Politics & Power Quote by Jim Wallis

Jim Wallis is doing something more strategic than praising faith in politics; he is trying to rescue it from the culture-war caricature. By reaching for Desmond Tutu and Martin Luther King Jr., he’s not just name-checking moral heroes. He’s building a permission structure: if your instinct is to distrust “values” talk because it often arrives packaged as exclusion, Wallis offers a different lineage where religious conviction fueled liberation rather than policing.

The wording matters. “Put their values or their faith into action” frames belief as a verb, not a badge. That’s a quiet rebuke to performative piety and to leaders who treat religion as branding. Then he narrows “faith” into “this is a good thing,” twice, like he anticipates the reflexive backlash. The repetition is a rhetorical seatbelt: he’s bracing for the audience to swerve toward church-state alarms or memories of moral-majority power plays.

The subtext is an argument about legitimacy. Wallis implies that politics is never value-neutral; the real question is which values get enacted and toward whom. Invoking Tutu and King also shifts the terrain from abstract “religion in public life” debates to concrete outcomes: reconciliation, civil rights, dignity under pressure. It’s a bid to reframe “faith-based” leadership as accountable to justice, not merely to a constituency.

Contextually, this lands in a long American fight over whether religious language in politics signals compassion or control. Wallis wants the former to be audible again.