Jim Wallis

Editor-in-Chief and Executive Director, Sojourners
Movement: Progressive Evangelicalism

In Matthew 25, Jesus told his followers that their dismissal of the hungry and poor, the sick and the uneducated, was an affront to him by saying, "as you’ve done to the least of these, you’ve done to me." That passage speaks loudly to Jim Wallis, who is leading the movement to reclaim the mantle of evangelicalism from those whom he feels have co-opted it for their own gain. Despite passages like the one above, the word evangelical now conjures up images of fundamentalists who vote for public policies in contradiction to the teachings of Jesus Christ. Mr. Wallis’s movement has adopted the "Red Letter Christian" label to describe their mission of putting into practice the passages attributed to Jesus in the Bible, often printed in red ink. By working to make people more aware of Jesus’ actual message, he hopes to dissuade them from following the fundamentalists who pick and choose selectively from the Bible in order to support a conservative agenda. Those fundamentalists, and the remarkable success they have achieved during the past few decades, motivates Mr. Wallis to spread the actual word of Jesus, the word printed in red ink. Wallis has long worked for social justice—protesting against the Vietnam War, founding Sojourners magazine, and speaking internationally on ethics and public life. His leadership of the progressive evangelical movement will continue until he sees a closer parallel between society and the actual teachings of Jesus Christ. As he says, “Jesus didn’t speak at all about homosexuality. There are about 12 verses in the Bible that touch on that question… there are thousands of verses on poverty. I don’t hear a lot of that conversation.”

Jim Wallis graduated from Michigan State University and then became a preacher, studying at the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. His columns have appeared in the New York Times, Huffington Post, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times; they prompt readers to examine their roles as citizens and activists. Time magazine deemed Mr. Wallis to be one of the "50 Faces for America’s Future" in 1979. His books include The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America (2008), God’s Politics: Why the Rights Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It (2005), Faith Works (2000), Who Speaks God? A New Politics of Compassion, Community, and Civility (1996), The Soul of Politics: A Practical and Prophetic Vision for Change (1994), and Call to Conversion (1981).

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