The good fight: how much longer can the religious left remain politically neutral?

• Author: Sullivan, Amy
• Position: God's Politics - Book Review

God's Politics

By Jim Wallis

Harper San Francisco, $24.95

Let us read, brothers and sisters, from the Gospel of Karl, chapter 20, verse 4. "And lo, in those days, the man they called Rove did proclaim, 'I shall find those lost four million evangelical voters and I shall shepherd them to the polls.' The call went far and wide, throughout the lands of wheat and sugar, in every hill and valley, and the people did hear. They phone-banked, and caucused, and lobbied their neighbors about capital gains tax cuts. And on the first Tuesday of the eleventh month, they voted?'

By now, it's become gospel truth that the mobilization of religious conservatives won the 2004 election for George W. Bush. The grassroots base rallied around hot-button issues like gay marriage while the president conducted a more moderate campaign nationwide, and they provided a cushion of votes in the red states that drove up his popular vote total. Amid the flurry of activity on the religious right that preceded Election Day, what was the religious left doing?

Well, here's a taste. On the morning of Nov. 1, the day before the election--a highly competitive presidential election--I opened my inbox to see a press release from the once-venerable National Council of Churches (NCC), an umbrella organization for liberal, mainline denominations. Religious organizations-like other non-profits--are subject to all manner of complicated rules regarding how political they can be, particularly in the weeks before an election. Even so, I expected a pre-election press release to have some bearing on the decision facing the country. I was wrong. "NCC Urges U.S. to Accept Responsibility for Uighur Chinese Refugees at Guantanamo," read the headline. I have no doubt that advocacy on behalf of Chinese Muslim prisoners is a worthy cause; I also have no doubt that it confirms the irrelevance of the once-powerful religious left.

Which is why the recent emergence of Jim Wallis as the public face of the religious left has been such a welcome development for many progressives who are also people of faith. An ordained minister in the American Baptist Church, Wallis is the founder of Sojourners magazine and the progressive movement Call to Renewal. In the last few months he has faced Tim Russert's queries on "Meet the Press," chatted up Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show," discussed poverty with Charlie Rose, and mused about faith and politics with Terry Gross on NPR's "Fresh Air" And now he's released his latest book, God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, which debuted on The New York Times' bestseller list and in the number two slot on Amazon.com. Wallis's...