It really wasn’t a partisan query. He just couldn’t understand, so he asked me respectfully and quite sincerely, “What about Jesus?”

This lawmaker, as a committed Christian himself, is also concerned about how too few of his colleagues, on both sides of the political aisle, are willing to seriously grapple with this same question, or even care to ask it at all.

For many years I have said, “The right gets it wrong, and the left doesn’t get it.” That would seem true now more than ever — especially with the departure of so many white evangelicals from many of Jesus’ core teachings, which is genuinely baffling to many people beyond my lawmaker friend and to people like me who are from the evangelical tradition.

Even other Christians all over the world are asking the same question: How have American Christians forgotten about Jesus? In particular, many American Christians of color and a new generation of young people of all colors and creeds who are trying make their own decisions about faith are shaking their heads in confusion and even disgust.

We are indeed in a crisis, and the disorienting and dangerous state of our nation’s present reality is rapidly being normalized, which is even more frightening.

Many people experience an ongoing crisis of safety and lack of opportunity in communities of color; many women and marginalized people feel afraid in the United States and around the world. And many of us — across the political spectrum — are alarmed at the lack of public civility and decency; the growing dangers to the protocols, procedures, and practices of governance; and even threats to the rule of law, which collectively put both the common good and even democracy in jeopardy.

Going beyond and deeper than politics, many across the ideological spectrum sense the sharp decline of values, health, and human flourishing in our cultural and civic lives, which morally undermines the quality of our public life and society. By morally accepting things that we should not, we help to undermine the spiritual fabric of our personal, family, and social lives.

As many have pointed out, the symbol for the word “crisis” in Chinese is a combination of the symbols for two Chinese words: “danger” and “opportunity.”

The dangers of the present crisis are obvious and growing by the day — especially for those people on the margins, such as immigrants and their families; young people of color, especially in relation to our policing, criminal justice, economic, educational, and electoral systems; all the poor and vulnerable among us; people who face cruelty, oppression, and violence because of who they are, how they worship, who they love; and women in every category.

Democracy itself, the rule of law, and the very idea of objective truth are all in danger now, as our nation and world face an emerging and spreading autocratic style of leadership.

What is the opportunity? Most fundamentally, reconnecting to the person and teachings of Jesus.

Christians, in other historical moments, have often remembered, rediscovered, returned, and gone back to their obedient discipleship to Jesus Christ — both personal and public — in times of crisis. It’s called coming home.

Even Americans of other faiths hunger for this return. Muslims and Jews regularly tell me how grateful they are when Christians start talking about Jesus again, as that makes them feel safer! People who don’t identify with any faith system wonder why Christians are not talking about the actual person and teachings of Jesus more and wish they would.

Reclaiming Jesus is not about making more Christians as much as it is about making Christians more genuinely and redemptively human, as God made us and as Christ calls us to be. For people of faith, along with their neighbors of other faiths or no faith at all, this is an opportunity to remember and return to our best personal convictions and choices. And it is also a time to recommit to the best founding values and aspirations of our democracy — sometimes called our civil religion.

This crisis of faith and politics thus presents us an opportunity to go deeper — deeper into what we call faith; deeper into our relationships with each other, especially across racial lines; and deeper into our proximity to the most marginalized, whom we often don’t think about or whose faces we don’t see. Crisis can take us deeper into the moral, spiritual, or faith commitments that can and do shape both our personal and public existence.

I believe two things are now at stake: the soul of the nation and the integrity of faith. Who we are and want to be and what we truly believe about God and our purposes in the world must be made clear in a time such as this.

Much is at stake in this crisis. How we answer key questions will determine whether we go deeper and use this opportunity to create a better world or not: Who are we as a nation? Who do we want to be and become? What is our identity as Americans? What is our identity as people of faith or moral conscience, and how does that relate both to our personal lives and our public posture and participation in the world? Will what we say we believe compel us to reject other things — behaviors, practices, and policies — that are contrary to our faith and moral values?

These questions can serve as the moral test of what now lies before us.

