Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners and a leading evangelical voice on the religious left, told an overflow crowd on the University of Wisconsin campus that the best kind of inter-religious dialogue occurs in the midst of action that addresses problem issues. "Act together and talk while you’re acting," he said.
Wallis was in Madison this week as the second annual Rose Thering Fellow, sponsored by the UW-Madison Lubar Institute for the Study of the Abrahamic Religions (LISAR). He spoke on the topic, "An Evangelical Christian Looks at Jews and Muslims." An audience of over 500 people packed the largest lecture room in Grainger Hall.
Wallis has been involved in gang reconciliation activities in some of the nation’s largest cities. He said that focus had prepared him for working to reconcile religious organizations. "Both groups have their disputes over turf, territory, grudges and grievances," he said. "I’ve brought together the National Association of Evangelicals and the National Council of Churches. That’s like bringing together the Crips and the Bloods."
Wallis talked about a pentecostal Christian colleague who works at an inner city soup kitchen in Washington DC. Even though people from many faiths, or with no faith, come to work at the kitchen, nobody objects when she prays because her prayers are passionate and eloquent.
No Mushy Stuff
"We have to be sensitive to each other but we need to respect prayer from our hearts, none of this mushy common denominator stuff" he said. "The conversations I have found most exciting are with people who draw on the deep well within their own traditions."
He described one of the best faith dialogues that he had ever witnessed, in a Washington D.C. jail after some religious leaders had been arrested during a protest at the U.S. capitol. Baptist pastor Tony Campolo and Jewish rabbi Michael Lerner were in the cell with him and challenging each other on what they believed. "You get arrested for your faith and then discuss theology in jail," he said.
Wallis said that people of many different faiths or no faith could agree that serious issues need to be addressed together. "I’m not one to say our differences are not real or not important. But the new reality is, what do we do about our neighbors? If Christians would act as though we were Christians first and Americans second we could transform this country," he said.
Promoting Anti-Slavery Action
He suggested that human trafficking and modern slavery were examples of an issue that should unite people of all faiths into action because the number of slaves today is higher than the number of slaves two centuries ago when William Wilberforce worked to abolish slavery.
"We need to go deeper in our own traditions and try to figure out what our traditions have to say about the things we most care about," he said. "And then have a conversation that’s a lot more interesting than it would be otherwise."
Faith Perspective Needed to Address Issues
Despite the differences that divide Jews and Muslims, and divides that are just as deep between Christian factions, Wallis stressed that it was people of faith who have the solutions to problem issues. He described New York Times reporter Nick Kristof, who feels called to write about forgotten and abused people in the world. Frequently Kristof would find that people of faith were the ones most deeply invested in helping such people. "There’s no reason to be there unless you are called to do it," Wallis said. "There’s no career trajectory there."
He said that the faith-based groups working in the world’s trouble spots know more about what’s going on and what needs to be done than the U.S. State and Defense departments combined. People of faith have the resources to solve those issues.
"We’ve been marginalized because the secular folks think they can do it without us, and it hasn’t worked very well," he said. But in order to work together, he said people of faith need to put away some of their baggage and find things that they can agree on. "It’s not going to happen at a theological consultation," he said. "It’s going to happen on the streets of our lives."