Life & Wisdom Quote by Jim Wallis

Wallis is trying to puncture a lazy habit in American politics: treating “left” and “right” like moral blood types. The line is a rebuke to anyone who assumes faith neatly maps onto partisan identity, but it’s also aimed at religious institutions that have let party language colonize their theology. By insisting these aren’t “religious categories,” he’s refusing the common bargain where Christianity is marketed as conservative branding and progressive politics is treated as the secular alternative.

The sharper twist is the second sentence. Saying left and right are “often not even value categories” challenges the comforting idea that our political labels reliably signal what we believe. Wallis suggests the axis has become more tribal than ethical: a shorthand for team membership, donor ecosystems, media habits, and culture-war reflexes. Values are invoked, but frequently as props. The result is a politics where “pro-life,” “family,” “freedom,” “justice,” or “compassion” get selectively deployed depending on which coalition needs the word that week.

Context matters: Wallis has long operated in the space where evangelical faith meets social justice, pushing against the post-Reagan fusion of white evangelicalism with the Republican Party while also resisting a progressive impulse to dismiss religion as inherently reactionary. The sentence works because it’s not merely “both-sides” contrarianism; it’s a demand to re-sort our moral vocabulary. If left and right aren’t sacred, and aren’t even consistently about values, then religious people (and everyone else) are forced back to first principles: What do we owe one another, and who benefits when ideology replaces conscience?