Hearts & Minds

Jim Wallis 7-19-2021
A young Jim Wallis in flannel smiling at the camera.

Jim Wallis in December 1976.

AS I SAY farewell to Sojourners, one word comes most to mind: gratitude. I feel deeply grateful for the past and very excited about the future. The love of my life and my vocation for more than 50 years has been centered on two other words: faith and justice. Therefore, it is a great joy—a dream, really—to take this big step into the next chapter of my life and vocation and be wonderfully invited into two new roles focused on both of those core words.

I have accepted an invitation from Georgetown University to become the inaugural Chair in Faith and Justice at the McCourt School of Public Policy and the founding director of the new Center on Faith and Justice. In these new positions, I will be able to focus on the things I most love: teaching and mentoring, writing and speaking, offering media commentary, convening and strategizing with both faith and political leaders across the theological and ideological spectrums, engaging in outreach to both policy makers and local practitioners, helping to change the narrative of faith and politics, and
being an advocate for justice—all because of my faith. It is an incredible gift.

Jim Wallis 5-25-2021
An illustration of three people holding up a giant gavel that is making a noise.

Illustration by Jackson Joyce

NEARLY A YEAR after the death of George Floyd, a jury found his killer, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, guilty of all charges. My initial reaction was relief—that this trial, which felt so momentous, had concluded with accountability for Chauvin’s crime—but for many of us, relief was tempered by real sorrow and anger at knowing that this accountability will not bring Floyd back to his loved ones and community. And while a single verdict is a long way from justice for a brutal and broken system in which police kill 1,000 people every single year, this verdict could, should, and must open the door to long overdue transformation of policing and criminal justice in America—and we should settle for nothing less.

It is critical to remember the extraordinary forces that led to this verdict—it should not take so much to convict police for abuse and lethal violence against Black people and other people of color. It took a dramatic and painful video that the world watched over and over, extending the trauma of Floyd’s family and friends to millions of others. It took police leaders taking a highly unusual stand against an officer in their own department, when that should be normal in a case like this. It took overwhelming and incontrovertible evidence. All this shows just how hard it is to convict police officers who violate and kill Black and brown Americans, which remains the common practice of American law enforcement. It should not take such a video, or a world-changing movement in response, to ensure accountability when the police regularly commit such violence against citizens of color.

Jim Wallis 3-22-2021
Jim Wallis and Ed Spivey Jr., 1976 / Sojourners archive photo

Jim Wallis and Ed Spivey Jr., 1976 / Sojourners archive photo

THE NIGHT ED SPIVEY JR. first came to our Sojourners community house in Chicago, he made me laugh. He still does, more than anybody else I have ever known. But it was also evident how serious he was about his faith and its meaning for his life. Ed was raised as a Southern Baptist, and he told us a funny story of how his Baptist pastor in Chicago wanted his congregants to wear a button to work that said, “I’m Excited!” When people ask why, you were supposed to say, “I’m excited about Jesus.” But Ed was in his first job after college — as art director of the Chicago Sun-Times Sunday magazine, where he was the youngest hire in the newsroom — and he was reluctant, to say the least. While he found the button idea tacky, it was clear that he was excited about following Jesus wherever that road would lead.

That’s what we talked about at our first dinner together. Some of us were still seminary students at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and we had just started a new publication called The Post-American, forerunner to Sojourners. None of us had ever done a publication before, or much writing beyond leaflets and school papers. Our art director was both temporary and part-time, and we would often wait weeks before our articles were laid out for printing. It took us by surprise when, at that first dinner, Ed said that he felt a strong calling from God to join us. “I am ready to quit my job at the Sun-Times, move in with all of you, and give my life to this.” Ed’s announcement called to mind the scripture we were then reading about how the earliest disciples acted when they heard a call from Jesus.

Jim Wallis 1-26-2021
Illustration of a hand holding a key.

