The Worldview of Neo-Marxist Jim Wallis

By Brannon S. Howse

David Noebel wrote an article for WorldviewWeekend.com that details the radical and anti-biblical worldview of Jim Wallis. That Wallis has served as President Obama’s spiritual adviser reveals a great deal about his belief system. Dr. Noebel exposes the following facts about radical change agent Jim Wallis:  

First, Jim Wallis has had relationships with the communist Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). 

Second, his “Witness for Peace” was an attempt to defend the Nicaraguan Sandinistas! Wallis, together with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (Obama’s former pastor of 20 years) “rallied support for the communist Nicaraguan regime and protested actions by the United States which supported the anti-communist Contra rebels” (Family World News, February 2009, p. 7).

    Third, Wallis and his Sojourners community of fellow-travelers believe Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua, and the other revolutionary forces “restructuring socialist societies” are the Communist paradises the United States needs to emulate in order to establish “social justice.” Writing in the November 1983 issue of Sojourners, Jacob Laksin notes, “Jim Wallis and Jim Rice drafted what would become the charter of leftist activists committed to the proliferation of Communist revolutions in Central America” (Laksin, “Sojourners: History, Activities and Agendas” in Discoverthenetworks.org, 2005).

The ugly truth is Wallis wishes to see the destruction of the United States as a nation and in its place “a radical nonconformist community” patterned after the progressive, socialist commune he established in Washington, D.C., in 1971 (Laksin, Ibid.).

“The Sojourners community,” says Laksin, “actively embraced ‘liberation theology,’ rallying to the cause of communist regimes that had seized power with the promise of bringing about a revolutionary restructuring of society.” Clark Pinnock, a disaffected former member of Sojourners, said that the community’s members were “100 percent in favor of the Nicaraguan [communist] revolution” (Laksin, Ibid.).

And yes, Wallis portrays the evangelical right that happens to be pro-American and anti-Communist “as members of the forces of darkness” (Nash, p. 66, 71). For Wallis, a good Christian is someone who is pro-communist and socialist, while a bad Christian is someone who is anti-communist and pro-capitalist. The cry of the Sojourners crowd is “social justice” for the poor and downtrodden—social justice being code for socialism/communism.

You would hope that a radical like Jim Wallis would be the last person embraced by people who call themselves Bible-believing conservatives. The problem is that many individuals, churches, and organizations think they are Bible-believing conservatives, but their actions, theology, doctrine, and associations say otherwise. 

Legitmacy at Prestonwood 

Prestonwood Baptist Church in West Plano, Texas scheduled Wallis to speak for a church luncheon on March 9, 2010. I found this shocking because Prestonwood is considered by many to be a strongly conservative church, and the senior pastor at the time, Jack Graham, had served two terms as president of the Southern Baptist Convention. 

I called the church to alert them that they had invited a neo-Marxist to speak at the church, but no one seemed interested in my warning—until I discussed their Wallis invitation on my radio program and distributed the program to our Worldview Weekend email list. Suddenly, a representative from Prestonwood wanted to talk to me. In an email and a phone call, he informed me that Wallis would not be speaking at the March 9 function after all. That was good news, of course, but the bad news is that upon further communication, I could not get the church to make a statement declaring that Prestonwood Baptist Church does not agree with the worldview of Jim Wallis. 

One wonders if the church actually agrees with Wallis’s radical worldview. He was, after all, originally invited to speak for a church luncheon, yet after withdrawing the invitation, the church would not denounce the man’s radical worldview. Did the church cancel Wallis as a speaker simply because of the controversy or because the church really does not agree with Jim Wallis? Why wouldn’t Jack Graham put out a statement saying he and his congregation denounce the social justice, Emergent Church, socialist worldview of Wallis and his friends? Such a statement would have put the issue to rest and would have been a real encouragement to hundreds of thousands of people and thousands of other pastors. Prestonwood’s invitation to Wallis and the church’s lack of willingness to denounce his radical worldview reveals just how far some churches have slid from their once biblically solid foundation. 

(Some of our listeners and our email alert recipients, by the way, reported that when they called the church to voice concern, they were led to believe Wallis had never been booked to speak at the church. To demonstrate otherwise, we emailed our folks a screenshot of the luncheon announcement which had been removed from the church website.)

Copyright 2012 ©Brannon Howse. This content is for Situation Room members and is not to be duplicated in any form or uploaded to other websites without the express written permission of Brannon Howse or his legally authorized representative.