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 Evangelical leader takes on Beck for assailing social justic 
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 Evangelical leader takes on Beck for assailing social justic
By John Blake, CNN
STORY HIGHLIGHTS

(CNN) -- An evangelical leader is calling for a boycott of Glenn Beck's television show and challenging the Fox News personality to a public debate after Beck vilified churches that preach economic and social justice.

The Rev. Jim Wallis, president of Sojourners, a network of progressive Christians, says Beck perverted Jesus' message when he urged Christians last week to leave churches that preach social and economic justice.

Beck told his audience that they should leave churches that preach "economic and social justice." Wallis says Beck compared those churches to Communists and Nazis.

Wallis says at least a thousand people have already responded to his call to boycott Beck. He says Beck is confusing his personal philosophy with the Bible.

"He wants us to leave our churches, but we should leave him," Wallis says of Beck. "When your political philosophy is to consistently favor the rich over the poor, you don't want to hear about economic justice."

Wallis says he wants to go on Beck's show to challenge the contention that churches shouldn't preach economic and social justice.

Social and economic justice is at the heart of Jesus' message, Wallis says. :heart

"He's afraid of being challenged on his silly caricatures," Wallis says. "Glenn Beck talks a lot when he doesn't have someone to dialogue with. Is he willing to talk with someone who he doesn't agree with?"

Beck did not answer numerous requests for an interview. :spit :crylaugh :roflmao

But a prominent evangelical leader says he, too, is suspicious of churches that preach economic and social justice.

Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, a Christian college in Virginia, says Jesus wasn't interested in politics. He says that those pastors who preach economic and social justice "are trying to twist the gospel to say the gospel supported socialism." :doh

"Jesus taught that we should give to the poor and support widows, but he never said that we should elect a government that would take money from our neighbor's hand and give it to the poor," Falwell says. :crazy

Falwell says that Jesus believed that individuals, not governments, should help the poor.

"If we all did as Jesus did when he helped the poor, we wouldn't need the government," says Falwell, the son of the late evangelical leader, the Rev. Jerry Falwell. :roll

What is economic and social justice?

The term "economic and social justice" is not easy to define. It has different meanings for different people.

For some Christians, practicing economic and social justice means that churches should practice charity: setting up soup kitchens, assisting victims of natural disasters, and helping people find jobs.

For other Christians, practicing economic and social justice also means trying to change the conditions that cause people to be poor or unemployed. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. subscribed to this definition of biblical justice.

Marty Duren, a Southern Baptist Convention pastor, says some conservative Christians have traditionally thought churches shouldn't get involved in economic or social justice.

"For a long time, Southern Baptists and evangelicals were so focused on the return of Christ that what was happening in the real world was almost incidental," says Duren, who blogs at martyduren.com.

But within the last two decades, Duren says, more evangelical Christians have come to believe that the Bible calls for economic and social justice.

William Wilberforce, for example, is a 19th century British politician who helped abolish the slave trade in his country. He is now regarded as a hero for some evangelicals because he applied his faith to the economic and social justice issues of his day, Duren says.

Did Jesus preach about social and economic justice?

The Bible cares about social and economic justice, Duren says.

"The Old Testament is replete with examples of God threatening to judge a nation because of a lack of justice or carrying out that threat of judgment against a nation,'' Duren says.

He believes Beck was wrong to tell Christians that they shouldn't belong to churches that seek justice.

"If I had any authority at Fox News right now, Glenn Beck would be seeking economic justice," Duren says. :crylaugh :spit

That concern for justice is what helped convert him, says Wallis, president of Sojourners. Wallis, who counts King as one of his faith role models, says the Bible isn't just concerned with feeding the poor -- it's concerned about the conditions that create the poor.

Wallis also evoked the Christians who fought against slavery as well as civil rights activists.

"The Bible just didn't say take care of the victim -- it talks about justice," says Wallis, who is the author of "Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street and Your Street."

Meanwhile, Wallis says he's waiting for that public debate with Beck.