This article, featured at Religion News Service, is excerpted from “Christ in Crisis: Why We Need to Reclaim Jesus,” by the Rev. Jim Wallis.

Of course, the two political parties are not morally equivalent; it makes a great difference how we vote, as we will have the opportunity to do later this year. The Republican Party’s political sellout to Donald Trump — and the Democrats’ lack of a clear moral alternative many people of faith are excited to support — leave many of us feeling politically homeless.

Republican leadership has sold its party’s soul to a bad, amoral, childish, and dangerous man. Most of my Republican friends agree. Trump was elected president by anti-establishment backlash and in a series of political accidents by both parties, many candidates, and our electoral system. He has been revealed as an intellectually shallow and a mentally incompetent leader, a person who lacks any moral conscience, an unapologetic promoter of racial bigotry and misogyny, a personality with embarrassing emotional immaturity and alarming instability that threatens disorder in the nation, and a man whose disrespect for the rule of law and our political system of checks and balances can best be described as narcissistic and authoritarian paranoia. The president of the United States is now a very dangerous threat to American democracy and national security. While there are some Republican commentators and elected officials who have voiced opposition to the president’s behavior, the Republican Party has shown itself unable or unwilling to hold him accountable and has, in fact, become a captured party by an aspiring autocrat who is telling the world that he has the biggest nuclear button.

The GOP has disregarded the best values of principled conservatism: fiscal integrity and responsibility, an allegiance to truth and honesty, genuine pro-family values, national security through global engagement, the commitment to opportunity for all, the value of empathy for those in need, and the worth and equality of every person under the law. The Republicans have substituted a moral relationship to the presidency for a transactional one, ignoring Trump’s consistent incompetence, immorality, and hateful divisiveness in exchange for economic and environmental regulations and tax cuts that support the greedy demands of their wealthiest donors. All this makes many conservatives with Christian and other moral values feel politically homeless.

READ: The Gospel of Donald Trump

The Democratic Party, on the other hand, has lost its historic relationship to working class people around the country, and has indeed become dominated by cultural elites who have little connection to ordinary families and the many pressures on their lives. Democratic Party rhetoric doesn’t appeal to the values of many Christians who care most about poverty and racism. For many election cycles, Democratic consultants have replaced the word “poor” with the words “middle class,” and the party is no longer perceived as one that cares nearly enough about the needs of people on the margins of life in America. The text from Matthew 25 that draws many Christians into engaging in politics does not say, “As you have done to the middle class, you have done to me.” It rather has Jesus saying to us, “As you have done to the least of these, you have done to me.” It’s a biblical text many Democratic consultants seem not to have read or have forgotten.

“It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.” Those words from Hubert H. Humphrey would likely not be described as the mission of Democrats today, many of whom are as connected to the Wall Street elites as the Republicans are.

Despite being dependent on African-American voters, the Democratic Party has often taken them for granted instead of courageously addressing the realities of institutionalized racism, and instead of investing in organizers, mobilizers, and candidates in African-American and Latinx communities.

Unfortunately, the Democrats are no longer a faith-friendly party. Voters with religious faith are often ignored or even dismissed without serious outreach or respectful dialogue. I have fought religious fundamentalism for most of my life, but the secular fundamentalism that controls much of the left and the Democratic Party at the national level can be equally ideological, irrational, and divisive — too often even seeming to attack religion itself.

Moral issues of intrinsic concern to the faith community are often disregarded or disrespected by Democratic Party orthodoxy, which often takes extreme or overly strident views on issues like abortion. Many of us in the faith community regard abortion as a moral issue and part of a consistent ethic of life and seamless garment of concern for the many threats to human life and dignity. While many of us pro-life Christians don’t support the criminalization of often desperate and tragic choices, we find the Democrats even reluctant to make a commitment to reducing abortion by supporting women with health care, nutrition, and social services. Many in Democratic leadership don’t seem to want to talk about or even being willing to use the word “reduction” as a positive term in relation to abortion.

