by Jim Wallis.

HarperOne. 336 pages. $25.95.

BY ELIZABETH CAZDEN
Special to the Journal

This book follows Jim Wallis’ 2005 bestseller, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It. Now, Wallis announces, the Religious Right has lost its political clout, and both right and left have been replaced by a new spiritual-political revival of “the moral center.”

Wallis, CEO and editor in chief of Sojourners magazine and Web site ( www.sojo.net), has been described by both admirers and critics as a left-wing evangelical, though he now rejects that label.

Since at least 2000, Wallis has hailed the end of the Religious Right’s dominance of American politics. His current announcement still seems at best premature, given the strength of conservative Christians in this still-unsettled election cycle. Wallis’ claim that all previous American religious revivals involved political and social change is also one many historians would challenge as simplistic and, in some cases, erroneous.

Wallis seeks to both describe and promote the new “awakening.” The book seems, however, too full of Wallis at Davos economic summits, Wallis with presidents and presidential candidates, Wallis teaching at Harvard. He features, almost exclusively, highly educated white men. He neglects the many other religious leaders and ordinary folks across the theological spectrum who have pushed their churches into more engagement with global climate change, racism, and economic justice. This top-down approach seems an odd recipe for political movement-building, though it may help secure Wallis’ role as a sought-after talk show and magazine pundit.

Wallis waffles on whether the current revival is (and should be) Christian, religious, spiritual, or whatever. He notes that “religion has no monopoly on morality,” but then within two pages says that only a spiritual revival will show us the common good. He urges evangelical Protestants to strive for the kingdom of God, a new order whose constitution is the Sermon on the Mount, but to use non-religious language in public. He occasionally mentions Catholic, Jewish, Gandhian, Buddhist, and Muslim renewals, almost as an afterthought, while appealing to the “spiritual but not religious” and to those who merely seek “a new moral center.” It remains unclear to whom he is speaking, and what he hopes they (we) will do.

The book reads like a compilation of magazine articles or blog entries, too lightly edited. Wallis accurately identifies a widespread longing for integrity, leadership, and a political discourse that addresses people’s real problems. It is less clear how his book answers that hunger or helps bring people together to find solutions. THE GREAT AWAKENING: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America,

bcazden@verizon.net