Values voters: in the footsteps of Jesus?

With conservative

groups gathering in Washington,
D.C., for the first day of the
2006 Values Voters Summit, a refreshing reminder that Christian evangelicalism
and the political right are not always synonymous. 

With conservative groups gathering in Washington, D.C.,
for the first day of the 2006 Values Voters Summit, a refreshing reminder that
Christian evangelicalism and the political right are not always
synonymous.  The Rev. Jim Wallis, a
preacher and theologian who directs the group Sojourners and calls himself a
“progressive evangelical,” was interviewed
last night on CBS:

“This is not a
mushy political middle or center. The hunger, though, is for a moral center
where we find the moral choices and challenges that lie right beneath our
political debate…. With 30,000 children dying every day needlessly from poverty
and disease, I can’t imagine Jesus thinking the top issue on our agenda ought
to be gay marriage amendments in Ohio.”

Bravo for Wallis, who among many others
reminds us that at the core of Christian ethics is a commitment to peace and
social justice.

I was intrigued by the response from Tony
Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, who appeared in the same CBS
piece.  His view: that “abortion and gay
marriage are the driving concerns for most evangelicals.”

Now, as an empirical judgment, it’s not all
that easy to disagree.  Abortion and
same-sex marriage are the issues that tend to bring out evangelical voters,
activists, protestors; that tend to attract evangelical donors; and so forth.

Where I take issue is with Perkins’
methodology.  He seems to be telling us
that abortion and gay marriage matter because they’re what people care
about.  The trouble with that view (apart
from the fact that it smacks of doing theology by polls and focus groups) is
that it’s absolutely foreign to Christianity. 
If Jesus of Nazareth had made issues out of what the people of his time
cared about, he would have been a revolutionary political leader; or maybe he
would have become a chief priest, following the commands of the Torah to the
last syllable.  He wouldn’t have preached
against the legalism that killed the spirit of the law in the very process of
upholding its letter.  He wouldn’t have
surrendered in the Garden
of Gethsemane.  And he certainly wouldn’t have associated
himself with the undesirables in first-century Jewish life: divorcees, Roman
centurions, tax collectors, prostitutes.

The same can be said of so many figures in
the history of Christianity.  Francis of
Assisi, Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day, and others aren’t known to us because they
did what society expected them to do. 
They’re known to us because they broke with convention.  Because they had the courage to stand up to
large numbers of people and tell them that their priorities were askew.

So looking back at last night’s CBS
interviews, who stands in that tradition today?