Time & Perspective Quote by Jim Wallis

Wallis draws a sharp line between hope as sentiment and hope as force. “Hope unbelieved” isn’t merely ignored; it’s labeled “nonsense,” a word that captures the way power structures protect themselves. Dismissal is the first line of defense: if you can make an aspiration sound childish or naive, you don’t have to argue with it, much less concede anything to it. The phrasing subtly indicts the gatekeepers of “realism” who mistake the present order for the only possible one.

Then he flips the frame with a daring redefinition: hope “believed” becomes “history in the process of being changed.” That’s not motivational-poster uplift; it’s a theory of how movements work. Wallis treats belief as collective commitment, the moment when private longing hardens into public action. History, in his formulation, isn’t a neutral record of what happened. It’s a contested project, and belief is the lever that moves it.

The line also carries the imprint of Wallis’s long career at the intersection of faith and politics, where “hope” can sound like a pious cop-out. He refuses that. By tying hope to historical change, he argues that moral imagination is not separate from material consequences; it’s often their precondition. The subtext is a challenge: if your hope can’t survive mockery, it isn’t ready for power. If it can gather believers, it stops being a wish and starts becoming a plan.