"I'll have it," Wallis says, "anywhere he wants." :clap

http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/03/12/beck.boycott/index.html?hpt=C1

For anyone interested in sending an e-mail:

http://go.sojo.net/campaign/glennbeck_socialjustice

However, Sojourners' web site is receiving a ton of traffic - so be patient. Please send the e-mail - I did. :mrgreen:

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The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. - FDR


Fri Mar 12, 2010 1:03 pm
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Post Re: Evangelical leader takes on Beck for assailing social justic
Here is the text of the email from Sojourners, which was forwarded to me yesterday from a Catholic priest who has worked for peace and justice, both economic and social, all his life. He is not alone; missioners all over the world work for justice for the poor and marginalized every day. This is what it means to be a Christian, a follower of Jesus This is what he commanded of us in the Sermon on the Mount. I am VERY disappointed in Glenn Beck.

Dear Friends,

Tell Glenn Beck:
"I'm turning myself in -- I'm another Christian who believes in social justice."

This time, he’s crossed the line.

Last week, Fox News commentator Glenn Beck urged Christians to leave churches that use the words “social justice.”

Then today, on his morning show, Beck said social justice was a “perversion of the gospel” and complained that social justice and economic justice were code words for Communism and Nazism.

Really?

Considering that the Catholic Church, the black churches, the mainline Protestant churches, and more and more evangelical and Pentecostal churches all consider social justice central to biblical faith, what’s he really advocating? A complete disregard of the gospel and millennia of Church teaching?

Of course, Christians may disagree about what social justice means in our current political context. And that’s an important debate. But the Bible is clear: From Moses to the Hebrew prophets to Jesus, social justice has been an integral part of God’s plan for humanity.

Beck said that, if his church were about “social justice,” he would report his church to the church authorities. What authorities? Church bodies as diverse in their theology as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the National Association of Evangelicals have explicitly endorsed social justice as a biblical imperative.

So here’s our idea: How about reporting ourselves to Glenn Beck as church members and pastors who practice and preach social justice?

Because Sojourners’ mission is “to articulate the biblical call to social justice,” our founder and CEO Jim Wallis was the first to “turn himself in.” Since yesterday, we’ve had more than a thousand other Christians join him.

What about you? We invite you to “turn yourself in” to Glenn Beck as a Christian who believes in social justice. And while you’re at it, invite some friends. Let’s send him thousands of names.

Add your name to the list here:

http://go.sojo.net/campaign/glennbeck_socialjustice

-Sojourners

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"The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything." ~ Albert Einstein


Sun Mar 14, 2010 9:37 pm
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Post Re: Evangelical leader takes on Beck for assailing social justic
The Ultimate Contradiction-in-Terms: Right-wing Christianity

I have done a lot of writing, in my blog posts and my book, about the historic differences between conservatives and progressives in political battles, but almost equally fascinating to me is that between conservative and progressive religious traditions. The exact same fault lines, most importantly in terms of individualism vs. community, play themselves out in theological debates which sound very much like our political debates -- and indeed, a lot of the same people operate in both realms.

Glenn Beck and Jim Wallis got into this debate over the last few days, and because Jim actually knows something about the Bible, he easily won the debate. Beck's classic conspiracy-minded starting point -- that because both Nazis and Communists have used the phrase "social justice", that any religion that uses the term must be bad too -- has a similar logic to saying that if a really bad teacher said two plus two equals four, because he or she was a bad teacher it must be false. Or saying that if a politician you don't like says "God Bless America", then any politician who says that is terrible. But leaving aside Beck's incredibly stupid logic, the point he makes about "social justice" is in keeping with conservative ideology: it is all about a self-focused view of religion and politics that, like Beck's ideological hero Ayn Rand, proclaims selfishness as the ultimate virtue.

Conservative Christians manage to ignore the literally many hundreds of Biblical quotes about social justice by making Christianity a religion solely focused on one very selfish goal: whether they get into heaven or not. That's it, that is the entire goal and purpose and meaning of their faith. And because St. Paul argued that faith is more important than "works" (what you do good in the world), they think that believing a certain doctrine is the only thing that matters in terms of whether you make it into heaven or not. Since everything is about getting themselves to heaven, and the Earth will be destroyed soon in Armageddon anyway, nothing that happens here matters very much. The one thing that matters to their God is having more people worship Him, so they try to convert people, but all that other stuff Jesus and the Old Testament prophets and Moses and James and all those other folks in the Bible talked about in terms of kindness, mercy, forgiving debts, being your brother's keeper, helping the poor, and all that other liberal socialistic stuff just isn't much of a priority to them compared to: me getting to heaven, and (second most important) converting others to my God. These so-called "Christian" conservatives live in a state of paranoia that somewhere, somehow some dollar of their taxes might go to some undeserving poor person, ignoring the fact that Jesus' entire ministry was targeted to the "undeserving" poor.

