Jim Wallis, the Christian evangelical pastor who is a VIP in liberal political circles, has a new book coming out. It’s called The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy. The book is timed to stir up acrimony and resentment leading into the 2024 election.
The False White Gospel is a sermon aimed at the “Amen corner” of the Left. Wallis considers former President Donald Trump and his followers evil. The problem with his book is that, like so much of liberalism, the arguments are not specific. Wallis shouts about racist white pastors, yet he doesn’t name a single one. He condemns MAGA conservatives yet will not examine who they are and why they believe what they do. He preaches that America is awash in white supremacy yet offers no contemporary examples, instead falling back, as liberals always do, on old stories from America’s past.
The False White Gospel is a culmination of the greatest hits from the Hymnal of High Liberalism. No heresy is allowed. It’s a lazy book that contains no real research.
The one villain that Wallis does name, and obsessively so, is — you guessed it — Donald Trump. In Wallis’s theology, Trump is Satan, Herod, and Judas all rolled into one. The former president is ignorant, obnoxious, xenophobic, and racist, racist, racist. His supporters can’t be reasoned with.
“The success of any movement,” Wallis writes, “depends on knowing the difference between who can be persuaded and who must be defeated — nonviolently, but definitively in the national narrative and at the ballot box.” He adds this: “This book is for anyone willing to move into a deeper conversation about faith and willing to take that crucial faith discussion to all those you know and love who may be willing to hear.”
Not mentioned is that Trump kept us out of wars and boosted the economy for the same minority groups Wallis claims to support.
The “deeper conversation about faith” Wallis envisions means that Wallis will be setting the boundaries. His favorite tactic is to tell anyone who brings up social matters and argues from the Right that the Bible demands that we focus on the poor and not on your weird obsession with transgenderism, government corruption, or immigration. However, when the reverend is haranguing the flock about racism or in defense of the LGBT agenda, it’s different.
In other words, if you bring up culture war matters, you’re ignoring Jesus. But if Wallis spends 200 pages calling you a white supremacist, without proof, he’s not forgetting the poor to serve his own ego but doing the work of social justice. Heads, he wins; tails, you lose.
Here, I need to add some full disclosure. In the 1980s, I was a regular contributor to Sojourners, the magazine that Wallis founded in the 1970s. I was a liberal Catholic in the Reagan years and became friends with the Sojourners staff in Washington, D.C. They are tremendous people who care deeply about the poor and live out the gospel command to help those less fortunate. There is a touching passage in The False White Gospel in which Wallis and his crew take in a homeless mother of nine. I saw Wallis and his team in action doing work like this. They are not phonies.
Yet when liberalism began to sour for me around 1990, I stopped writing for Sojourners. After I left, Wallis’s star began to rise. His biography is impressive: He’s a New York Times bestselling author, public theologian, and “renowned preacher and commentator on ethics and public life.” Wallis is the inaugural holder of the Chair in Faith and Justice and the founding director of the Georgetown University Center on Faith and Justice. In 2022, he served on former President Barack Obama’s White House Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships and has taught faith and public life courses at Harvard.
Someone with those kinds of credentials is bound to go wobbly on the tough social matters. And so Wallis has. In 2008, he defended traditional marriage with this sober assessment: “I don’t think the sacrament of marriage should be changed.” “Some people say that Jesus didn’t talk about homosexuality, and that’s technically true. But marriage is all through the Bible, and it’s not gender-neutral. I have never done a blessing for a same-sex couple. I’ve never been asked to do one. I’m not sure that I would.”
By 2013, Wallis had flip-flopped on the matter. He is now all-in on LGBT. And though he was once uneasy about abortion, calling it “killing,” Wallis ran a piece in Sojourners in 2022 by a pastor who went from pro-life to what he calls a “pro-choice pro-lifer.”
Over and over in The False White Gospel, sentences such as this appear: “White Christian nationalist leaders and their churches almost never speak of the poor, or God’s priority of a ‘preferential option’ for the poor.” Again, who is Wallis talking about? Who are the white Christian nationalist leaders? Name them. He never does, instead taking a swipe at Glenn Beck for something that happened years ago when Beck told his audience to “run the other way” when Wallis appeared (not bad advice).
In writing his book, Wallis could always have spoken to one conservative he knows — me. I’m for the poor and the working class, hate racism, didn’t vote for Trump, and am pro-life and Catholic. Dialogues with folks such as me would have made The False White Gospel a less hectoring, tiresome, and arrogant book.
It also would have presented Wallis with an uncomfortable truth. In his book America’s Original Sin, Wallis argues in defense of black men who are falsely accused of crimes. Yet when I was falsely accused of crimes in 2018 in a political effort to prevent a conservative Supreme Court nomination that threatened the diabolical abortion ruling Roe v. Wade, Wallis joined the mob in calling for my crucifixion. He was more Herod than Jesus.
Sadly, Wallis doesn’t have the decency to feel ashamed about that. A celebrity pastor to the liberal elite, he probably has difficulty comprehending the idea that a working-class Catholic such as me — who will never make sainthood yet stood by the truth while under a demonic attack, an attack launched by the people Wallis counts as disciples — may have done more for the most vulnerable among us, the unborn, than he ever has or ever will. While Wallis increasingly echoes Pontius Pilate — “What is truth?” — I may have saved more black lives than he has in 50 years of ministry.
Wallis and his False White Gospel bring to mind a line from Bob Dylan, himself a preacher and a Sojourners favorite: “Sometimes, Satan comes as a man of peace.”
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Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.