Life & Wisdom Quote by Jim Wallis

Wallis is trying to steal a tired wedge issue back from the people who usually wield it like a club. By opening with an unqualified "absolutely", he signals fluency in liberal civic scripture: church and state must be institutionally distinct. That first clause works as inoculation. It tells secular audiences, "I'm not here to smuggle in theocracy", while telling believers, "I'm not surrendering the public square."

The pivot - "But I don't believe..". - is the real move. Wallis reframes the debate from rules to motives, from constitutional architecture to moral psychology. Separation, he implies, was never meant to demand moral muteness; it was meant to prevent coercion and favoritism. The subtext is a critique of a certain modern posture: the idea that "neutral" public reason requires amputating the sources of people's ethics, especially religious ones. He's arguing for translation, not evacuation: bring your convictions into politics, but don't demand that the state baptize them.

Context matters. Wallis, a prominent evangelical voice on the religious left, has long pushed against the monopolization of "values" talk by the Christian right. The line "for many of us" is strategically pluralistic; it widens the frame to include secular moral traditions and other faiths, even as it centers religion as a legitimate engine of civic engagement. There's also a quiet warning to progressives: if you treat religious language as inherently suspect, you cede a huge constituency - and you misunderstand how many Americans actually arrive at justice, solidarity, and duty.