NEWSBYJIM WALLIS

Jim Wallis, the public theologian and President and CEO of Sojourners, is part of Change.org's Changemakers network, comprised of leading voices for social change. Change.org asked Wallis to respond to questions to provide context for his work and the causes he supports.

When Glenn Beck promised to devote a whole week of his television show to come after me, I wasn't sure he really meant it. I guess he did. On Tuesday night he began to make good on the threat he made on his radio show that "the hammer will fall."

I confess to having never really watched Glenn Beck's show before being told that he equated the term "social justice," highly respected in the Christian world and embedded in all of our traditions, with Communism, Marxism, Nazism and a completely totalitarian view of government. He said "social justice" is a "perversion of the gospel" and told Christians to leave their churches if they heard that term used by their pastors or even found it on the Web site! Whew.

I responded on my blog that instead of leaving all our churches, maybe we should just stop watching his show and the insults against a teaching at the core of the gospel and integral to biblical faith, and I suggested that instead of turning pastors and priests in to "church authorities," we turn ourselves in to Glenn Beck (since our church authorities also regard social justice as core to their faith). Well, he apparently got angry and promised that the hammer would "pound over and over through the night" on "your cute little organization and the cute little people who work for you." Some of them are indeed very cute, but they felt a little uneasy about the context of the compliment.

But Tuesday's first installment of the hammer proved that Beck isn't just angry or merely misguided; he really does completely misunderstand the Christian teaching of social justice and is indeed insulting us.

I was glad he gave us his definition of "social justice" and put it up right on his famous blackboard. "My definition of social justice," he wrote in chalk, is "the forced redistribution of wealth, with a hostility to individual property, under the guise of charity and/or justice." Well, somebody needs to tell Mr. Beck that virtually no church in America, or the world, would support anything close to that as a definition of social justice. Beck needs to hear some good church teaching -- including from his own Mormon church members who fundamentally disagree with him and have said so.

Jim Wallis, the public theologian and President and CEO of Sojourners, is part of Change.org's Changemakers network, comprised of leading voices for social change. Change.org asked Wallis to respond to questions to provide context for his work and the causes he supports.

Change.org: What cause would you most like to promote as a Changemaker and why?

My goal is to encourage individuals to put their faith into action for social justice. If people would take this cause seriously, it would make an enormous difference in their lives, their communities, the nation and even the world. All of our faith traditions evaluate the integrity of a society by how we treat the most vulnerable. But, let's not restrict working towards social justice to people of faith, because religion has no monopoly on morality. If all of us put our deepest beliefs into everyday operation, our world would change.

Change.org: If you could ask one million people to all do one thing to advance causes that matter to you, what would it be?

I would ask people to put their faith into action by changing three concrete ways in which they interact with their family, their neighbors and their government: trade in screen time for face time, trade in isolation for simple acts of kindness and trade in cynicism about political leaders for joining a movement that forces them to improve their leadership.

Change.org: When did you first know you wanted to dedicate your life to creating change and helping others?

When I was a teenager, I realized life was so different in white Detroit where I lived, than in black Detroit just a few blocks away. That seemed wrong to me. But nobody in my school, neighborhood or church seemed to have given it a thought. Since I wasn't getting answers to my questions in my community, I went into the city, met the black churches and took jobs alongside young African-Americans, who while living in the same city had really grown up in a different country than I had. From there everything changed. I knew there had to be a better way and my life begin to change.

Change.org: If you could ask President Obama and the U.S. Congress to do one thing to advance you cause, what would it be?

Find the courage to lead over the heads of the elites and the special interests in Washington, D.C. and make an appeal directly to the people to change their country.

Photo credit: JBCurio