Jim Wallis, Terri Schiavo and the Christian Democrats

Andrew Gumbel writes:

What may have been troubling to the Pacifica crowd, and to many others on the secular left, is that Wallis believes religion is the key to a progressive revival in this country. What troubled them that night in Beverly Hills was not that they thought Wallis was wrong, but rather that they suspected he was entirely right. Wallis’s great hero and role model is Martin Luther King Jr., whose leadership of the civil rights movement would have been inconceivable without the support of black churches and his own sense of a religious mission. Likewise, the backbone of opposition to the Vietnam War came from radical priests who argued against the war in specifically moral terms. That’s the kind of religious politics to which Wallis wants to return.
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Wallis is an inspirational speaker, and when he told his L.A. audience that “the monologue of the religious right is over and a new dialogue has just begun,” they were all too willing to believe him. The Terri Schiavo affair, though, demonstrates just how premature his observation was. So why can’t the Democrats and the rest of the Bush opposition get comfortable with God? Why can’t they formulate religion as a matter of social justice, not just anti-gay, anti-feminist fire and brimstone?
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Part of the problem undoubtedly lies with the Democrats’ aspirations to diversity. They don’t see themselves representing just Christians, much less just evangelical Protestants, and they have taught themselves, over several decades of political correctness, not to relate their private religious passions with their public, political ones. In a country as steeped in religion as the United States, that was clearly a big mistake.