Another installment of the critiques of God’s Politics, to which I have posted comments
Progressive Protestant » here (at Progressive Protestant) and here (Van’s Blog”)

Both these blogs are great conversation supporters, and both bloggers thoroughly engaged their commenters, including me. I have no desire to give any impression that I think these guys are to be “battled” in any way. I just think that this is an extremely worthy topic, being that it is between fellow “Progressive Christians” with different senses about Faith and Politics and how these interplay. Hauerwas and Stout have conversation going on similar issues.

A commenter on the first post raises some points about the critique of God’s Politics that I would have had he not beat me to it:

I think the audience for Wallis’ message is fellow-Christians. For that audience, the secular policy arguments don’t hold water, hence his desire to replace bad theology with better theology. Yes, Christians disagree, but so do non-Christians. Does Pollitt not want politically progressive Christians to persuade conservative Christians to their view? If you take Wallis and other theologically orthodox politically progressive out of the picture, or if you take God out of our language, Christianity is ceded to the conservatives. Is that what Pollitt wants?

Another important point — Wallis says in God’s Politics that progressives should not be looking to gain political power, as the right has done. Instead, we should be looking to proclaim truth to power regardless of political party. She gets him wrong when she sees this as a political power play.

This Pollitt person sure does have a wieldly axe to grind. She almost froths at the mouth with what seems an awfully lot like disgust for what she interprets Wallis to be saying (and most of it she gets totally wrong). It seems as though she just “flipped through” the book, and picked out pieces of it to chewup and spit out. Anybody with much more than a passing familiarity with Wallis and Sojourners knows that Wallis has been anyting but politically opportunist. The book I just read about the beginnings of the Sojo movement would be some “information” on which to base a reasoned response to the Sojourners movement. But very few of the Wallis critics have the benefit of such familiarity with the journey these people have had, or their experiences of living WITH and FOR the poor in a multitude of ways.

The crux of Van’s critique, I believe, is in this statement:

I don’t think that Wallis sucks, or that he only cares about political issues. But I believe that he undersells the agency of the church (which I can really understand, because we have sucked at our job over the last 2000 years). The church has a different sort of agency than the rest of the world. If Christians want to get involved in “indirect” politics (ie, the agency of American politics), that isn’t bad as long as they maintain their ecclesial agency (direct politics).

Again, that Wallis “undersells the agency of the church” is inaccurate, unless you want to judge Wallis’ complete “theological works” by what one derives from reviews of

God’s Politics

. Wallis audience IS a national audience for God’s Politics. Although many INSIDE the Church are applauding and identifiying with what Wallis procalims in God’s Politics, the real aim is at the national discourse, and how that translates into actual motivations to create policy and implementation and funding for addressing the problems revealed by that process.

A simple reading of Sojourners history, and Wallis’ books themselves is enough to dispel the critique Van has offered. Just a simple knowledge of the history of the Sojourners community itself is enough to show how Wallis IN NO WAY undersells the agency of the church. But again, if you limit this matter to what snippets have been bantered about in whatever circles of debate one listens to, then one can often find a lot of discussion that does nbot explicitly invoke church. But what DOES make it out of the actual pages of the book and onto the media and public debate are those things which DO GET COVERED (and “selected” to share the limelight and get dissected). And these are going to be the things more accessible to the secular audeince and secualr media. Read some Christian responses like Cornel West, and you get an entirely different picture, and an assesment that comes from a theologically informed view. I say this , and direct it to Chris and Van because O know that they are explicitly Christian, Progressive, and care deeply about the SAME issues that Wallis does. The things that Wallis cares most about are not the “frame of the debate itself”, but the things which can be tackled and addressed after we get “all the cards onto the table”. There are many cards missing from the table, and I believe that Wallis would also say that not only have the “other” moral issues been missing from public discourse, but also missing from the conversations in the churches. This HAS to change. People of “Progressive” sensitivities need to be able to find church communities where they can feel that their deepest concerns can be an impetus for mission, and an invitation to them to share their passions and journeys with others, so that the entire body can be edified.