Religious youth push new political agenda

CNS: A roll of stickers used at a 2006 march of nearly 700 people of faith to launch the "Covenant for a New America," led by the Rev. Jim WallisNot long ago, if the words religion and voting came together in the same sentence, chances are the topic was a certain kind of religious voter: a Protestant evangelical or conservative Catholic driven to political activism by opposition to legal abortion and qualms about homosexuality.

The days of the easy label may be over.

In this election season, the religious right, the umbrella term long applied to that predictable religious Republican voter, once ubiquitous on the airwaves and in print, has seemingly vanished from the scene. The two hot-button issues that have dominated so much of U.S. politics in recent years have likewise receded, giving ground to such other issues more readily associated with a liberal agenda: war, poverty, the environment and human rights.

This rearrangement of the political landscape, this “leveling of the praying field,” as TIME magazine has termed it, is largely the work of a new generation of evangelicals -- young people who don’t fit comfortably into the old political-religious mold and aren’t necessarily aligned with a party.

AP Photo/Will Shilling: The Rev. Jim Wallis answers a question during a debate on the role of faith in politics in Columbus, Ohio, in March 2006.The Rev. Jim Wallis, head of Sojourners community in Washington, an expert in the new electoral dynamics, and one of the architects of a broader religious/political conversation, attributes the changes to nothing less than “the Spirit.”

“We can discuss some of the historical factors” in the changes underway, he said in an April 29 phone interview with NCR, “but I do think it feels like some sort of Spirit movement going on.”

Wallis -- an evangelical Christian who’s had his differences with the religious right -- finds an indicator in the huge attendance at his recent book signings: They have been drawing thousands. His latest book, recently released -- The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America -- argues that the religious right experiment is at an end. That book and his previous one, the New York Times bestseller God’s Politics, articulate a “seamless garment” political framework, one that opposes not only abortion, but also a range of other assaults against human dignity, including poverty, the death penalty and modern warfare.

Wallis believes that the unusual enthusiasm among young evangelicals and Catholics for that broader agenda is nothing less than a deepening faith insisting on a voice.

“The only way I can explain the success of God’s Politics,” he said, is “that all kinds of people out there were already feeling, ‘Wait a minute, I’m a person of faith, too, and those voices [on the religious right] don’t speak for me.’ Or ‘I care about moral values, too, and I’ve got more than just two.’ Because when you get a couple thousand people at a book signing night after night, you know it’s not about a book. It’s about the timing of this.”

The week before the interview, Wallis conducted a “justice revival” in Columbus, Ohio, in conjunction with 15 denominations. Some 10,000 participants showed up each night, half of them under 30. The revival included a traditional call to conversion, but “conversion to the Jesus who … invites us into a journey of relationship with those he calls the least of these,” Wallis said.

“It wasn’t just a call to the social gospel,” said Wallis. “It was a call to personal faith that issues forth in social justice, because if we just preach the social gospel and don’t talk about the faith, they will burn out, they will tire, they will get discouraged.”

Wallis reports an upsurge in interest in social issues when he visits campuses too. A decade ago, he stopped visiting college campuses, finding a lack of interest. These days, he speaks regularly at college events.

In part, he said, the enthusiasm reflects a generation that is more global in outlook and experience than earlier generations. Many young evangelicals have been to other countries, Wallis said, and observed other cultures. They’ve also gone beyond their home towns in this country.

A month ago, for instance, Wallis visited New Orleans and became aware of the tens of thousands of people, members of church groups, who had traveled -- and continue to travel -- to that city to help rebuild after Hurricane Katrina.

“What that taught me is that New Orleans and the Gulf Coast had become a converting field, kind of a sacred ground for teaching people to be Christian. Multiply that to all the other places these young people are going. I go to a lot of Protestant evangelical schools and a lot of Jesuit schools, and all of this is happening at these schools. They are seeing things and doing things and experiencing things that they never did before.”

If this youthful enthusiasm does indeed spring from faith, Wallis believes the Spirit got some help from “the failure of the religious right as a project, as a movement over decades.

“It’s failed even to deliver on their issues to their constituencies, and I think it is now being perceived by many people as way too partisan, way too much in the pocket of one political party.”

Wallis is not alone noting the shift. ABC News, in a February story, reported that “a younger generation of evangelical Christians is coming of age -- and as they head to the polls, they are breaking from their parents and focusing on a broader range of issues than just abortion and gay marriage.”

Even earlier, in 2006, Public Television noted in a special report on younger evangelicals that the environment and poverty had moved to the top of the list of young evangelicals’ concerns. “There is tremendous strife within evangelical groups in terms of what issues should be collectively prioritized,” said Paul Froese, a sociologist of religion at Baylor University.

Interest in a broader agenda is now associated not only with young progressive evangelicals, Wallis said, but also with “young people who are in the inner circles of those religious right organizations.” The insiders are coming to his events “and they’re telling me things like, ‘If they keep making us focus on just two issues, they’re going to miss our whole generation.’ ”

Wallis cites the failure of the Bush administration on a number of fronts for the drift of conservative evangelicals away from the Republican Party. The Bush administration was supposed to be the one that delivered for the religious right.

Bush, after all, “was considered one of them,” said Wallis. But from Katrina to Iraq, the administration has brought major disenchantment to legions who expected otherwise -- “people who thought this administration was going to be the fulfillment of a lot of their goals and dreams.”

But if this new breed of evangelical is leaving the Republican Party “in droves,” they aren’t necessarily turning up in the camp of liberal Democrats either, he said. Most remain strongly opposed to abortion, though somewhat less concerned about homosexuality than their parents or grandparents, while expanding their concerns to other issues.

In researching his latest book, Wallis became more certain than ever of a conviction he’s had, and that he now passes on to young audiences: that social movements, not politicians, bring change.

And more and more, he thinks he’s seeing the beginnings of what’s ahead.

It’s evangelicals and it’s Catholics and it’s anyone else standing on the spiritual foundations of today’s social justice concerns who are setting a new moral agenda for the country.

And to date, it’s got no label.

Tom Roberts is NCR news director. His e-mail address is troberts@ncronline.org.

National Catholic Reporter May 16, 2008