Jim Wallis to SA: Have faith in a different future and it will surely manifest.

It’s been my privilege to spend time with Jim Wallis in Davos over the past dozen years. He is among the heavyweights of the high-profile faith-based leaders who lend critical balance to the proceedings at this nexus of power. His day job is with Sojourners, an organisation which facilitates interaction between and connects spiritual communities worldwide – basing its message on ethics and morality. He is a regular visitor to South Africa, counts himself a close pal of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and is a huge fan of the icon’s forthright successor, Thabo Makgoba. This is an interview to cherish. Wallis explains why President Jacob Zuma is dead wrong in calling for the churches to stay out of politics; and exposes some of the incredible work being done behind the scenes to address the corruption which has become commonplace in SA. For instance, Wallis connected young South Africans with the #BlackLivesMatter group in Ferguson and they’re working on strategies together. What really resonated, though, was his assertion that even though facts might not currently support such conclusions, by employing faith and imagining what the future can be like, it gets manifest into reality. Wallis is confident South Africa will soon shake off its recent troubles sparked by a President and his crony capitalist friends pillaging in the name of transformation. After hearing his stories, so am I. Hope springs. – Alec Hogg

I’m here with one of my favourite people in Davos, Jim Wallis from Sojourners. How many years have you been coming?

Oh, about a dozen years.

You’ve seen incredible transformations over that period. This year though, it does seem to be very, very different because of Brexit, of course Trump, what might be happening in Europe, and so on.

Well, I think there’s a real battle going on for the direction of the future, I think that’s really true, so whether there be a moral compass is the question. In the US, we’re in a very reactive period now. Donald Trump used racial bigotry directly in his campaign and a majority of white people voted for Donald Trump. Many of them would say, “I didn’t vote for him because of his racial bigotry”, but his racial bigotry was not a deal breaker for them, was not a disqualifier and people of colour voted against him overwhelmingly. We have a racial divide in the US like we haven’t seen for a long time.

A couple of years ago you gave the pope’s message here in Davos and I thought it was very interesting that Donald Trump got a lot of support, supposed endorsement from the Pope, which of course never was, it was part of the whole fake news agenda.

No, the Pope actually spoke against what Trump was saying and he Tweeted against the Pope like he Tweets against everyone, but I think everyone in the country knew that Francis was advocating the agenda very different than Donald Trump’s, but again most white Catholics voted for Donald Trump and 81 percent of white Evangelicals voted for Trump, but Christians of colour voted against Donald Trump all across the country, so again the racial divide is clear. Right after the inauguration, I’m actually happy to be missing the inauguration, happy to be here, but next week many of us in the faith community are going to launch what’s called the Matthew 25 Pledge.

The 23rd chapter of the gospel of Matthew was where Jesus says, “I was hungry, I was thirsty, I was naked, I was a stranger, immigrant, I was sick, in prison and you weren’t there for me” and they say, “Laurel, when do we see you hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, and in prison?” He says, “As you’ve done to the least of these, you’ve done to me”. So a simple pledge is, “I will defend and protect vulnerable people” and many people in our country are feeling very vulnerable right now because they were targeted by the candidate who has now become the President, and the stories.

I just, I can’t say to your audience how many people that I’m directly hearing from every day who are being verbally attacked and physically threatened by people who claim to be Trump supporters, black church leaders, young people, Hispanic kids on the playground. We’re going to be defending and protecting vulnerable people as a pledge across the country, the Matthew 25 Pledge, and it’s getting lots of attraction, so our work is cut out for us in the weeks and months and years ahead.

Jim, you know South Africa very well, you’ve seen a lot of turbulence there, but it was when the faith community got involved that Apartheid fell. Recently the faith community has been involved in a very strong anti-corruption drive because it appears to have become the endemic in the country. Is this something that you write, God’s blog, the almighty would actually agree with, that you should get involved in politics, or is it something that is best left to the politicians?