While you can’t resolve an issue as complex as abortion in a couple of paragraphs, the denial of a moral conversation about it within the Democratic Party continues to alienate many people of faith. While a younger generation in the faith community is indeed more welcoming of LGBTQ people than their parents have been, they are not so welcoming of abortion as the Democratic elites seem to be, and the Democratic Party needs to figure that out.

Gratefully, there are Democrats who want a more faith-friendly party and wider inclusion of ideas, but I still hear many progressive Christian women and men feeling that the Democratic Party makes no outreach to them and offers them very little. Elements of the Democrats’ richest donor base continue to enforce extreme positions on abortion, not allow serious moral discussions, and seem to want to close the party’s tent to pro-life Democrats. Similarly, the central importance of marriage, family, and parenting for the common good of society is not a central topic in Democratic Party language and policy. Many people of faith are turned away by Democrats’ perceived endorsement, whether intentional or by marked silence, of recreational sexuality over covenantal sexuality and an “anything goes” attitude when it comes to sex. Why is the discussion of family values — among every type of family — so absent from conversations on the left when we know it is a part of critical solutions to issues of poverty? Those voices on the left advocating for strengthening families are seldom heard.

READ: Siding with Jesus & Justice

With part of the Christian community putting faith at risk by their idolatrous support of Donald Trump, and other Christians feeling alienated by the other party’s dismissal of faith and the moral questions it raises, our nation’s moral discourse is in serious trouble.

Third parties have not been a successful way forward in the American system of politics. But perhaps a “third way” or better yet a “moral movement” to revive and renew American politics, on both sides of the aisle, is the way forward for people of faith who put the poor and vulnerable, the consistent dignity of human life, strong families and gender equality, and the priority of racial and economic justice and peace at the center of their political convictions.

More and more each day, we are in an urgent time that calls for action on the gospel text of Matthew 25 — which could be central to the new moral movement in politics that we need. We’re helping start that movement here, and we need you. Sign the Matthew 25 Pledge and see how you can get involved.

This article originally appeared at Sojourners.

Many people are frightened and appalled every day with the appointments and behavior of President -elect Donald Trump. And many Red Letter Christians are asking: What can I do?

The politics going on now are indeed beyond our control — but we can control what we do with our own faith and with our own actions.

I have been lifted up by a very familiar Gospel text that seems to be rising up in many diverse and unconnected places around the county. Maybe we call this the “Spirit.”

In Matthew 25, Jesus says, “… I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ … Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”

In this text, Jesus is literally saying to us: How you treat the most vulnerable is how you treat me. He is saying I will know how much you love me by how you respond — or don’t respond to them. This Gospel passage, which was my own conversion text, is coming up again and again right at the time when so many people are feeling vulnerable and so many others don’t know what to do. This is our answer.

Stand up and defend those most at risk at this crucial moment in America’s political history. Matthew 25 is answering our question. Matthew 25 is rising up in the face of a new political regime that is making many people feel so afraid.

A new pledge is emerging throughout the country with local organizers and congregations. It’s the outcome of a retreat last week that brought together a broad spectrum of pastors, heads of churches, grassroots activists, and the leaders of national faith-based organizations and networks who prayed and discerned together about the election results, reaching consensus to act in solidarity with those most at risk in the new administration. It’s called the Matthew 25 Pledge. It’s just one sentence and simply says: I pledge to protect and defend vulnerable people in the name of Jesus.

So simple and yet so powerful — at such a dangerous moment when so many are feeling afraid. Why? Because they were specifically targeted in the presidential campaign of the candidate who will become president on Jan. 20. And already, there have been an alarming number of people who have verbally attacked them and their children.

And no matter how Christians might have voted, it is absolutely clear that Christians are always called to serve Jesus by sheltering those most in need. This could be a unifying commitment between people of faith on different sides of the aisle — to protect the most vulnerable together.

Clearly, many people in America are feeling quite vulnerable right now — racial and religious minorities, women, and LGBTQ people — and especially those who sit at the intersections of marginalized groups. Sojourners and all other Red Letter Christians are committed to protecting the lives and rights of all those who feel threatened.

And here is a starting point, offered by that broad group of diverse national and local faith leaders and activists. Here’s what you can do now to prevent attacks on people the Trump administration has already targeted.

