Politics & Power Quote by Jim Wallis

Wallis’s line does something deceptively radical in the Bush-era culture wars: it grants George W. Bush’s faith the dignity of sincerity without granting Bush’s politics moral immunity. In the early 2000s, “faith” was a partisan accelerant, used to frame policy disputes as spiritual litmus tests. Wallis, a religious progressive who spent years arguing that “values” didn’t belong exclusively to the right, steps into that combustible arena and chooses a disarming move: belief the man, then debate the agenda.

The repetition is the tell. “I think… I think… I think” sounds modest, even cautious, but it’s also a rhetorical shield. Wallis isn’t offering insider proof; he’s offering a calibrated public judgment meant to lower the temperature. By stacking “sincere,” “very real,” and “deeply held,” he builds a three-beat affirmation that preempts the easy liberal caricature of Bush as a cynical evangelical cosplay artist. That matters because calling someone’s faith fake is a shortcut to dismissing their voters as dupes, and Wallis is trying to keep a coalition possible.

The subtext is sharper than the soft language suggests: if Bush’s faith is authentic, then its fruits are fair game. Wallis is quietly insisting on a separation not of church and state but of piety and policy competence. Sincerity, he implies, is not the same as righteousness. It’s an attempt to relocate the argument from motives to outcomes, from “he’s lying” to “even if he isn’t, look what this produces.”