Not all Christians think this way, of course. There is another kind of thinking about the Christian faith: one that actually takes what's written in the Bible (beyond the Book of Revelations) seriously. The Jewish Torah (for Christians, that's their Old Testament) and the Christian New Testament have a wide variety of ideas and voices in their pages. Written by scores of authors over a span of probably a couple thousand years, one of the things I love about the Bible is the wide range of beliefs and perspectives within it. A lot of fundamentalists are desperate to find ways to explain away the contradictions in the Bible, because they believe every word is inspired by God and it's all literally true, but in fact the authors of the Bible disagree on both the details of what actually happened and the interpretation and philosophy behind the events they write about. If you take the Bible seriously, you see the debates and differing perspectives. Some Biblical writers were more conservative in their thinking, and some were more progressive. But the most consistent and enduring theme that runs through virtually every book in the Bible is that we are expected to love and be kind to our neighbors, especially the poor, hurting, and oppressed of the earth.

From the God of Genesis punishing Cain for not being his brother's keeper to Nathan the prophet rebuking King David for taking from the poor; from the Psalms that over and over proclaim the need to help the poor, and condemn those who judges, government officials, and wealthy people who mistreat them, from the prophets like Isaiah and Amos who deride those who engage in ritual sacrifice while refusing to help the oppressed (Isaiah I: "Cease to do evil. Learn to do good, search for justice, help the oppressed, be just to the orphan, plead for the widow.") to Jesus very first sermon proclaiming that he had come to "bring good news to the poor" and "liberty to the captives"- virtually every book of the Bible demands justice and mercy and community.

People who take the Bible seriously and respect its words, as opposed to being obsessed with whether they personally will get into heaven by following a certain kind of dogma, understand that community and compassion are in fact far more central to it than any specific metaphysical belief system. And that is what the Pat Robertsons, Glenn Becks, Sarah Palins, and the other false prophets of conservatism don't understand.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-lux/the-ultimate-contradictio_b_499056.html

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The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. - FDR


Mon Mar 15, 2010 10:18 am
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Post Re: Evangelical leader takes on Beck for assailing social justic
Jim WallisFounder of Sojourners; speaker, author, activist
Posted: March 24, 2010 11:06 AM

What Glenn Beck Doesn't Understand About Biblical Social Justice

When Glenn Beck promised to devote a whole week of his television show to come after me, I wasn't sure he really meant it. I guess he did. Last night he began to make good on the threat he made on his radio show that "the hammer will fall."

I confess to having never really watched Glenn Beck's show before being told that he equated the term "social justice, highly respected in the Christian world and embedded in all of our traditions," with Communism, Marxism, Nazism, and a completely totalitarian view of government. He said "social justice" is a "perversion of the gospel" and told Christians to leave their churches if they heard that term used by their pastors or even found it on the Web site! Whew.

I responded on my blog that instead of leaving all our churches, maybe we should just stop watching his show and the insults against a teaching at the core of the gospel and integral to biblical faith, and I suggested that instead of turning pastors and priests in to "church authorities," we turn ourselves in to Glenn Beck (since our church authorities also regard social justice as core to their faith). Well, he apparently got angry and promised that the hammer would "pound over and over through the night" on "your cute little organization and the cute little people who work for you." Some of them are indeed very cute, but they felt a little uneasy about the context of the compliment.

But tonight's first installment of the hammer proved that Beck isn't just angry or merely misguided; he really does completely misunderstand the Christian teaching of social justice and is indeed insulting us.

I was glad he gave us his definition of "social justice" and put it up right on his famous blackboard. "My definition of social justice," he wrote in chalk, is "the forced redistribution of wealth, with a hostility to individual property, under the guise of charity and/or justice." Well, somebody needs to tell Mr. Beck that virtually no church in America, or the world, would support anything close to that as a definition of social justice. Beck needs to hear some good church teaching -- including from his own Mormon church members who fundamentally disagree with him and have said so.

