With Greenbelt just four days away I've taken half a day off today, which has given me the chance to finish God's Politics by Jim Wallis.
I'm a painfully slow reader, which makes it difficult to effectively summarise one book in one post, but, in brief, Wallis' book is a look at the political situation in America from a the perspective of a progressive conservative evangelical.
Although I have never been to the United States, the picture that Wallis presents suggests that politics and religion and the crossover between the two, is a whole different ball game in America to the situation here in the UK. Wallis' observation at the start of the book is that much of American politics (not least American foreign policy) is determined by bad theology . His suggestion is that the solution to this problem is not secularism, but good theology. Wallis then goes through a series of issues and presents alternatives to the [secular] policy of the left and the [theologically misguided] policy of the right. In particular Wallis deals with family values, the Middle-East, security, race and poverty (national and international).
Reading the book from this side of the pond the difficulty is that here the church does not have the influence that it does in America. Nor is the church a collective group that votes en mass. We are a disparate, diverse fellowship that has little influence on the state (except for a handful of white bearded men we call bishops) and therefore Wallis' softly, softly approach (meetings with and letters to the president) seems futile.
I would suggest that, politically speaking, the church in Britain needs to be more counter-cultural. To use the miners as an illustration, gone are days of beer and sandwiches with the Prime Minister, now is the time for picket lines and protests- Sentamu style!
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