Oh, no, no. South Africa has changed my life, South Africa over many, many decades; I’ve had the blessing to be involved, to be close to many people there. South Africa really gave me my theology of hope. Hebrew says, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”. My best paraphrase of that text is, “Hope means believing in spite of the evidence, then watching the evidence change” and I saw that in Desmond Tutu and Frank Chikane and Allan Boesak in the old days and with those Christians literally only the eyes of faith could see, the victory and you know 14 year old kids in Soweto, 14 year olds, I would say, “Will your children breathe free air in South Africa?”, 14 year olds looked me in the eye and they would say, “I will see to it”. I learned my theology hope that even when you can’t see the changes, your belief in them helps make the changes possible.

Over the years I’ve been, and this last time that I went, I went back to do a speaking tour and a lot of the older church leaders said, “We’ve got to drop this, we’ve got to get out of politics after Apartheid ended and Mandela came in, we were all in the government, but we kind of dropped our prophetic role, we have to find it again”. We ran around, they had me speak with the ANC leadership and they were very nervous about being critiqued by churches and I said to them, “Now ANC, when I was here it was a movement, now it’s a government. Do you understand that we Christians feel differently about movements and governments? You’re going to be critiqued, that’s our job”.

You know, they weren’t happy about that, it was a good conversation, but I met a whole new generation and these were young people who were driving me around, who were staffing. I began talking to them and the more I went around, the more of them I met, the more they would kind of cluster around these events, late night conversations and there is a whole new generation of young South African leaders who are leading this anti-corruption battle. I am on the phone with them a lot and we’re on the phone back and forth and we’re sending our young leaders to South Africa. They have been to our leadership conference and in fact, this is a powerful story.

I had a number of those young leaders from South Africa at our leadership summit a year ago and at the same summit we had the young Ferguson leaders there as well and I got the two groups together and I said, “I want you all to meet and talk, go off and talk”. They said, “Aren’t you coming?” I said, “You don’t need me, you go off and talk” and now they’re corresponding back and forth, they’re talking strategy. This is the Black Lives Matter movement in the US and your young leaders, multi-racial in South Africa are having strategic conversations having met at the sturgeon of leadership, so that two years ago, a year and a half ago, that was a great moment for me. I had these young leaders on and these two countries have their conversation.

The Ferguson, perhaps not everyone remembers it, you were very involved there with what happened at Ferguson and that made a huge difference.

Oh yes, well I got arrested in Ferguson along with all the young men.

You were thrown in jail.

Yes, they put me in jail, but you know, to be honest, they treated faith leaders, Cornel West and I were arrested together and they put us in jail, but they were, “Reverend are your handcuffs too tight now, can we loosen those, or…”, they were worried about their role, whether it’s going to get all wrinkled in jail. They treat young black men very differently than church leaders who are arrested, but I was on the streets with the young people, listening to them. We went in there early on and there’s a real bond that we feel. There’s a whole new generation of young black activists and a multi-racial group of supporters around the country that I’m very hopeful about and again, I met their peers in South Africa.

I came back from my last trip to South Africa very encouraged by what I saw, by a new generation of leaders who really want to take their faith to public life. I believe in the separation of church and state, but that doesn’t mean the segregation of moral values from public life. We need to engage the common good and public life and that means politics. You’ve got to be involved in issues that are political from a moral perspective and that’s what I see happening in South Africa again, with a whole new wonderful generation of leaders I talk to now on a regular basis.

Thabo Makgoba, who is of course, Desmond Tutu’s successor, I’m not sure if he was directly, but he is now the Archbishop of the Anglican Church, he’s come out and made some pretty strong statements. He had a beautiful Christmas mass message, which went viral. Subsequent to that the President said, “You’ve got to stay out of politics”. If you were in Thabo’s camp explaining to him, or advising him what to do, how would you suggest he handles that?

I know Thabo and I would say I am in this camp and I would say, “You keep speaking out and when the President tells you not to, you know you’re doing the right thing”. He’s doing exactly the right thing and it is in Desmond’s tradition that he’s speaking out, so to me and I remember when Mandela, after he got out of prison, he had a big gathering in the Soweto Stadium with all the faith leaders, multi-faith leaders thanking them for their indispensable role in bringing down Apartheid.

