Gary North

May 7, 2009

Jim Wallis is at it again. He is not alone. In the first week of May, Left-wing Christian activists descended on the nation's Capitol to lobby Congress to use the power of the State to take money from taxpayers to hand over to the activists' constituents.

This used to be called robbing Peter to pay Paul. It still should be.

Mr. Wallis has described the affair with enthusiasm.

There were some remarkable outcomes to last week's Mobilization to End Poverty, with nearly 50 sponsors and partners. The week's events brought together Christian leaders and grassroots activists committed to overcoming poverty -- both domestically and internationally. Here are some of the statistics from the event: There were 1,153 people who attended, from 44 states (and The District of Columbia) and six countries.

When there is free money to be had, you can gather quite a crowd.

We all know how busy President Obama's schedule is, but he was kind enough to send a personal video, which was presented the first morning of the Mobilization, thanking the activists from the faith community for coming to Washington and for what they do back home. To further highlight the administration's sense of the importance of the event, the video was followed by a panel discussion with top White House staff working on the anti-poverty agenda. . . .

When you are buying votes, but the assembled groups don't have many votes, you send some low-level representatives and a DVD.

The next day we went to Capitol Hill for an advocacy day. Faith leaders got appointments in the offices of 82 senators and 210 representatives! That is almost unheard of for one group in one day. Our advocacy teams urged Congress to commit to reducing poverty by half in the next 10 years, fully funding the foreign assistance budget, and supporting health care reform. At a rousing afternoon rally, five members of the Senate or House came to speak to us, including the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.

When you have enormous faith in political deliverance -- cutting poverty in half in 10 years, 45 years after Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty -- you go right to "deliverance central": Congress. Those at the top, who also believe in political deliverance, are always happy to cooperate.

Given Sojourners' firm commitment to progressive evangelicalism, we were delighted to see the growth in folks who self-identify in this way. It was also delightful to see a much larger percentage of the younger generation than many of our previous conferences, as well as greater racial and ethnic diversity than ever before.

Note: the phrase progressive evangelicalism means the Social Gospel of the Progressive movement. It is the patched flat tire of the theological Left wing, which has been preaching the gospel of economic deliverance by the State since about 1885. So far, no deliverance.

We are firmly committed to a series of follow-up steps that will make it clear that the Mobilization was another big step in our campaign to overcome poverty. That goal must become a bipartisan commitment and a nonpartisan cause, a vision that was clearly seen last week in all those who came to Washington. Some issues transcend politics, but we need good political strategy to see results. And that was a real part of the outcome of the Mobilization to End Poverty.

Hope springs eternal in the hearts of faith-based believers in economic salvation by politics. It springs eternal because reality does not cooperate -- political reality and economic reality.

My favorite story from the week was that of a poor young woman who had been sexually trafficked in a major East Coast city. And when civic crusaders closed the brothel where she lived, she became homeless. But she got hooked up with one of our partner groups in that city, and they brought her to the Mobilization.

I wish Mr. Wallis knew what "hooked up" means in 2009. In 2001, America's most observant social commentator, Tom Wolfe, published Hooking Up. In chapter 1, he explained the phrase.

"Hooking up" was a term known in the year 2000 to almost every American child over the age of nine, but to only a relatively small percentage of their parents, who, even if they heard it, thought it was being used in the old sense of "meeting" someone. Among the children, hooking up was always a sexual experience, but the nature and extent of what they did could vary widely. Back in the twentieth century, American girls had used baseball terminology. "First base" referred to embracing and kissing; "second base" referred to groping and fondling and deep, or "French," kissing, commonly known as "heavy petting"; "third base" referred to fellatio, usually known in polite conversation by the ambiguous term "oral sex"; and "home plate" meant conception-mode intercourse, known familiarly as "going all the way." In the year 2000, in the era of hooking up, "first base" meant deep kissing ("tonsil hockey"), groping, and fondling; "second base" meant oral sex; "third base" meant going all the way; and "home plate" meant learning each other's names.

You can read Mr. Wallis' article here:

For a detailed look at Mr. Wallis and his theology of What Would Jesus Steal?, click here:

http://www.garynorth.com/public/department61.cfm