Illustration by Jackson Joyce

IN JANUARY, Sojourners entered its 50th year—a half-century of working to inspire hope by articulating the biblical call to social justice and a vision of the “beloved community.” When I began reflecting on that impending anniversary several years ago, my first thought was: “I don’t want to go back to my desk the morning after that celebration.” I also knew that I wanted Sojourners to go on long beyond the founder, and that we would need a new generation of leadership to take Sojourners into the next 50 years. When I began to think about a successor, one name kept coming to mind: Adam Russell Taylor. I met Adam 20 years ago when he was a student in my first class on faith and politics at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Adam has been involved with Sojourners for the past 20 of our 50 years. His personal story, scholarship, breadth of experience, vision, sense of vocation, and ordination in the Black church all uniquely prepare him to lead Sojourners as its first African American president. This transition has been in the works since 2016, when the board and I first selected Adam to be my successor. It’s been an amazing journey, and I’m so grateful that Adam is coming home, am very committed to his success, and I look forward to our continuing collaboration in the years ahead.

Still as founder, and now also ambassador, I will continue to write for Sojourners, record my Soul of the Nation podcast, expand my speaking engagements, offer strategic advice to Sojourners and others, and stay centrally involved with some key parts of our work—such as the convening of faith leaders in coalitions such as the Circle of Protection and the Faith Table and projects such as Lawyers and Collars in our partnership with the National African American Clergy Network.

Jim Wallis 11-30-2020
An illustration of people climbing up a ladder, out of a ditch that is on fire. At the top of the ladder is green grass and a person helping them up.

Illustration by Jackson Joyce

THE PEOPLE HAVE spoken, democracy has worked, and it is time for a peaceful transfer of power. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have fairly won the presidential election, and I am hopeful about their commitment to both healing and change. We should accept the results, and call upon our faith communities to do the same, in order to help our nation move forward together.

We should be grateful for and inspired by the ways our faith communities worked for free, fair, and safe elections in 2020. Thousands of multiracial and interfaith poll chaplains helped to protect vulnerable voters from both suppression and intimidation at the polls and helped secure this election.

Racism was recognized as a religious issue in this election—and we must commit to a much deeper, and even uncomfortable, conversation in the body of Christ about the great and painful divisions between white Christians and believers of color that this election has again revealed. Addressing systemic racism, economic injustice, inhumane immigration policies, and climate change—all of this is required as expressions of our faith. Let us begin with healing our nation from the COVID-19 pandemic and then from our polarized divisions with grace and love and the reconciliation that comes from working together to build a more racially just and inclusive America.

Jim Wallis 9-24-2020

Illustration by Jackson Joyce

WHO WOULD HAVE thought that a verse from the first chapter of the Bible would become an “altar call” for a presidential election? Here is our call to faith as we look to Nov. 3: “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.’ ... So God created humankind in [God’s] image” (Genesis 1:26-27).

I believe this text about the creation of humankind in God’s likeness is the foundation of politics for people of faith. It means how we treat other human beings, including our fellow citizens, is a theological matter and not just a political one. Mistreatment of our fellow human beings and citizens is also not just a political problem but an offense to the image of God, an assault on imago dei.

Protecting the image of God in the upcoming election means protecting the voting rights of Americans of color, whose votes some are trying to suppress, deliberately and strategically. The faith community is responding.

Jim Wallis 6-24-2020

Illustration by Jackson Joyce

A WHITE COP’S knee on the neck of a Black man revealed the old and ongoing pandemic underneath the current pandemic. The coronavirus had already laid bare the systems of racial injustice that accelerate the spread of sickness and death among people of color—the fundamental racial disparities in health care, economics, housing, education, and every other institution in America. Structural racism was exposed as a precondition for getting and dying from COVID-19; white supremacy is the virus that has made America’s soul sick for 400 years and continues to kill Black people.

Over the last weekend in May, including Pentecost Sunday, Sojourners helped organize faith communities to lament the first 100,000 COVID dead in this country. We were joined by Muslim and Jewish brothers and sisters in their services, and we helped unite Christian families across all our divisions—mainline Protestant, evangelical, and Pentecostal, Catholic, Black, Hispanic, Asian American, and Native American Christian leaders and their congregations—in honoring and memorializing those who died from the virus in only three months, many of them separated from their loved ones. On June 1, we were joined by mayors from more than 60 cities who, with interfaith clergy, announced a Day of Mourning and Lament.

