Parenting & Family Quote by Jim Wallis

“We have got some mountains to move” is activist rhetoric with a preacher’s cadence: it borrows the biblical scale of impossibility and treats it as a to-do list. Wallis, a faith-driven progressive who’s spent decades arguing that religion should be measured by its public ethics, isn’t offering a statistic for polite concern. He’s using a number as moral leverage. Three billion isn’t data; it’s indictment.

The follow-up clause tightens the screw. “Half of God’s children” reframes global poverty from an economic problem into a relational one. It collapses distance. If the poor are family, then inequality stops being unfortunate and starts being a violation. The subtext is aimed at comfortable believers (and policymakers who court them): you can’t square a faith built on mercy with an economy that normalizes $2-a-day lives. The line quietly challenges the idea that charity is enough; mountains don’t move with spare change.

Context matters, too. Wallis came up alongside the Religious Right’s rise, insisting that “values” shouldn’t be shorthand for culture-war policing. By pairing the scriptural metaphor with a blunt poverty threshold, he bridges two languages that rarely cooperate: moral urgency and policy realism. The intent is coalition-building through shame and hope at once: if this is the scale of suffering, then incrementalism becomes a kind of complicity, and belief becomes meaningless unless it reorganizes priorities, budgets, and political courage.