Joyful Tears over Obama’s Budget

on April 22, 2009

The following article originally appeared on the FrontPage Magazine website, and is reproduced with permission.

 

The beauty of the Obama Administration’s expansionist new welfare state spending is such that Religious Left icon Jim Wallis wept with joy.

“I was in tears,” Wallis recounted to the The Washington Post of his happy meltdown during a White House conference call to unveil the Obama budget to key supporters. “Some of the things I’ve fought for my entire life are in there,” he told the Post, which published a paean to Wallis’ new role as court prophet.

During the bad old days of Republican occupation and Gingrich rule, Wallis was compelled to get arrested in the U.S. Capitol rotunda in protest against all the “cuts” in social programs. But now Wallis is apparently vindicated as the new President attempts to build Wallis’ federally-funded version of the Kingdom of God.

“I’ve been 40 years in the wilderness, and now it’s time to come out,” Wallis enthused to the Post. “This is a new experience for me.” As the Post noted, his chumminess with the Clinton Administration abruptly ended when he fiercely denounced Welfare Reform as a betrayal in 1996.

For years, Wallis has solemnly pronounced that federal budgets are “moral documents,” to be divinely favored or condemned based on welfare expansion and military reduction. A pacifist, Wallis presumably would like to see the Pentagon’s budget reduced to zero, or at least rechanneled towards mediating Christian Peacemaker Teams, which proved so successful in Iraq.

A committed statist, Wallis seemingly has never beheld a government welfare, environmental or regulatory initiative that was large or controlling enough. Probably he sees even the Obama budget as merely a down payment towards the eventual government mandated utopia.

Himself long a critic of conservative religious chieftains who pandered to Republican rulers, Wallis almost will certainly compromise to ensure continued coziness with the Administration. Despite his ardent pacifism, he has refrained from directly criticizing Obama’s military build-up in the Afghan war, instead gently urging an alternative “surge in funding for diplomacy and development” and to “reconsider the escalation of offensive operations.” Wallis was less gentle in reaction to the Bush Administration’s Iraq “surge,” which Wallis denounced as “criminal.”

The 60 year old religious activist, as part of his new role as court prophet, has also expanded his willingness to carry water for political causes not typically his focus. The Post prominently reported Wallis’ congressional testimony zealously siding with labor unions favoring the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would limit employees rights to a secret ballot regarding unionization. Wallis, who insists that all of his causes are “moral” rather than economic or political, denounced corporate CEO salary increases, which EFCA supposedly will contain, as a “a sin of biblical proportions.” The court prophet also pronounced that “unionization is critical tool in the fight against poverty.”

Touting unions is at least a mainstream liberal cause. Much of Wallis’ background was “kind of Marxist,” as he described himself to the Post. His radical brew of 1960’s protest politics was and would be alien to most union members. Wallis’ tone today reflects a smoother and more media savvy prophet who appreciates access to power over continuous street agitation. Once unapologetically hard core Religious Left, Wallis today insists on a more politically expedient evangelical identity. Unlike most evangelicals, Wallis almost never discusses his theology, preferring to describe his supposedly evangelical beliefs in strictly political terms. After all, evangelicals have always fought for social justice! In fact, Wallis favors same sex civil unions and abortion rights, neither causes typically identified with most evangelicals. Wallis, like much of the Religious Left, hopes to shift evangelicals away from personal morality and towards Big Government.

Echoing Wallis in his crusade for Big Government is Evangelicals for Social Action chief Ron Sider, a long-time Wallis ally. Unlike Wallis, Sider still mostly upholds traditional evangelical moral stances. But Sider too identifies God’s purposes with an ever larger state. In a recent column for Wallis’ Sojourners website, Sider praised the Obama budget’s reputed “justice for poorer Americans.” Sider cited supposedly growing income inequality starting in 1981, with the advent of the Reagan nightmare years (for the Religious left). According to Sider, the bottom 20 percent of Americans have experienced minuscule income growth over the last 30 years, while the top 10 percent have experienced 75 percent growth.

The Religious Left typically sees the world as a limited pie of scarcity, that can only be parceled out equitably by noble bureaucrats. But the claims about income inequality typically assume that the same people have stayed glued to the same economic ladder step, suffering or thriving without regard to their own exertions. In fact, many at the bottom 30 years ago are now in the middle or even the top, whose ranks have swelled. Many today at the bottom are themselves immigrants, who left extreme overseas poverty for the relative wealth of lower income America. But America’s constant social and economic fluidity perplexes and frightens the Religious Left, because the state does not orchestrate it, and because such freedom reduces the possibility of chronic victimhood.

Wallis probably really likes the anecdote about his joyful tears over the Obama budget, because Sider’s column acclaims it. “Jim said the call [with the Obama White House] left him in tears as he realized, first, that he had never experienced this kind of concern from top government officials before and, second, that the budget contained things that ‘some of us have got arrested for.’”

With the advent of God’s reign now unfolding in Washington, perhaps the court prophet Wallis will never again have to darken the wall of a D.C. jail.

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