Democrats Turn to Leader of Religious Left

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/17/politics/17wallis.html

Democrats Turn to Leader of Religious Left
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

emocrats, reeling from the Republicans' success at courting churchgoers, are focusing new attention on a religious and political anomaly: Jim Wallis, one of the few prominent left-leaning leaders among evangelical Protestants.

At the start of the Congressional session, Senate Democrats invited Mr. Wallis to address their members at a private session to discuss issues. A group of about 15 House Democrats invited him to a breakfast discussion about dispelling their party's secular image. And NBC News has enlisted him to appear as a guest during its inauguration coverage opposite Dr. James C. Dobson, one of the most prominent evangelical conservatives.

Last week, Mr. Wallis's publisher, a religious imprint of HarperCollins, released his new book, "God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It," moving it up from a publication date this spring to coincide with the inauguration. It immediately jumped to the top of the best-seller list at Amazon.com, where it hovered between No. 2 and No. 7 over the weekend.

Mr. Wallis, the founder and editor of the Christian magazine Sojourners, has written two previous books on similar themes, "Who Speaks for God?" and "The Soul of Politics," without making much of a splash, but since the November presidential election he has drawn a new level of attention, especially from Democrats and liberals.

"Failure makes you reassess," he said. "The Democratic Party has increasingly had a problem as being perceived as secular fundamentalists."

James P. Manley, a spokesman for the Senate minority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said the reason Mr. Reid, a Mormon, had invited Mr. Wallis to speak was obvious. "It is clear from the results of the election that we Democrats need to be much more forceful and clear in communicating their faith and values to the electorate," Mr. Manley said.

"He can help us communicate with the rising number of evangelicals in the country, which is right now a Republican constituency," Mr. Manley said, "but which Wallis argues could easily become part of the Democratic constituency as well."

Mr. Wallis, a registered Democrat, told the senators that the Bible contains more than 3,000 references to alleviating poverty. He said Democrats needed to do a better job of explaining the moral and religious foundations of policies intended to help the poor, protect the environment and reduce violence.

He also urged the Democrats to look for middle ground on the social issues most troubling to religious traditionalists, like obscenity and abortion. Whatever their stance on abortion rights, he argued, Democrats need to treat its occurrence as a moral problem and propose ways to reduce it. <snip>

A few days later, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts echoed some of the same themes in a speech, calling for the party to "speak more directly to the issues of deep conscience" and emphasizing efforts to lower the abortion rate while preserving abortion rights.
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WORKFARE NOT WELFARE----no such thing as a free lunch

Stands for sojourner's.net I get weekly updates from their site. Before the election they ran an ad in some major newspapers stating "God is not a Republican. Or a Democrat."

He's a good man. I agree with most of what he says. It's very refreshing to find a Christian Left exists.

:-)

Go, look and see where the little shacks that peddle porn are located. They're everywhere, from sea to shining sea. I definitely notice them more along the Interstates in Red States.

Frankly, I don't see abortion as a moral problem, it's a medical problem. I indeed want to see as few abortions as possible, just as I would like to see ANY surgical procedure minimized. An abortion is not a haircut. That means you teach kids about contraception, and as Woody Allen says, the most effective method of oral contraception is saying no. Realistically though, when you try to teach people the alternatives to abortion you get Right Wingers getting red in the face about teaching sex. Of course, they want us to teach children that the world was made in six days and that any evidence to the contrary was planted by some evil goat-like creature.........