Jim Wallis and Richard Land agree that faith should influence public policy. They just can’t agree on how. The two evangelical leaders locked horns in an Oct. 19 debate at the Values Voter Summit in Washington.
Wallis and Land exemplified two sides of the evangelical spectrum. Wallis, a best-selling author and head of Sojourners magazine and Call to Renewal, is known for his activism on environmental, poverty and human-rights issues. Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, is a denominational leader who supports traditionally conservative values.
Land said he believes the American-led coalition’s military intervention in Iraq satisfied just-war criteria, while Wallis said at the conference he believed “this war was a mistake.” Wallis has signed on to an evangelical statement endorsing the view that global warming is human induced, while Land has not. Land supported welfare reform in the 1990s, but Wallis did not.
They agreed younger evangelicals have a wider agenda than older ones — and that these newer issues can be addressed while still supporting the sanctity of human life and the protection of marriage.
“That doesn’t mean they are abandoning their concern for the sanctity of life or the health of marriage,” Wallis said. “They just don’t want there to be only two moral values issues.”
Land said he has “full confidence” that evangelicals can stand for the sanctity of all human life, human rights and marriage as defined by God “and we can be concerned about the environment as well.”
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