A book review in Salon has made me very thoughtful this morning about the current intersection of religion and politics and about my own philosophical journey. (Thanks to Stumpy for passing this on.) In a review posted two days ago in Salon, Elizabeth Castelli reviewed the new book by Jim Wallis, famous "moderate" evangelical editor of Sojourners -- "God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It." Castelli praises Wallis for reaffirming that "the moral" in our political culture should include a good deal more than posturing on abortion and homosexuality, but she also castigates Wallis for practicing an exclusionary habit of mind that associates "religion" with Christianity alone.

Wallis is an evangelical Christian who holds high the goal of social and political justice. Though I've never met him, I know him like a brother. I was in college with several Jim Wallises and was in fact a Jim Wallis myself, participating in "missions" to the poorest of the poor in West Texas, the Mexican families who did stoop labor for big (and little) farmers. I went on those missions ostensibly as an evangelizing Christian, believing at some level that accepting Jesus Christ as personal savior would somehow cure their poverty and the injustice that was inherent in their lives (accepting Christ for them, in our baby Baptist eyes, meant one thing: renouncing Catholicism, which was tantamount in our world to devil worship).

But something else animated my own resolve to make life better for Mexican "braceros." I grew up only a half-step ahead of them socially, mainly because (and only because) I was "white." I understood in my gut the social calculus of rich and poor, and the gorge could rise like a tsunami in me at the sight of injustice. I saw prejudice close up on the school yard. I heard it around me every day. I came to hate upper-class smugness and to despise "race" privilege. My God was not the God of institutional injustice, and He sustained me.

Now around me and on every side I hear the "Christian" voices proclaim that God has not only ordained the United States of America but this particular regime now running it, that everything this president does must be right because God has chosen him and because he is a "moral" man. I hear the Rev. Pat Robertson, not at all unrepresentative of the beefeaters in the ministry very comfortable in the company of power and privilege, saying that God has told him that He is going to help the Republicans lower taxes on the rich and "reform" social security. I hear callers on C-SPAN both denying the injustices of war and then applauding them, denying torture ever took place and then applauding the strong Christian warriorhood that isn't afraid to do "what has to be done" to keep God's kingdom on earth the bright and shining city on a hill.

And as I write this, Alberto Gonzales is on TV trying his best to blow back the swirling cesspool that has formed an eddy around this super-Christian in the Oval Office. Whatever faults Jim Wallis may have as an evangelical critic of this evangelical president, I'm glad he's come out with this book. More true Christian voices need to be raised against the rich pharisees who have highjacked our public policy, who threaten to highjack our Constitution.