Time & Perspective Quote by Jim Wallis

Religious certainty is never just a private feeling; its real power shows up in how it authorizes a person to talk, act, and demand obedience. Jim Wallis is zeroing in on the most combustible form of that certainty: the conviction that you have been personally drafted by God for a world-historical assignment. In American political life especially, “called by God” doesn’t simply describe motivation. It functions as a moral force field, a way to preempt scrutiny by relocating decisions from the messy realm of human judgment to the supposedly unassailable realm of divine mandate.

Wallis’s craft here is interrogative rather than declarative. The repeated “Where is...” isn’t a request for information; it’s a pressure test. He’s exposing the missing ingredients that make power legitimate: self-reflection and humility. Those virtues aren’t soft spiritual add-ons in his framing; they’re safeguards against spiritualized authoritarianism. If you can’t imagine being wrong, you can’t truly hear dissent. If you can’t admit limits, every compromise starts to look like betrayal of God.

The subtext is aimed at leaders and movements that wrap ambition in providence, turning political projects into sacred missions. Wallis, a religious writer himself, isn’t arguing against faith. He’s drawing a line between faith that chastens the ego and faith that inflates it. The warning lands because it refuses to debate theology and instead targets the rhetoric of chosenness: once you claim divine appointment, accountability becomes optional, and history has seen how quickly that slides from confidence into cruelty.