Why I'm launching God's Politics with Jim Wallis

The media landscape is changing. God's word is not.

Welcome to God’s Politics, a newsletter where we will talk about topics like faith, race and politics – the taboo subjects at cocktail parties and Thanksgiving dinners, as they say.

If you’re interested in learning how to put your faith into action, how to cut through political chaos and noise, and how to build resilient communities to protect and restore our democracy …. God’s Politics newsletter is for you.

I’m Jim Wallis, and I’ve been thinking, speaking, writing, praying and acting on moral issues like racism, poverty, and war, fighting for our marginalized brothers and sisters and reviving our secular and religious communities for nearly 50 years. I was a founder and leader of Sojourners, the Christian social justice advocacy organization and publication. Now I hold the Chair in Faith and Justice at the McCourt School of Public Policy and lead the new Center on Faith and Justice at Georgetown University. 

I am a teacher and activist for social justice, preacher and pastor, and former Little League baseball coach for 22 seasons with my two boys. Some people call me a public theologian and a Christian ethicist. If that means putting my personal faith into public practice and digging beneath policies to find the moral and ethical questions and choices they present, I’ll take those titles.

I call myself a Matthew 25 Christian, after the Bible passage in which Jesus says how we treat the “least of these” is the primary test of discipleship. But I hope this newsletter will be inclusive enough to welcome people of all faiths, including those without a spiritual or political home. 

I’m calling this newsletter God’s Politics, after one of my books from some years ago. The subtitle of that book – still my favorite – is “Why the Right Gets It Wrong, and the Left Doesn’t Get It.” That’s still true. In fact, a good motto for this newsletter will be Don’t Go Left, Don’t Go Right, Go Deeper.

In this newsletter, you won’t get news summaries or links to the day’s buzziest stories. Instead, you will find a weekly commentary that offers what I hope will reveal the most profound moral and ethical questions and choices beneath the issues of the day, including stories and people not covered by the media.

One way we’ll work for the common good is in the fight for voting rights, in which everything is at stake, including the very future of our democracy. We will explore how this threat to democracy is more than a question of equal citizenship or even politics. It is a deeply moral, religious and theological matter. Likewise, immigration. At its heart, immigration is about how we treat “the stranger,” which Jesus says is how we treat the Lord himself. With this spiritual lens, we also see that policing and criminal justice are never just about law enforcement. It’s about who and what we value.

In this newsletter you will hear about other books that you shouldn’t miss, snippets of conversation from a podcast I host called The Soul of the Nation. Sometimes I’ll post regular commentaries on things that are happening, as I did at Sojourners for decades, or link to other columns I’ve written elsewhere. 

You can subscribe by entering your email address below. There is no charge for subscriptions. Our plan is to post at least once a week.

Thanks in advance for joining us as we explore what it means to put our faith into action. Our world urgently needs it. 

Now, let’s go deeper.