Turning Perception on Its Head

Every once in a while, you run across something that truly changes the way you look at things. That happened for me with last Tuesday’s Daily Show (which, thanks to my DVR, I only got around to watching Friday evening).

On the show, Jon Stewart interviewed Jim Wallis, author of God’s Politics and an avowed evangelical Christian. You can see an excerpt of the interview here, but in a nutshell, Wallis made the case rather eloquently that the right wing does not speak for all evangelicals.

The Republicans — according to Wallis — would have us believe that gay marriage and abortion are the only two “moral values” of interest to evangelical Christians. Wallis’s belief is that given the overwhelming attention given in the Bible to things like poverty and honesty, those should be much higher on the scale of importance. (For the record, it would appear that Wallis’s book levels some equally harsh criticisms on the left, though they weren’t as much in evidence in this particular interview.)

I have never had a problem with people either having or expressing their faith. My “eternal hostility” is reserved solely for those who would choose to impose that belief upon those who do not share it. To date, I’ve always thought of evangelism as — by its very nature — crossing that line (or at least coming awfully close). And since the more rabid crowd is the one that tends to get the most news coverage, I’d seen nothing to dispel that impression. I don’t wonder that I’ve painted the group with an inappropriately large brush. (It probably doesn’t hurt that the psychotics in power are more than eager to imply a one-to-one correlation between evangelical Christianity and support for them.)

But Wallis comes across as pretty much the antithesis of the angry, superior, contemptuous, Bible-thumping evangelical we’ve seen far too much of — he appears reasoned, inclusive, nonjudgmental... in other words, a normal guy who just happens to be Christian.

It remains to be seen whether Wallis’s movement will gain enough traction to overcome the knee-jerk wingnuts who — up until now — had formed the basis of my impression of the evangelical movement. But now I’m a great deal more willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.