If the faith hadn’t been involved, as Mandela said, it might have not gone the way that it did, so Thabo is doing the right thing. I met him actually, here in Davos years ago. We met and talked and he was this young guy. He knew that I was very close to Desmond Tutu and so we talked about lots of stuff. I liked him then and I liked him better and better. He’s doing the right thing, he should speak out. Faith leaders, we’re never partisan, you know we’re not supporting candidates and parties; we’re supporting moral issues, moral values, and moral framework, moral accountability. We’re talking about the common good and we are the ones that have to lift up the people who are often left out, lifting up the vulnerable, the marginal, those who are left out by elites like those who inhabit this place here, for example.

Indeed. It’s a lovely story that you tell and the faith in what the future will bring because in South Africa it’s almost a binary future at the moment. There are those who have given up hope, there are those who continue to fight on because they believe that the institutions are holding, the constitution is a good one and there are those who would turn it into a different country. The moral compass that you mentioned earlier needs to be found somewhere, where would that come from?

Let me start by saying, I feel very personally invested in South Africa’s future. This isn’t just something that is just for South Africans. South Africa changed the world; the anti-Apartheid movement changed all of us. Nelson Mandela, when he came to the US for the first time after coming out of prison, he met with a group of us in a room at Riverside Church and then he preached at Riverside Church and I have never been in a room with a political leader (and I’ve been in the room with all of them, all the American ones) who had such moral authority and whose presence filled that room.

There is a real moral compass from the leadership of Nelson Mandela and the anti-Apartheid movement and then his spiritual brother, Desmond Tutu, who was the master of ceremonies at the inauguration, and so the leadership of Mandela and Tutu around some of these, like the Truth and Reconciliation, so many things, was a moral compass and nations often don’t have a moral compass. You’re blessed to have a moral compass embodied by Nelson Mandela and the kind of leader that he was and people like Desmond Tutu and all the people he gave credit to as part of his team and now a new generation doing that too, so it can come from the faith community as long as it isn’t sectarian. It can’t just be for people of faith; it’s got to be a pluralistic country that brings people together of all faith traditions and those who have no faith at all.

Many young people today, the box they check for their religious affiliation is none-of-the-above. I call them the ‘nones’, I’ve always loved the ‘nones’. Now the other ‘nuns’ I love too. When I go out speaking at these really conservative Christian campuses as a young man, there would be two rows of Catholic sisters in their habits. I said, “Sisters, why are you here?” They would say, “Jim, we’re local”. I said, “Well, I figured you’re local, but why are you here?” They said, “Well, this is a very conservative place and somebody had to have your back”, so I had nuns for bodyguards for years at these Christian colleges, but now the ‘none’s’, these young people, my audiences are filled with these young kids and most of them would say they believe in God, they just don’t want to affiliate with religion because of what we have or haven’t done.

They’re looking for courage, they want their lives to mean more than just their own careers, they want their lives to make a difference in the world and they want a faith that makes a difference in the world, so I found a lot in common with the none-of-the-above’s and I think in South Africa I meet many young Christians, but also other faith traditions and many young people who just kind of were hanging around because that moral compass is very attractive to them. It’s what moral politics are, not partisan, but these are moral issues.

Healthcare is a moral issue, education is a moral issue, jobs are a moral issue, wages are a moral issue, and the environment’s a moral issue. These are all what we’re discussing here in Davos, they’re not just business issues, they’re not just political issues, they’re moral issues and I was just in a session on the new sustainable development goals, STG’s and a businessperson said, “Until this becomes a moral compass for us, we’re not going to succeed”, he’s a CEO. You could make a good business case for why this makes sense, but finally it’s a moral choice about what kind of rule we want to have.

Jim, just wrapping up of what’s going on here in Davos, I was at the Edelman’s Trust barometer this morning, which shows trust has fallen again in the past year, not surprisingly and is now at the level it was last at in 2009. It does however; appear as though business is getting a wakeup call to move in a more moral direction. Do you think that’s wishful thinking?