Jim Wallis 4-21-2020

Illustration by Jackson Joyce

MUCH OF THE country is still on lockdown to save countless lives by slowing the spread of COVID-19. The economic consequences for families, and especially for the most vulnerable people, are incalculable and rising by the day. The U.S. has the most confirmed cases of the disease in the world, with a staggering death toll. All of us have friends and loved ones who are sick or who have died, and hospitals in many parts of the country are under enormous strain.

It’s critical that—even as we stand apart from each other for our physical health—we find new ways to stay together for our mental, emotional, and spiritual health. Our physical health requires social distancing in a pandemic, but maintaining our spiritual health means we can’t let that lead to social isolation, especially for the most vulnerable. Even as we live more separated, we must find new ways to be together.

Turning from physical contact with others must not cause us to turn away from each other, but rather turn to each other in better, deeper, and healthier ways. How can we stay in even closer contact, over our phones and social media, with friends, family, and especially people who are alone; see what they need; and help them not feel so isolated and afraid? The answers must stem from active, creative, and innovative faith that leads to action.

Jim Wallis 2-25-2020

Illustration by Jackson Joyce

WE'RE LIVING IN a fearful time, and 2020 has thus far served to amplify and validate many of our fears about the future of the nation, our faith, and the world. What’s at stake this year is perhaps a last chance to decisively reject the overt white nationalism that we’re up against, which is as bold and brazen as at any time in decades.

The racism that has been present in this land since before the founding of this nation, a nation built on the forced labor of kidnapped Africans and the displacement and genocide of Indigenous people, represents America’s original sin. The history of the U.S. is one of halting, tentative steps toward repenting of that sin, juxtaposed against white people doubling down on racist systems, structures, and beliefs. It’s important to note that repentance does not mean feeling bad or sorry but rather stopping, turning around, and going in a new direction. We are at a moment of national decision, between repentance on the one hand and active retreat from that progress on the other, meaning the reaffirmation and reinstitution of America’s original sin.

Lent is traditionally a time for deep reflection, often with prayer, fasting, study, and repentance. Given the crisis we are now facing in both nation and church, such deep Lenten reflection is urgently needed. Answering the questions that Jesus asked during his ministry, as I laid out my book Christ in Crisis, is the best response to our current political, moral, and religious crisis. It’s a response that could set us on a path toward true national repentance from America’s original sin.

Jim Wallis 12-17-2019

Illustration by Heidi Younger

LAST FALL, I went on a 20-city book tour for my new book, Christ in Crisis: Why We Need to Reclaim Jesus. I was deeply encouraged by the “new and needed conversations about Jesus,” as they were often called, that we had with diverse gatherings of thousands of people. Most events produced a public discussion on the meaning of faith and public life in America.

As a result of that tour and the national events that were unfolding alongside it, I came to three principal conclusions:

First, between the impeachment process and the upcoming election, we are facing a test of democracy.

Second, we are facing a test of faith in how religious communities respond to this moral, political, and constitutional crisis.

Third, a new generation is watching and will decide their future relationship to the faith community on the basis of that response.

Where were the voices of faith? This will be the question when people look back on this period in history, and that makes it an urgent question for all of us right now. That is the key question I will be asking as this new year unfolds. I have put my voice out there with the new book, to a deep response so far, and will continue to do that in the weeks and months ahead.

Jim Wallis 10-22-2019

Illustration by Jackson Joyce

FOR SOME OF US, the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays may be the only time all year that we see some of our relatives. Some probably harbor anxiety or even dread at the difficult conversations on politics and faith that surface during meals with family members who see the world very differently than you do.

In Advent, our thoughts turn to the meaning of Christ’s coming and the deep significance of the season for followers of Jesus—“waiting” for him to come, which has special and poignant meaning for us in the deep political and moral crisis in which we find ourselves. In many ways Advent is my favorite liturgical season, because it demands of Christians that we do the work of preparing our hearts for what it means that God came and lived as one of us in a world that needed (and needs) to be changed.

Jim Wallis 8-06-2019

Illustration by David Plunkert

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. —1 Timothy 2:1-4

This is a scripture passage that’s been on my heart quite a bit this summer, really since Donald Trump took office in January 2017. On the surface, it seems challenging to reconcile this instruction to offer thanksgiving to God for Trump, whose tenure in the highest elected position in the United States (and perhaps the world) has been filled with so much amorality and cruelty to so many groups of vulnerable people that, in Matthew 25, Jesus calls us to protect.

