Politics & Power Quote by Jim Wallis

Wallis is doing something rhetorically savvy here: he’s laundering the controversial idea of evangelical access to power through the moral clarity of the causes he names. “Evangelical leaders can persuade the president” quietly concedes a reality many progressives distrust - religious influence at the highest level - then preemptively reframes it as civic virtue. The sentence is built like a permission slip. If the outcomes are Sudan, sex trafficking, HIV/AIDS, then the process must be “a very good thing.”

The subtext is triangulation. Wallis, long associated with a more socially conscious evangelicalism, is marking a boundary between culture-war religiosity and what he wants to brand as public-interest faith. Notice the careful stacking of issues: Sudan signals humanitarian intervention and global conscience; trafficking evokes bipartisan moral panic and protective instincts; HIV/AIDS nods to a history of evangelical stigma while offering redemption through compassionate engagement. It’s a curated list designed to make “evangelical leaders” feel less like a voting bloc and more like a conscience caucus.

Context matters because this kind of argument peaked in the Bush-era moment when evangelical networks were simultaneously a domestic political machine and, through initiatives like PEPFAR, a channel for massive global health spending. Wallis’s “completely supportive” is less personal enthusiasm than a strategic wager: if evangelicals are going to have the president’s ear anyway, better to steer that access toward outward-facing mercy rather than inward-facing regulation. The line aims to normalize religious persuasion as acceptable - even admirable - when it produces internationally legible goods.