Politics & Power Quote by Jim Wallis

Wallis is calling out a sleight of hand: the comfort of religious rhetoric without the discomfort of religious scrutiny. The line lands because it refuses the usual culture-war script where “faith” is either celebrated as a private virtue or attacked as a public intrusion. Instead, he treats theological language as what it actually becomes when a president deploys it in wartime: a moral claim with real-world stakes. If you invoke Scripture to frame Iraq, Wallis argues, you’ve invited Scripture to cross-examine you.

The intent is less to banish religion from politics than to demand accountability inside the president’s chosen register. That’s a smart rhetorical trap. It denies leaders the ability to borrow the authority of the Bible as a mood-setter while insulating policy from the Bible’s most politically inconvenient themes: just war criteria, the protection of innocents, the priority of peacemaking, the suspicion of empire, the prophetic tradition of speaking truth to power. Wallis’s “serious discussion” implies a debate with teeth, not a photo-op faith.

The subtext is also a rebuke of the broader media and political ecosystem. “And that was never done” points to a failure of elites who either lacked religious literacy or treated it as impolite to interrogate. In the early 2000s, post-9/11 urgency and the Bush administration’s moral certitude created a climate where theological language could function as moral napalm: it burned away complexity and sanctified ambiguity. Wallis insists that if religion is going to be used to sell war, it must also be allowed to veto it.