Jim Wallis Talks About "God's Politics" and Values...
by Which Wallis Doesn't Mean Hate, Greed, and War Mongering
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/05/02/int05008.html"...religion has to be disciplined by democracy. That means you don’t enter the public square and say I’m religious so I ought to win. Or God has spoken to me directly and I have the fix for Social Security. You say my faith motivates me. It shapes my convictions or it compels me to act on behalf of the poor, or peace, or whatever."
(snip)
"Lincoln got it right. We don’t claim God’s blessing on our politics and policies. We don’t claim that God is on our side. We worry, we pray, we just always examine ourselves to see if we are on God’s side. And if Lincoln got it right, I think Martin Luther King did it best. With that Bible in one hand and the Constitution in the other hand, he really didn’t pronounce, he persuaded. He didn’t shut people out; he invited everybody in to a moral discourse on politics. And he said we can do better. We can do better than this by our democratic values, by our religious values.
We have to ask what kind of people do we want to be, what kind of nation do we want to have, what kind of world do you want to leave for our children. And when every major progressive social movement in our nation’s history was fueled and driven in part by religion, by faith, by moral values, we have a very powerful, prophetic and progressive religious tradition in America and around the world.
I think of my friends – Desmond Tutu in South Africa and Oscar Romero in El Salvador, the Archbishop there set against the junta and the U.S.-supported military dictatorship – and all these movements around the world where religion has been progressive."
http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/05/02/int05008.html