Center for American Progress

Jim Wallis

For years I’ve been critical of Jim Wallis, the self-styled “prophetic voice” (his term) of Progressive politics in the American public square. “Prophetic voice” is a term that borrows from the Christian moral lexicon to lend moral authority and offer religious cover to secular Progressive ideology. Wallis operates in the mold of the National Council of Churches (NCC) and conflates Christian thinking with Marxist social dogma.

Like the NCC, Wallis was lost in the wilderness for decades. “Christian Progressives” are dogged by a sense of their own irrelevance. An ideology which unequivocally dismisses religion doesn’t have much room for professional religious types like Wallis or the NCC. He seemed to have found his voice after the Obama election however, rising to become one of Obama’s “religious advisers” and all around gadfly on the Progressive speaking circuit and occasional appearances on MSNBC.

But there’s trouble in Wallis land. It turns out George Soros has been pumping cash into the Wallis organization, maybe millions. Marvin Olasky of World Magazine has been scouring the Wallis records and uncovered the uncomfortable dalliance. Wallis denied it as long as he could but had to issue a “clarification” a few days ago admitting it was all true. You can read about it here and here.

Soros spends his considerable wealth supporting hard-left causes (Moveon.org for example). He also funds the Center of American Progress, the Progressive think-tank at which Pat. Bartholomew spoke last year during the Mississippi Riverboat Cruise promoting global warming. The trip ended in a Patriarchal admonition to support the Geneva Accords that advocated the centralization of the economies of each EU member member state under one bureaucracy.

The diplomatic effort collapsed after the leak of emails from East Anglia uncovered that much of the global warming “research” was fraudulent. The EP squandered considerable moral capital on the trip, and has wisely refrained from making any statement about global warming since the collapse. Maybe he learned something Wallis has not: You cannot serve God and mammon.

A scandal in global warming research is unfolding that isn’t going away. Internal correspondence from the Climate Reseach Unit (CRU), the research center and ground zero for global warming advocacy, was released that reveals that the top global warming scientists hid data that proves the earth has been cooling for the last ten years, conspired against colleagues that were global warming skeptics, and cooked the numbers to keep the lucrative grants coming. It is taking time to digest all the facts but you can read some preliminary conclusions here: London Telegraph, Pajamas TV, Fox News, Washington Times, (Google “climategate” for more).

Global warming was of course the centerpiece of the Ecumenical Patriarch’s pastoral message to America during his trip to the United States a few weeks back. The Green Patriarch embraced the Progressive environmentalist agenda, so much so that he lent the full weight of his office to urge the passage of political legislation such as the Copenhagen Protocols that global warming advocates argued was needed to stop imminent environmental catastrophe.

We warned the EP’s handlers that the Mississippi River Symposium and the Washington, DC public relations offensive last month was a dangerous road to take. We objected that a leader of the EP’s stature was lending his moral authority to legislation built on questionable (now shoddy and corrupt) science. We rejected the political correctness that shaped many of his public statements, especially the elevation of secular moralism and apocalyptic alarmism, while ignoring the critical issues like the continuing devaluation of human life seeping into western civilization. We pointed out that two other prominent religious leaders of the West, Pope Benedict and Patriarch Kirill, have no trouble making these important moral distinctions.

Progressive environmentalism will suffer a grave blow when the corruption revealed by the release of CRU documents is fully comprehended. The Ecumenical Patriarch hitched his wagon to the environmentalist agenda and garnered heaps of praise by secular elites for his, well, “progressive” leadership.

It will prove to be a debilitating blunder. Sanctifying cultural fads and political ideologies carries a penalty. The moral stature of the Ecumenical Patriarch will diminish as the corruption of the CRU is further revealed. The basking in accolades from civic authorities and cultural gatekeepers will be seen as the abrogation of moral authority that it is. Opportunities for substantive leadership have been squandered, and the Church and the culture are the poorer for it.

Address of His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew

“A Changeless Faith for a Changing World”

Center for American Progress and Georgetown University
Gaston Hall of Georgetown University
Washington, DC
(November 3, 2009)
Remarks as Prepared for Delivery
————
Thank you very much, Professor James J. O’Donnell, Provost of Georgetown University, and John Podesta, President of the Center for American Progress. We are also especially grateful for the students who are present with us today, and for their interest.

Progress is often equated with change. So let us acknowledge this: it may appear strange for a progressive think tank to sponsor a lecture by the leader of a faith that takes pride in how little it has changed in 2,000 years. The fact is that our first instinct in Orthodoxy is to conserve the precious faith that has been handed down to us in an unbroken line from Jesus Christ through the Apostles. In the case of our Ecumenical Patriarchate, the First See of the Orthodox World, it has been handed to us through St. Andrew the Apostle, to whose See we are the 270th successor.

But even though our faith may be 2,000 years old, our thinking is not. True progress is a balance between preserving the essence of a certain way of life and changing things that are not essential. Christianity was born a revolutionary faith – and we have preserved that. In other words, paradoxically, we have succeeded in not changing a faith that is itself dedicated to change.

Let us, as the lawyers would say, make a disclaimer: By calling Christianity revolutionary, and saying it is dedicated to change, we are not siding with Progressives – just as, by conserving it, we are not siding with Conservatives. All political factions believe God is on their side – as Abraham Lincoln said of the Union and Confederacy, “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.”

The only side we take is that of our faith – which today may seem to land us in one political camp, tomorrow another – but in truth we are always and only in one camp, that of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Continue reading →