1. Support undocumented immigrants threatened with mass deportation.

Arresting and deporting hard-working and law-abiding people who have lived in America for decades would break up families and potentially put people’s lives in danger. The most at risk are young “Dreamers, ” who were brought here as children and who turned in their names and contact information to the administration in response to executive orders that allowed them to work.

Already, prayerful networks of support are being set up in faith communities to offer love, welcome, assistance, and ultimately, resistance to block and obstruct such mass deportations. If massive arrests of the people Jesus calls “the stranger” are ordered,  immigration police will be forced to arrest many of those immigrants in our churches, seminaries, schools, and homes. Faith communities already have the capacity to impose a clear domestic cost on any efforts aimed at massive deportation of those who have become our neighbors and fellow churchgoers.

2. Stand with African Americans and other people of color threatened by racial policing.

Black pastors and parents are especially concerned about how their young people will be treated under an administration that has fueled racial bigotry and continued to stoke those fears by his cabinet appointments. The new president promotes “law and order” and “stop and frisk” in an uncritical code language that racial minorities understand. But if there is little or no accountability from the federal government after Jan. 20 to excessive force against our citizens of color, and especially young people, local clergy will hold their police departments accountable.

For Christians, when one part of the body suffers, as it says in 1 Corinthians, the whole body should feel that pain and respond. So racially diverse local clergy from ecumenical and interfaith associations will join together and go to their sheriffs in every community to help support healthy community policing. But they will also promise to watch, monitor, and resist any racial policing by standing against such practices and standing with those who they are aimed at, promising to hold law enforcement accountable to racial equity and healing in our communities.

3. Defend the lives and religious liberty of Muslims, threatened with “banning, ” monitoring, and even registration.

U.S. citizens and immigrants who practice their Islamic faith in this country — our friends and neighbors — are our brothers and sisters as fellow human beings and children of God. Many Christians, Jews, and others who believe in religious liberty are promising that if Muslims living in America, whether citizens or immigrants, are ever asked to register based on their religious identity, we will proudly line up before them to declare ourselves to be Muslims, too. We will also never accept a religious test for entry into the United States. Now more than ever, as we’re watching the horror unfold in Aleppo, our Christian faith should compel us to act — to advocate for welcoming refugees of all faiths into our country instead of turning them away. Religious tests, in addition to being morally repugnant,  would threaten our nation’s democratic principles and the constitutional rights of every American. The violation of the religious freedom of our Muslim brothers and sisters will be not be accepted by any people of faith.

This is the beginning. This is where to start now. But rest assured that if and when other groups of people are targeted by government decisions or by hateful cultural responses, we who sign the Matthew 25 Pledge will also seek to surround and protect them.

Rather than just watching, grieving, and feeling sorry for what is happening to the most marginalized, who are named in the 25th chapter of Matthew, we can pledge to join together in circles of support in the name of Jesus. In unjust times, justice often starts in the small places and personal decisions that challenge the big places and structural injustice.

The Matthew 25 Pledge is ready for you to sign — as individuals, congregations, organizations, denominations, and community groups. In response you will receive resources in the lead up to the inauguration to help you pray, join in with local efforts, organize your congregations and community groups, and get ready to act. We deliberately begin this time of prayer during Advent so that we can prepare our hearts, minds, and communities for what is to come at Christmas — the Christ child who would change the world and bring “good news” to the poor. And in January, before the inauguration of a new president, the organizations and networks behind the Matthew 25 Pledge will publicly launch its open-source library of resources, toolkits, plans of action, and local networks to activate.

So you can make a decision to do something now, to go back to the words of Jesus, and take the Matthew 25 Pledge to act. As Brittany Packnett said in Sojourners’ latest issue: “The Christ I serve did not sit idly by in times like these—for in eras like this one, inaction is a sin.”

So let us act.

