Sojourners in the News

Add Sojourners, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Committee on Migration to the list of groups which, almost incomprehensibly, asked Obama to “move cautiously.”

The bishops' comments follow that of Sojourners President Jim Wallis who called on House Speaker John Boehner earlier this week to make both a moral and a biblical choice on immigration reform and allow the vote before the August recess.

Washington often loses sight of the common good. Instead of considering how to best serve the public, many of our elected leaders focus on advancing the agenda of their political party or their own careers. The general welfare is sacrificed for the sake of individual gain. Immigration reform is a textbook example.

A pro-reform coalition that includes the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, National Immigration Forum, Service Employees International Union, Sojourners, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human rights, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Migration recently urged "speaker Boehner and his colleagues to seize the moment," while calling on Obama to restrain himself from taking any executive action on immigration until at least August.

"Giving the Republicans space takes away their final excuse," said Jim Wallis, president of Christian social justice group Sojourners. "It's all now focused on John Boehner."

Monday was Memorial Day, full of family trips and events, lots of picnics and barbecues with friends and neighbors, and a national day off from school and work. For us it was the Northwest Little League All Star game here at Friendship Field in Washington D.C., a family tradition for many years. My wife Joy, the Commissioner, organized the game day, including a wonderful picnic on a glorious baseball day for players, parents, relatives, and many fans–with 300 hotdogs!

To the contrary, based on the early vision for evangelicalism developed by Carl Henry, it seems that true evangelicalism is more closely aligned with the work of organizations like Sojourners, The BioLogos Foundation, Red Letter Christians, and Evangelicals for Social Action than with The Gospel Coalition, Answers In Genesis, or Focus On the Family. Why? Because the evangelicalism that Henry and his peers envisioned was a movement of bible-believing Christians who engaged honestly with academia.

In a blistering editorial in the January 1978 issue of Sojourners, Jim Wallis castigated the president for failure to attend adequately to the needs of the poor. “The biblical demands for justice and compassion bring the harshest kind of judgment to the system of wealth and power upon which Jimmy Carter has built his presidency,” Wallis wrote. “It is these standards of social righteousness that our evangelical president has set aside during his first year in office.” John F. Alexander of The Other Side, another signatory to the Chicago Declaration in 1973, was almost flippant about the 1980 election. Although he acknowledged the moral rectitude of Carter’s policy on human rights—“we can be reasonably sure that fewer people are being tortured now than if Ford had been elected”—Alexander expressed doubts that an evangelical in the White House made any difference whatsoever. While he applauded Carter’s cancellation of the B-1 bomber, Alexander criticized the president’s approval of the MX missile. “Personally I see little point in not voting,” he concluded, although he suggested that his readers cast their ballots for Donald Duck.

Vincent Harding died on Monday. One of my most important and dearest mentors is gone; there are countless other people across America -- indeed, around the world -- who are feeling the same as me.