He did say that caring for the poor was good, and he does it himself, but only in individual ways, and that anything more than that is a slippery slope first to "socialism," then "forced re-distribution of wealth," then full-out "Marxism." It was all in cool diagrams and triangles on his blackboard, which he said just came to him before the show. I can believe that. Again, somebody should take Mr. Beck to a good Catholic Education Congress, like the one I spoke at last weekend in Los Angeles, where 25,000 Christians talked excitedly about the vital relationship between personal and social responsibility.

Then he nailed me. He accused me of saying that faith-based initiatives and their resources were inadequate to reduce poverty by themselves. Guilty as charged. The quote was likely in the context of calling Christians to take such actions and lead by example (something I have preached and tried to practice for almost four decades) but that we will be most effective when we also work in partnership with other sectors: the private market, the rest of civil society, and even the GOVERNMENT! Would somebody please tell Catholic Charities and the Salvation Army that they are really supporting Marxism if they partner with the public sector? :roflmao

Then Beck played a tape which exposed me saying that "redistribution" (the word in the English language that most seems to scare him) was part of the gospel message. He could have mentioned the gospel stories of the Rich Young Ruler, of Lazarus and the Rich Man, or the stern warnings of Jesus in Matthew 25 that we will be judged by "our treatment of the least of these." But he didn't. He did make a brief reference to Christ's teaching that it would be harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle; but he didn't seem to get it.

Instead Beck said that what I meant was...you guessed it: "forced redistribution, socialism, and Marxism." Hmm, don't ever remember saying that (it will be hard for Fox to find the videos of that), or even remember any of my fellow traveler social justice Christians ever saying or supporting that.

But we do say that while social justice begins with our own lives, choices, and sacrifices, it doesn't end there. Those of us who have actually done this work for years all understand that you can't just pull the bodies out of the river, and not send somebody upstream to see what or who is throwing them in. Serving the poor is a fundamental spiritual requirement of faith, but challenging the conditions that create poverty in the first place is also part of biblical social justice. In countering Beck's misunderstanding of social justice on The Colbert Report, James Martin, an editor of the Jesuit America magazine, quoted a Catholic Archbishop as saying, "When I feed the poor they call me a saint; but when I ask why people are poor they call me a communist." He suggested Beck has that problem. :roflmao

Private charity, which Beck and I are both for, wasn't enough to end the slave trade in Great Britain, end legal racial segregation in America, or end apartheid in South Africa. That took vital movements of faith which understood the connection between personal compassion and social justice. Those are the movements that have inspired me and shaped my life -- not BIG GOVERNMENT. And my allies in faith-based social justice movements have wonderfully different views on the role of government -- some bigger than mine and some smaller than mine -- but we all believe social justice requires changing both personal choices and unjust structures. Apparently Beck thinks social justice ends with private charity, but very few churches in the nation would agree with him.

He even recounted my favorite story about the 2,500 verses in the Bible about the poor that we cut out of an old Bible when we were in seminary -- leaving a Bible full of holes -- again, proving my "Marxist" motivations but missing the whole point of the story: that we have made our American Bible full of holes when we have ignored the biblical call to social justice. We might now call that old holey (not holy) Bible, The Glenn Beck Bible. Since the great attraction of so many young people of faith today is the call of Jesus to justice, Glenn may continue to lose the youthful audience who would rather go to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert -- both of whose shows did very funny spoofs on Beck's views last week.

But what really made me mad was when Glenn Beck called Dorothy Day a "Marxist" and went after us both with guilt by association. Guilty again. I couldn't be more proud of that association. It was clear that Beck had never heard of her, so somebody really needs to tell him that Dorothy Day is regarded as a modern saint in the Catholic Church and is already in the process of canonization--before he puts her up on his blackboard. Beck recounted a conversation I had with Dorothy as a new young convert to Christianity. She was in her eighties and asked me if I had been a radical student in my early years as she had been. "Yeah," Beck recorded me saying. And if I had been attracted to Marxism, as she had. "Yeah" I said again. Gotcha! Beck said. They're both Marxists! What he left out was the next lines of our conversation that I still remember and, of course, were on the same tape he abruptly cut off. "And now, you're a Catholic?" Dorothy Day asked me. "Well, now I'm a Christian," I said. "You're not a Catholic?" she chided. I lamely responded that "some of my best friends" were Catholic, and Dorothy smiled. We were sharing our conversion stories from secular radicalism and Marxism to Jesus Christ and his gospel of love and justice. Glenn Beck just left that part out, as he often leaves stuff out or just makes up stuff and puts it in. Here's the full audio of that interview:

