The Friday Funnies: Jim Wallis Left-Center-Left

James Kushiner at Mere Comments chronicles the amusingly irrelevant "sojourn" of the amusingly irrelevant Jim Wallis.

Mark Tooley, the new president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, yesterday pointed out the conversion of Sojourners as a member of the Religious Left. Ted Olsen at CT gives some interesting details and responses from Sojourners about this at CT's blog (HT David Mills). I guess they can't really be sojourners anymore, having finally arrived.

But in 2002 Mark Tooley wrote in Touchstone in Sojourn to the Center:

Six years ago [1996] I wrote about Jim Wallis and his then new movement, “Call to Renewal.” It was advertised as a coalition of religious activists that transcended old categories of left and right. But at that time it seemed a barely repackaged coalition of religious left fixtures from the National Council of Churches, left-wing Catholic orders, and the liberal fringes of the Evangelical world.

The emphasis of the Call has changed. The “prophetic” denunciations of capitalism are almost all gone. Republicans, and the Democrats who dare to seek alternatives to liberal orthodoxy, are no longer excoriated, at least not loudly.

Tooley concluded:

Wallis now cites the family, not the state, as the center of society. And his underlying message acknowledges that faith, not government programs, is the ultimate answer to the human condition.

A cynic might suspect that Wallis is simply deploying the language that will appeal to the traditional religious groups that he seeks to recruit for the Call. But even most cynics will acknowledge that age, marriage, and children can change a man.

Whether Wallis is sincere or opportunistic in his move to the center, it bodes well that he has moved

So according to Tooley, in 1996 or so, Wallis was clearly on the Left (not that he would have used that label), then moderated to the center more or less by 2002, but in 2009 is openly on the Left again.

So let me get this straight: 1996, 2002, 2009--Clinton, Bush, Obama--Left, Center, Left.

Hmm, maybe I spoke too soon. Sojourners no more? They may be on the move again at some point in the future. Perhaps its not really a matter of whether the state or the family is at the center, but whether Sojourners is....?

BTW, congrats and all the best to my old friend Mark Tooley on his promotion to president of the IRD. As for Wallis and his political grandstanding, I have long since seen through his thin disguise.