Jim Wallis 6-12-2019

Matt Dorfman

SINCE OUR EARLIEST days publishing in tabloid format on newsprint, Sojourners (nee The Post-American) has never sought to be slick or trendy. But the magazine has always addressed timely issues, and we want our look and feel to reflect that. That means, every decade or so, we’ve engaged in a process of redesigning the visual presentation of the magazine.

Jim Wallis 4-23-2019

WITH THE COMING of spring and warm weather, my thoughts turned, as they always do, to the importance of the game of baseball in my family and the valuable lessons I’ve taken from it. We have a sign outside our home: “We interrupt this family for baseball season.” It reflects how much baseball means to our whole family and how much time and space it takes up in our day-to-day lives for much of the year.

Some of my most rewarding years as a father were the 11 years (and 22 seasons) that I coached my sons, Luke and Jack, in Little League Baseball. Though that time is past, baseball still very much connects our family as my sons have moved through school, with my oldest continuing to play baseball at Haverford College.

Jim Wallis 3-19-2019

THE LAST TWO years have been extraordinarily difficult for many Christians in the United States who care about social justice and treating the most vulnerable as we would treat Christ himself, given the cruelty of the Trump administration toward the ones that Jesus calls the least of these.

Yet a significant change in our collective imagination is showing signs of emerging out of the 2018 midterm elections and the new public policy debates around health care and climate change, at least in the House of Representatives under new leadership. If realized, this shift could be profoundly important and hopeful for the future of our nation and our planet.

For decades now, we have lacked both the seriousness of purpose and the commitment that we will need to change the status quo on both of these issues, and changing that should be a moral imperative for Christians.

The next few months have the potential to significantly shift the terms of political debate in the United States and even reshape the public’s perception of what our country can achieve on access to affordable health care and efforts to avoid the most catastrophic levels of climate change.

Jim Wallis 2-21-2019

Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan addresses the audience at the Fitzgerald Theater after being sworn in as Lieutenant Governor. Lorie Shaull

ON JAN. 7, I was in St. Paul, Minn., where Peggy Flanagan was sworn in as Minnesota’s lieutenant governor. Peggy has been a close friend and ally of Sojourners for many years, serving as a member of our board executive committee, and she has been like a daughter to me and my family.

What I saw and heard from Peggy could be a glimpse of the future of American politics. It felt so different from the divisive political situation I had just come from in Washington, D.C. It was a historical moment as Peggy Flanagan was sworn in as the highest-ranking Indigenous woman ever elected to a state’s executive office. I would like to give my space to present her words, adapted from her inaugural speech:

“MY STORY IS a One Minnesota story. It’s about community. We didn’t have much growing up. What little we had, my mom used to make sure we got ahead. But it didn’t always add up. We needed help. I was the kid with the different-colored lunch ticket. We needed those free meals at school. Medicaid saved my life. As a kid with asthma, it’s the reason I’m alive today.

Growing up wasn’t always easy, but it made me strong. I stand before you today because of a loving family, a supportive community, and a great state. My vocation is to create community across Minnesota—a community like mine that lifts people up and provides them a little help when they need it.

Jim Wallis 1-22-2019

THE TRUMP administration, members of Congress, and many media pundits often speak and act as if the United States must choose between acting in its own interest and respecting deeper moral values. That’s a false choice.

Events on the world stage in recent months have offered abundant reminders that the United States’ cozy and corrupt relationship with Saudi Arabia and its tyrannical royal family is a bipartisan moral failure with real costs in human lives. In the name of perceived national interests, the U.S. has long engaged in an amoral realpolitik throughout the world, especially regarding the Middle East. In 2019, this includes Trump’s defiant support for Saudi Arabia, despite rising dissension in his own political party.

In recent months, some in Congress and throughout civil society are more openly questioning the U.S. relationship with the Saudi Arabian leadership, for two major reasons.

The first is the four-year-old military campaign in Yemen led by Saudi Arabia and materially supported by the U.S. that has created the world’s worst ongoing humanitarian crisis. By November, the war had caused—by Save the Children’s estimate—85,000 Yemeni children to starve to death. Sufficient food is arriving to Yemen, but the economic devastation caused by the Saudi-led campaign makes it impossible for many parents to buy enough food to feed their children, and conditions on the ground make distributing emergency food aid extremely difficult.

