Moral Values, Politics and the Faith Factor

Transcript

JIM WALLIS: Faith and politics are not just important for political demographics—who voted which way last time; who gets it and who is comfortable, and who doesn't; who won or lost key constituencies. It's important for deeper reasons about the moral values that have to be brought to bear on political life because there really is good and evil in this world. There is right and wrong in our public life. Everything must not just be reduced to a battle for power between the right and the left.

But this topic is so polarized, so politicized. The conventional wisdom now says that one party owns the language of religion and values and the other is just a bunch of secularists. Now, neither of those statements is true. But when it comes to God's politics, I really do believe that the right often does get it wrong and the left often doesn't get it. First Harper Collins made me take out the "often"s from the subtitle for a good marketing message.

But as has been said, a flawed exit poll created a new and more visible public discourse about moral values—flawed, because the poll separated moral values and issues. And of course, values are deeply embedded in issues. And John quoted the Zogby poll just a week later. I was struck by the same thing, that 64 percent of us responded that the greatest moral crisis in America was greed and materialism on the one hand, or poverty and economic justice on the other hand. Too bad that neither party or candidate made a central issue of that in this last campaign. Abortion and gay marriage were well down that list but are on the top of many lists—and I agree both are moral, deeply important conversations, and a better moral discourse on each one has to occur. We might get into that later.

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