Then he most offensively implied that people like us (all up on his infamous blackboard now) at least know people who believe in violence to make our social revolutions succeed -- like former Weatherman Bill Ayers (never met him or heard of him, until Fox tried to make him famous and link him to Barack Obama). By the way, that is really the point of bringing "the hammer" down on me -- to get at President Obama, for whom Beck said repeatedly that I am an "influential spiritual advisor" on a whole range of policy matters. Trouble is, I have never been a "spiritual advisor" to Obama, but am happy to be regarded as one of his many "friends" over the last decade and only gave him "policy advice" in the official report of the Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships on which I served for a year with a distinguished group of interfaith leaders -- who will all likely be up soon on Glenn's blackboard. You can read the full report and check all our recommendations for "Socialism and Marxism."

But I do want to expose his audience to some of the people who are the kind of social revolutionaries Glenn Beck most fears. Listen to this:

Quote:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
he has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.


Or this:

Quote:
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.


Or this:

Quote:
Therefore, it must be borne in mind that grave imbalances are produced when economic action, conceived merely as an engine for wealth creation, is detached from political action, conceived as a means for pursuing justice through redistribution.


The first quote was the words of Jesus (Luke 4:18-19), and the second from Mary's Magnificat (Luke 1:52-53), which prophesied the meaning of the coming of Jesus to include what we Christians call "social justice." The third quote is from Pope Benedict XVI (Caritas in Veritate), one of the most conservative of recent popes and a fierce opponent of Communism. Glenn, he thinks social justice has something to do with "redistribution," just like you quoted me as saying. But neither of us have ever called for the "forced re-distribution" that you keep adding on to our words or say we "really mean."

Both Jesus and Mary could soon be up on the Beck blackboard, along with the Holy Father. :spit :crylaugh :roflmao

C'mon Glenn. Have me on the show! Give me my own blackboard. And let's have a real debate about "social justice!" You've got to be able to do better than this. Just because a fascist and anti-Semitic demagogue in the 1930s like Father Coughlin twisted the term social justice to justify his tirades, please don't say "Jim Wallis is Coughlin." Now you're going to make my rabbi friends mad too, not just the Christians. And please stop accusing Christians who teach social justice with support for totalitarian governments on the Right or the Left. Christian social justice does not equal totalitarian government, but on the contrary, has always tried to hold government accountable to the needs of "the least of these." :heart

Listen to what we teach: you start by practicing social justice in your own life, then you act for social justice in your family, your congregation, your community, in the most local way possible. The Catholics call that "subsidiarity" -- look it up. And you only work to change government when you can't accomplish things on a smaller scale. Churches were the very best in responding to Katrina, for example, but churches can't build levees. And Glenn, voluntary church action can't provide health care for millions who don't have it, or fix broken urban school systems, or provide jobs at fair wages, or protect our kids from toxic air, water, and toys, or fix a broken immigration system that is grinding up our vulnerable families, or keep banks from cheating our people. All that requires commitments to holding governments accountable to social justice, and advocating for better public policies. Christians have done that for many years, especially in democratic governments where they have the opportunity. Take a breath Glenn, your phobia about any government makes you see "Marxists" under every rock -- and in every Christian heart and congregation. Give it a rest!

We start with God, not government (remember your diagram Glenn); we start with changing lives, not policies; we always start on the home front in our families, congregations, and communities; and only address public policies when we can't do it ourselves. That's Christian social justice, Glenn, a passion for the gospel and the poor-- not for totalitarian government.

Both Glenn Beck and I have been flooded with more than fifty thousand messages from church leaders, members, and pastors saying that they are "social justice Christians." But Jesus also said that we should love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. I invited Beck to a civil and respectful conversation about the issues at stake here, but he has chosen a different path. But whatever Glenn Beck does to me, to Sojourners, or to others, I will continue to refuse to personally attack him. And I urge our supporters not to personally attack him either. Rather, pray for him, for me, for Sojourners, and for our country. :candle :heart

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-walli ... 11362.html

_________________
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. - FDR


Wed Mar 24, 2010 2:40 pm
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