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Excerts
I am writing this foreword to the Australian edition of ‘The Great Awakening’ as a friend of Jim Wallis’ and an admirer of the influence he has exerted on many continents as a prophetic voice over many years. Jim has visited Australia several times over those years and each time there has been the clarity of Gospel insights and passion for justice. He has a remarkable ability to bridge the gap between faith and politics. His visits have always inspired and refocused my own sense of vocation.
In 2006 Jim Wallis did a brief tour of the Eastern States of Australia to promote his last book God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left does not get it. I travelled with him and introduced him in numerous contexts including gathering of Parliamentarians and church leaders from Brian Houston of Hillsong to Archbishops in our mainstream denominations Wherever we went he tirelessly fielded questions about American civil religion and its impact on our world. As a keen student of context and culture he sought to raise the issues which were most pertinent to Australia - from our alignment with the USA in the Iraq war to our lockstep with George Bush in refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol.
We learnt that Jim was the key instigator in a remarkable American religious aberration that saw evangelical leaders break with rank with their own nest and withstand the scorn and hegemony of the religious right in calling on the Bush administration to sign Kyoto. Eloquently and simply stated this powerful religious constituency, a cornerstone of the Republican establishment, said the environment was a central Gospel issue and evangelical leaders were no longer prepared to be categorised as only interested in abortion and gay marriage.
Kevin Rudd, then the Opposition Foreign Minister and as of November 2007 the newly elected Prime Minister of Australia, travelled from Brisbane specially to have dinner with us in Melbourne. Kevin has long been a student of Jim’s work. He recognised in it the power and prescience of connecting good theology and liberating religion with good politics which disconnects from bad religion and the fear that leads to the worst politics. Kevin’s own landmark article in The Monthly magazine in 2006 on Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the politics of Christian resistance to totalitarianism was nourished by these long dinner table conversations on theology. Since that time I know that Kevin Rudd has take the opportunity to catch up with Jim when visiting Washington DC.
Whilst this book is particularly for American Christians who want to build a ‘greater America’ that does not go ‘Left or right’ but deeper’ it is enormously important for Australia too. As our new Government reasserts the importance to this nation of the American alliance there is not too little we can know about what motivates this nation’s remarkable experiment in republican democracy. Religion is at the heart of every US Presidential candidate’s pitch and, strange as it may sound to secular Australian ears, we have to be conversant with its biblical themes and soaring religious vision ‘under God’. This book is foundational for wanting to understand what galvanises an American vision of the future; and the challenges of poverty, racism and care of the environment, dignity of human life and the core value of family being examples Jim deals with so impressively.
It also provides a clarion call to the younger generation – articulating commitments that can be aspired to and providing a road-map for the journey into a future of greater justice, non-violence and leadership with integrity. I look forward to meeting people who have read it and been inspired to pursue lives of seeking justice and wholeness for our societies.
Tim Costello
December 2007
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