Red Letter Christian and Sojourners President Jim Wallis recently published America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege and the Bridge to a New America. In town hall style meetings across the country, Jim is joining other Red Letter Christians to facilitate a conversation on becoming the nation we’ve not yet been by repenting of the sin of racism. We asked him to share the story here of how he was converted by a friendship across the color line in his hometown of Detroit 50 years ago.

Fifty years ago I was a teenager in Detroit. I took a job as a janitor at the Detroit Edison Company to earn money for college. There I met a young man named Butch who was also on the janitorial staff. But his money was going to support his family, because his father had died. We became friends. I was a young white man, and Butch was a young black man, and the more we talked, the more we wanted to keep talking.

When the company’s elevator operators were off, Butch and I would often be the fill-ins. When you operated elevators, the law required you to take breaks in the morning and in the afternoon. On my breaks, I’d go into Butch’s elevator to ride up and down and talk with him. On his breaks, Butch came to ride and talk with me.

Those conversations changed the way I saw Detroit, my country, and my life. Butch and I had both grown up in Detroit, but I began to realize that we had lived in two different countries—in the same city.

When Butch invited me to come to his home one night for dinner and meet his family, I said yes without even thinking about it. In the 1960s, whites from the suburbs, like me, didn’t travel at night into the city, where the African Americans lived. I had to get directions from Butch. When I arrived, his younger siblings quickly jumped into my lap with big smiles on their faces, but the older ones hung back and looked at me more suspiciously.

Later, I understood that the longer blacks lived in Detroit, the more negative experiences they had with white people. Butch was very political, and even becoming militant—he always carried a book he was reading, such as Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, stuffed into the back pocket of his khaki janitor’s uniform—but his mom certainly wasn’t. She was much like my own mother, focused on her kids and worried that her son’s ideas would get him into trouble.

As we talked through the evening about life in Detroit, Butch’s mom told me about the experiences all the men in her family—her father, her brothers, her husband, and her sons—had with the Detroit police. Then she said something I will never forget as long as I live. “So I tell all of my children, ” she said, “if you are ever lost and can’t find your way back home, and you see a policeman, quickly duck behind a building or down a stairwell. When the policeman is gone, come out and find your own way back home.”

As Butch’s mother said that to me, my own mother’s words rang in my head. My mom told all of her five kids, “If you are ever lost and can’t find your way home, look for a policeman. The policeman is your friend. He will take care of you and bring you safely home.” Butch and I were becoming friends. And I remember his mother’s advice to her children as vividly today as I heard those words fifty years ago.

Five decades ago, revelations about race in my hometown turned my life upside down—and turned me in a different direction. Encounters with black Detroit set me on a new path, on which I am still walking. My own white church ignored and denied the problem of race. People there didn’t want to talk about the questions that were coming up in my head and heart—questions that suggested something very big was wrong about my city and my country.

As a teenager, I was listening to my city, reading the newspapers, having conversations with people. I wondered why life in black Detroit seemed so different from life in the white Detroit suburbs. I didn’t know any hungry people or dads without jobs, and I didn’t have any family members who had ever been in jail. Why were all these things happening in the city?

Weren’t there black churches in the city too? Why had we never visited them or had them come to visit us? Who was this minister in the south named King, and what was he up to? Nobody in my white world wanted to talk about it—any of it.

All of this drew me into the city to find answers to questions that nobody wanted to talk about at home. When I got my driver’s license at age sixteen, I would drive into the city and just walk around, looking and learning. I took jobs in downtown Detroit, working side by side with black men, and I tried to listen to them. That’s how I met Butch and many young men like him who had grown up in an entirely different city from me—just a few miles away.

In Detroit, I found the answers I was looking for, and I made new friends. I also met the black churches, which warmly took in a young white boy with so many questions and patiently explained the answers. When I came back to my white church with new ideas, new friends, and more questions, the response was painfully clear. An elder in my white church said to me one night, “Son, you’ve got to understand: Christianity has nothing to do with racism; that’s political, and our faith is personal.”

That conversation had a dramatic effect on me; it was a real conversion experience, but one that took me out of the church. That was the night that I left the church I had been raised in and the faith that had raised me—left it in my head and my heart. And my church was glad to see me go.