Jim Wallis 12-19-2018

SEVEN YEARS AGO this month, Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old high school student, was shot and killed while visiting relatives in Sanford, Fla. After George Zimmerman’s 2013 acquittal for Trayvon’s murder, I wrote about what it meant to me, particularly as a father.

I wrote about the fundamental injustice of a system and a nation in which a teenage boy like Trayvon could be killed as a direct result of being racially profiled, and his killer not held accountable, while my own teenage boys would never need to fear that a stranger would target them due to their race:

If my white 14-year-old son, Luke, had walked out that same night, in that same neighborhood, just to get a snack, he would have come back unharmed—and he would still be with me and Joy today. But when black 17-year-old Trayvon Martin went out that night, just to get a snack, he ended up dead—and is no longer with his dad and mom. Try to imagine how that feels, as his parents.

Martin Luther King Jr. said in his “I Have a Dream” speech, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” King’s dream failed on Feb. 26, 2012, when George Zimmerman decided to follow Trayvon Martin because of the color of his skin. Racial profiling is a sin in the eyes of God. It should also be a crime in the eyes of our society and in the laws we enact to protect each other and our common good.

Jim Wallis 11-19-2018

JUST DAYS BEFORE the midterm elections, the Sojourners community reacted with shock, mourning, and fear at the horrific and murderous attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Eleven congregants were killed while observing the Sabbath in the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in U.S. history.

That this evil act of anti-Semitic terrorism should take place here in the United States is deeply shocking. Yet both U.S. and world history teach us that the poison of anti-Semitism is very real and has deadly consequences. Anti-Semitism is one of the oldest and most persistent forms of bigotry alive in the world today, and Christians—who believe all human beings are created in the image of God—have a duty to name anti-Semitism and confront it at every turn, particularly given the shameful complicity of so many Christians in the Holocaust and other oppression and killing of Jewish people.

This hate crime capped off a horrific week of violence inspired by white supremacist ideology, in which racist and conspiracy theories were openly promulgated on the campaign trail by Donald Trump and amplified by prominent voices in right-wing media and dark web spaces. The attempted murder of critics of the Trump administration by mailing pipe bombs, the killing of two African Americans—Vickie Lee Jones and Maurice Stallard—in a grocery store after a failed attack on a black church, and the massacre of Jews in their synagogue—all were carried out by white supremacist nationalists, who are the greatest terrorist threats in America today.

In his closing election messages, Trump was unashamedly using a political strategy of fear and hate. The violence we have seen cannot be disconnected from the bigoted and hateful words of presidential political rhetoric. When the president proudly called himself “nationalist,” amid such hate and violence, the white nationalists, supremacists, and anti-Semites felt supported and emboldened.

Jim Wallis 10-23-2018

ON THE DAY Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed by the Senate to a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court, I tweeted this: “Today was a day of protest, rage, mourning, lament. Tomorrow we go on by going deeper, and learn that hope is not a feeling, but a decision—based on whatever we call faith. Stay strong and take care of each other.”

The nation is in trauma, with many women and people of color in particular being retraumatized almost every day. But Advent is upon us, and the message of that liturgical season never changes. Advent is a season of waiting for the coming of Christ. Christ will come again, and not just ultimately but time and time again, in all kinds of unexpected ways.

So, in Advent, we wait—expectantly—for Jesus Christ to come again in our personal and our public lives. That is our hope, based not on optimism but on faith.

The situation we face in Donald Trump’s autocratic impulses and actions is indeed a constitutional crisis, the severity of which will depend, in part, on whether our institutions and structures, in the wake of the midterm elections, will hold the executive accountable, or not.

This is also a moral crisis regarding whether our “better angels,” as Abraham Lincoln put it, or our worst demons, as Donald Trump seems to evoke every day, will finally triumph. As they say, the jury is still out on that. Trump has opened a Pandora’s box of white racial and male resentment, fear, and hatred, and those forces are not going back into the box, despite election results. The battle between our better angels and our worst demons will be the spiritual battle of our political life for the unforeseeable future.