Again, for me hope is never… Desmond Tutu taught me the difference between hope and optimism. Optimism is how things look this morning when you got up and looked outside and looked at your schedule and looked at the weather and all that. Hope is not a feeling, hope is not a personality type, hope is a choice, a decision you make because of this thing that we call faith, so I do think there are many wake up calls right now. Donald Trump is a wakeup call, but I said to a group of faith leaders, we had at a retreat in the US and they’re all feeling emotional, discouraged, angry, fearful and I said, “Look at it this way, a crisis like this can either deepen our faith and deepen our relationships to each other or not, but if it did who knows what could come out of that” and so just politics as usual is what we were expecting and not much might have come out of that.

I’m not happy for Donald Trump’s election. It really reflects America’s worst values. He represents America’s worst values. In all of our Christian history, every movement, every Catholic order has always had an alternative to money, sex, power, poverty, chastity, obedience. Donald Trump is a worshipper of money, sex and power, he embodies our worst values and yet his election could cause a wakeup call, make us go deeper in our faith and deeper in our relationships with each other, and that could build a real movement of change like something we haven’t seen for a long time.

"The response we have to the new administration is: faith, resistance, and healing." Jim Wallis https://t.co/pL0dj8PJ2r via @sojourners

— Catherine Hagman (@CatherineHagman) January 8, 2017

So let’s take these things that happen and ask, “Okay, what does God maybe want us to do in the middle of this” and in South Africa I was hearing mostly about the corruption, about lack of leadership, the ANC betraying the vision of Nelson Mandela, I was hearing all those things and then I met the kids driving me around and hanging around and talking and I came back saying, “Okay, it’s going to be okay. There is real leadership growing here, there’s hope again here”, but hope is a decision we make based on what we… you know the story I often tell about Desmond, when I arrived in South Africa back in the eighties, I was snuck in the country because I was on all these security lists here and there.

I could have never got in, but I got snuck in the country as a visiting pastor and then I had to meet Desmond Tutu at St George’s at the cathedral and he couldn’t come meet me and he couldn’t see me because I was on the security list, so I met him there and the place had been surrounded by the police and military. A rally had been called off. He had said, “We’re going to just have church” and they wouldn’t call that off, so he’s there and he’s preaching and I’m in the cathedral having just arrived and all of a sudden outside there are three times as many military and police as there are worshippers on the inside, outnumbering us three to one. They were supposed to scare us. I just arrived; it was working pretty well for me.

It was pretty scary and then they broke into the door, the South African security just broke in the door, they stood along the walls of his cathedral with note pads and tape recorders saying in effect, “You go ahead, you be prophetic, you be bold, we’ll get it all down”, he had just come out of jail, “We’ll put you back in jail”. They were saying in effect to him, “We own this country, we own this place, we own you, and we own your God”, that’s what they were saying. He stopped talking; he bowed his head in prayer. We were all wondering what’s he going to say, opens his eyes, he says, “You”, points at the police, “You are very powerful, you are very powerful indeed, but you’re not gods and I serve a god who will not be mocked” and he smiled that big Desmond Tutu smile, “So”, he says, “Since you have already lost”, he began bouncing like a black Baptist preacher, “Since you’ve already lost, we invite you today to come and join the winning side”.

The young people jumped up and danced us outside, toy-toyied and danced and the police outside didn’t know what to do, dancing worshipers, they all backed off and then I was at the inauguration many years later and he was the master of ceremonies, Bishop Tutu, “Do you remember that day in St George’s, do you remember what happened, weren’t you sad, what we did?” He smiled, he remembered. I said, “Today, they’ve all joined the winning side” because there wasn’t one South African that day who hadn’t always been against Apartheid and so to me that showed me my theology of hope.

On that day when you’re surrounded by all the evidence against you, you have the eyes of aid to see the party that’s coming, the celebration, you couldn’t see it except through the eyes of faith, but he saw it and our job as Christians is not to just be at the party, which was wonderful to be at the inauguration, to me it was one of the blessed events of my whole life, but the real job is to be back at St George’s where by faith you can see the victory celebration or party, but through the eyes of faith and then as he would say, “You bet your life on what you believe” and that’s what changes the world and I’ve seen that in South Africa again and again, and that’ll always be where my theology hope was formed.

Jim Wallis, it’s always a privilege. Thank you.

Blessed and you.

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