In a letter to all members of Congress (September 23, 2005), Jim Wallis calls on Congress to use the power of the State to solve problems of the poor.
He is using a disaster imposed by the combined forces of nature and civil government to push his official agenda: more Federal government spending on the poor. This agenda inescapably means more salaries and perks for the middle-class civil servants who administer these programs in the name of the poor.
He says that "we" have failed. But there is hope for "us." He offers "us" a form of social redemption. And who should do this for "us"? The 100 Senators and 435 Representatives to whom he sent his form letter.
The stunning images from New Orleans and the battered Gulf Coast revealed that we have failed the poorest in our nation, but we now have an opportunity to recover their trust and recapture part of the American spirit. As one of our nation's political leaders, you have the ability to lead in that effort.
The poor have dealt with salaried government bureaucrats all of their lives. How can anyone still believe that the poor are not onto the game, how they are the pawns in a power grab by white middle-class special-interest groups and Congress?
Poverty is no longer out of public sight. We have all seen the pictures of those who were left behind in Hurricane Katrina because they had been left out in America. And we pray for those who may face a similar fate as Hurricane Rita approaches Texas. What was hidden and mostly invisible is now flashing across our television screens. Our collective silence has been broken and the media have begun to talk about poor people and tell their stories more than any time in years. There are no longer any excuses for not knowing or caring.
All Americans know there are poor people. They have heard nothing else from vote-seeking liberal politicians since about 1933. Year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation, Washington and state governments extract taxes with the promise that this extraction will end poverty in America. It never does. More to the point, it never will. Only one thing has ever removed the burden of poverty: the free market, with its system of invested capital. This fact Jim Wallis never mentions.
Mr. Wallis has adopted Jesse Jackson's sing-song alliteration -- all in the name of abandoning rhetoric.
It is time to move from sound bites to sound vision; from debates to dialogue; from rhetoric to results.
Jesse can get away with this. White guys my age can't. As I read this, I got a mental picture of crew-cut, gray-haired Jim Wallis with a rapper's du-rag around his head. Why, it's Snoop Doggy Jim!
Then he says that there is a grass-roots movement of religious leaders from all spectrums. Who these people are, he does not say. He never says in his book, either. It is all rather vague -- no statistics, no opinion polls, no position papers published by growing denominations or congregations. Yet he asks Congress to believe that these leaders exist, and that they are a political force to be reckoned with. They are growning in number. He insists that they are getting stronger.
For some time now, religious leaders from across the theological and political spectrum have been standing together against poverty. Even before the current disaster, we have been learning to set aside other differences to lift up a vision for compassion and justice for those our nation and world has forgotten, the ones that Jesus called "the least of these." There is now a deep convergence among religious leaders, including conservative evangelicals; Catholic bishops; mainline Protestants; black, Hispanic, and Asian Christians; Jewish rabbis; Muslim imams, and many others. Our voice is growing stronger, but political action by national leaders is now needed to honor our nation's moral convictions.
Jim Wallis simply cannot accept this statistical fact: the Social Gospel has been dying a long, slow death for a generation. It has been on life-support ever since Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty turned out to be a massive failure. Poverty went up, not down, as Charles Murray showed so clearly in his book, Losing Ground. It was published in 1984, but Jim Wallis seems to be unaware of its existence or its evidence. A generation later, the welfare state state's programs are still losing ground.
What is to be done? The government has to spend more tax money, he says. So does the private sector. In fact, an entire cultural transformation is required.
Leaders from all sectors of society must acknowledge that a combination of public and private initiatives will be required to help the less fortunate. It will require changes in culture as much as changes in policy.
He used the same arguments and rhetoric in his recent book, God's Politics. Katrina is clearly a conventient bullhorn to amplify the same old arguments. He is using Katrina to promote his agenda. When it comes to offering reasons for more taxes, his motto is: "Any storm in a port."
It will take a moral and even religious imperative to change our priorities but the time has come to do so.
When seeking a source for a moral and religious imperative, Jim Wallis always heads for the seats of political power. For him, the coercive power of the State is the first and crucial lever of moral and religious transformation -- with a little help from a hurricane or two.
He says that the government must restore dignity to the poor. How? By offering more handouts. For believers in the Social Gospel, the first step in restoring a poor man's lost dignity is to put him on the government dole, to let him know that the government has forced others to pony up the funds. "We stuck a gun in a fat cat's belly and got this money for you, so that you can have a little dignity." Jim Wallis sees Congress as running a late-night infomercial. "Call 1-800-DIGNITY. Our telephone operators are standing by."
Just as we will be sensitive to needs now in the Gulf region, we must be sensitive to the needs of all struggling families in America -- now and in the long term. As we provide relief, we must also ensure dignity.
But the dole is not enough. No, indeed. It is only the beginning of the looming forced wealth transfer. Most important of all is to tax the rich, even though the lower income half of Americans pay less than 5% of all income taxes.
Both opportunity and dignity are threatened when we provide short-term charity while cutting funding and support for vital programs that help the nation's most vulnerable to survive. In a time of war, deficits, and disasters, many of us in the religious community will oppose further tax cuts for the wealthiest among us, as well as further cuts in services to our poorest families. I urge you to join us in a commitment to oppose these measures.
America needs a national change of heart. And the place to legislate this change is in Congress.
Restoring the hope of America's poorest families will require nothing less than a national change of heart. The "largest reconstruction effort in history," as President Bush described it, should include the biggest change in priorities that our country has ever known. It calls for a transformation of political ethics and governance, moving from serving private interests to ensuring the common good. We must work together toward the goal of a united America.
Jim Wallis needs to come to grips with the reality of coercive State power and the modern liberal's claim that State power can transform the hearts and minds of men. He should either repudiate the State as an agency of social regeneration or else openly endorse the words of Mao Tse Tung in 1938. This is from Volume II of Mao's Selected Works.
Every Communist must grasp the truth, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party. Yet, having guns, we can create Party organizations, as witness the powerful Party organizations which the Eighth Route Army has created in northern China. We can also create cadres, create schools, create culture, create mass movements. Everything in Yenan has been created by having guns. All things grow out of the barrel of a gun.
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