-1907) and progressive Catholicism (post-1919).  Smith back-dated such movements by a half-century, to revivals around 1857, which, he argued, added concern for morality and ethics in the social order to the private-and-personal moral agenda of older evangelicalism.  Having fought against dueling, profanity, Sunday mails, et cetera, these revivalists found new ways to address slavery, poverty, and inequality.  Imperfect, they did chart a course.

           

Smith died in 1997, but historians in his train often remind us of how things were back when evangelicals were evangelical and not Evangelical, as if a quasi-political party.  These years their ancient cause – dated from the eighth century before Christ, among the Hebrew prophets – is revived on many fronts.  This week we will sight one of them, Jim Wallis’s Sojourners, which we have been reading for two-score years.  This is not a blurb for the magazine – Sightings sights, it does not blurb – but it is time we put into print (or online) some notice of the kind of concern it’s shown through the decades.  Jim and a colleague dropped by the other for day a chat, in the week when he’d made a repeat visit to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and we made up a bit for lost time.

           

The Martys welcome all kinds of company, even someone like Wallis, whom Christian anti-Communist Crusaders (there are still such) call “pro-Marxist, pro-Communist, even pro-Socialist,” the third of which is a term applied to anyone to the left of Genghis Khan these days.  Wallis was on a book tour for his new Rediscovering Values on Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street: A Moral Compass for the New Economy.  This is not a blurb for the book – Sightings sights, it does not blurb – but he gave us a theme for the week, as did a chapter from the book in the February Sojourners.  His choice of words like “Values” and “Morals” instead of “Biblical” or “Christian” may enlarge the zone of discourse, but he has not left his evangelicalism behind.

           

Wallis has always been puzzled by the way some Evangelicals specialize in quoting the six biblical verses which refer or may refer to homosexuality, but consider it out of bounds for believers to notice the six hundred or six thousand that reference Mammon, money, riches-and-poverty.  Like the ancient prophets, he names names:  not Edom and Moab, Assyria and Babylon, but Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Citigroup, which, bailed out with the public’s money, had rewarded themselves at the time he wrote with $8.66 billion (that’s eight thousand six hundred and sixty million) in bonuses, while, Wallis adds, “the average bank teller at Bank of America makes only $10.75 an hour – just over $22,000 a year.”

           

He notices that the financial services industry spent $223 million lobbying Congress to fight any regulations or restrictions.  (He wrote that before the recent Supreme Court decision that will allow the banking industry and others to advertise and lobby and influence Congress in amounts that will make that $223 million look like peanuts.)  You get the idea.  Next week Sightings may be back to appraising our moral framework from a Crypto-Capitalist viewpoint.  After all, we’ll now have to do something compensatory lest this column get typed as – gasp! – not “prophetic” but – sh-h-h-h! – populist.

References:

Watch Stewart and Wallis:  http://www.hulu.com/watch/122028/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-jim-wallis.

Sojourners is online at www.sojo.net.

Martin E. Marty's biography, current projects, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com. 

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In 2010's first edition of the Religion and Culture Web Forum ("The Uses and Misuses of Polytheism and Monotheism in Hinduism"), Wendy Doniger explores the complex nature of Hindu theology and its relationship to historical and political issues by focusing on a simple question: "Is Hinduism monotheistic or polytheistic?"  Her answer offers intriguing implications for the distinction between theological identities of "one" and "many" in Hinduism and--as respondents with expertise in other theological traditions reflect--beyond.  With invited responses from Martin Marty, Willemien Otten, Katherine E. Ulrich, and Ananya Vajpeyi.  http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/webforum/index.shtml  

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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.