Group Offers Christians A New Political Path

A bout 35 years ago, during an intense week of end-of-summer religious services that we call “revival meeting,” I walked down the center aisle of the Macedonia Baptist Church in Conyers, Ga. I confessed the “sins” that the mothers and grandmothers had convinced my friends and me we’d committed. I joined the church.

That was the beginning of my membership in a community of faith that’s had trouble finding its way in secular waters.

I’ve watched the ascendancy of the Christian Coalition, which touts itself as a “permanent fixture on the American political landscape for people of faith.”

But it does not speak for me.

It does not speak for most Christians. It does not speak for most blacks, who, according to surveys, are the most religious of Americans.

I’ve joked that if all the folks claiming to have a lock on heaven are actually going to be there, I’ll take hell.

I’ve not been alone in wondering about the connection between God and those who presume to speak for God in the political sphere.

A new movement offers itself as an alternative, “affirming the vital link between spiritual renewal and social transformation.”

It is reaching out to “ordinary people who are tired of lesser-of-evils politics.”

This Call to Renewal, as it is named, hit New York the other night with a rally in Harlem at St. Mark’s United Methodist Church.

As was evident from the sparse and mostly white crowd, it is indeed a trickle. But led by a white evangelical Christian, Jim Wallis, it is an intriguing one.

“Trickles will turn into streams, and streams into mighty rivers with the power to reshape the political landscape,” Wallis writes in his new book, “Who Speaks for God?”

Slowly around the country, he said at St. Mark’s, blacks, whites, Asians, Native Americans, Catholics, mainline Protestants, members of traditionally black denominations and evangelicals such as himself are all answering this Call to Renewal. Some 100 representatives of clergy and laity, including the Revs. Calvin Butts of Abyssinian Baptist Church and James Forbes of Riverside Church, endorsed a statement of principles last year that said in part:

“We refuse the false choices between personal responsibility or social justice, between good values or good jobs, between strong families or strong neighborhoods, between sexual morality or civil rights for homosexuals, between sacredness of life or the rights of women, between fighting cultural corrosion or battling racism.”

True to their words, speakers at the Harlem rally Tuesday night were equal opportunity critics of the major political parties. But that’s tricky in Harlem. A member of the audience asked if they aren’t running the risk of discouraging voters from coming out for presumably sympathetic Democratic candidates by so strongly criticizing President Clinton for his support of the welfare reform bill.

The Rev. Gilbert Caldwell, pastor of St. Mark’s and a supporter of Call to Renewal, sees it this way: “Renewal always runs the risk of short-term pain but long-term gain.”

St. Mark’s, founded 125 years ago, was once the centerpiece of black Methodism but is now struggling to hold on while building up.

It is a symbol of the need for renewal as the great churches seem increasingly irrelevant to those who live near them and their congregations seem less interested in civic duty than in which club is raising the most money from fish fries and frolics.

In Harlem, the emotional center of black America, folks have no more of a clue how to achieve spiritual and political renewal than anybody else.

Can this nascent movement be a start?

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