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During the 2004 presidential campaign, when the role of religion in politics became a hot topic, one voice in particular represented the religious liberal point of view. The Rev. Jim Wallis, editor-in-chief of Sojourners magazine and a founder of the faith-based antipoverty organization Call to Renewal, appeared on countless TV and radio shows to debate religion and politics with leaders of the religious right. His new best-selling book, "God's Politics," further considers the topics he debated during the campaign. Wallis recently spoke with Beliefnet about ways to incorporate liberal religious positions into politics, the values-based issues religious people should care most about, and his outlook on the role of faith in politics during the next four years.

Q. There was a lot of discussion after the election about the moral values vote. What values did people vote on?

A. It's funny--a flawed exit poll has shaped a national conversation. I call it flawed because one choice was moral values. The others were about issues like Iraq and terrorism and then the economy, health care, jobs. But if I was a religious voter who cared about the war, I would have checked Iraq, and it would have been a moral value. If I were a Catholic coordinator of a food pantry, I would have checked the closest thing I could find to poverty, which would have been jobs or health care or the economy.

So if you take the issues like war and terrorism and group them as values, that was about 33% as opposed to 22% for moral values. If the economy, health care, and jobs are all values, it was about the same. A Zogby poll about a week later confirmed that intuition. It asked, What was the biggest moral issue in your voting? Forty-two percent said the war in Iraq. Then they said, what's the greatest moral crisis in America today? Something like 33% said greed and materialism. And 31% said poverty and economic jobs. So that's 64% saying that poverty, greed, materialism ... continue reading >

To say, as some have, that the 2004 presidential election was won and lost on "moral values" is probably an overstatement. It's nevertheless true that among church-going, God-fearing types who think the country has lost its moral bearings, George W. Bush enjoyed vastly more support than did his rival, John Kerry. Is there a lesson here for the Democrats?

Yes, there is, according to 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.

The American Right has been able to define “moral values” narrowly, almost exclusively in terms of wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage. It doesn't have to be this way, Wallis argues. Drawing on more than 30 years of work combating poverty, as well as an intimate knowledge of the Bible, Wallis, an evangelical Christian, argues that moral values encompass actions and attitudes toward a host of issues, including poverty, the environment, criminal justice and war.

Through a conversational combination of first-person stories, news analysis, statistics and old fashion preaching (on the written page), Wallis paints a very different picture of what religion means than the one President Bush and many of his supporters have in mind. ...

What does the Right get wrong?

The Right is comfortable with the language of religion, values, God talk. So much so that they sometimes claim to own that territory. Or own God. But then they narrow everything down to one or two issues: abortion and gay marriage.

I am an evangelical Christian, and I can’t ignore thousands of verses in the Bible on [another] subject, which is poverty. I say at every stop, “Fighting poverty’s a moral value, too.” There’s a whole ge ... continue reading >