During my student years I joined the civil rights and antiwar movements of my generation and left faith behind. But that conversation with the church elder was indeed “converting, ” because it led me to the people who would later bring me back to my Christian faith—“the least of these” whom Jesus talks about in Matthew 25, which would ultimately become my conversion text.

How we treat the poorest and most vulnerable, Jesus instructs us in that Gospel passage, is how we treat him: “Just as you did it to one of the least of these . . . you did it to me” (v. 40). My white church had missed that fundamental gospel message and, in doing so, had missed where to find the Jesus it talked so much about. My church, like so many white churches, talked about Jesus all the time, but its isolated social and racial geography kept it from really knowing him.

At the same time, black churches were leading our nation to a new place. Their more holistic vision of the gospel was transforming my understanding of faith, and my relationship to the churches was forever changed. I had to leave my white home church to finally discover Christ himself and come back to my faith. In doing so, I discovered something that has shaped the rest of my life: I have always learned the most about the world by going to places I was never supposed to be and being with people I was never supposed to meet. What I discovered by driving from the white suburbs to the city of Detroit every day, and going into neighborhoods and homes like Butch’s, were some truths about America that the majority culture didn’t want to talk about—truths that are always more clearly seen from the bottom of a society than from the top. This different perspective continues to change me, and Matthew 25 continues to be my conversion passage.

As a teenager, I didn’t have the words to explain what happened to me that night with my church elder, but I found them later: God is always personal, but never private. Trying to understand the public meaning of faith has been my vocation ever since. How that personal and public gospel can overcome the remaining agendas of racism in America is the work I feel most called to today.

Of course, I meant more than just the damage to the Twin Towers and the lives lost, which became far greater than any of us imagined at first. Rather, my first and deepest concern was what something like this could do to our nation’s soul. I was afraid of how America would respond to a terrorist attack of this scope.

But as the Towers collapsed, and the suffering of this horrible event became increasingly clear in the hours and days that followed, other parts of the American soul revealed themselves — the heroic responses of the first responders, and a city and nation of people taking care of each other. As ordinary citizens gave their lives for strangers, they became our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. In the days that followed the 9/11 attacks, the stories of pain, loss, and self-sacrifice brought Joy and me to tears several times. The suffering of many led to the service of many more.

For a moment, the world’s last remaining superpower was vulnerable, and we all felt it. In Washington, people fled from downtown D.C., walking and running right past our house, and gathered to pray at places such as Sojourners’ office. Joy helped Luke set up a little water station, as people frantically rushed by our house.

In our sudden sense of vulnerability we were now, and perhaps for the first time, like most of the world, where vulnerability is an accepted part of being human. And in those first days following 9/11, America, not the terrorists, had the high ground. The world did not identify with those who cruelly and murderously decided to take innocent lives in response to their grievances — both real and imagined. Instead, the world identified with a suffering America — even the front cover of the French newspaper Le Monde ran the headline, “We are all Americans now.”

But it was Washington’s response that I was most worried about. Within a short period of time, the official reaction to terrorism would simply be defined as war — a decade of it — resulting in many more innocent casualties than on September 11, 2001. In response to America’s own suffering, many others in Afghanistan, Iraq, and around the world would now suffer — all in the name of our war on terrorism. The opportunity for deeper understanding, reflection, and redirection would elude us as we sought to erase our vulnerability with the need to demonstrate our superior force and power. This was done quite easily in the early days of both our new wars. But now, we see that the longest series of wars in American history has failed to resolve or reverse the causes of the violence that struck us, or to make us safer. They just made it all worse.

The world expected and would have supported a focused and sustained effort to pursue and bring this small band of criminals to justice. But these last 10 years of manipulated and corrupted intelligence, endless war, practices and policies of torture, secret armies of assassination, global violations of human rights, indiscriminate violence with countless civilian casualties, and trillions of dollars wasted caused America to lose the high ground long ago. The arrogance of American power was our only response to the both the brutality and complexity of terrorism. Perhaps, this arrogance is most recently and brazenly exhibited in former Vice-President Dick Cheney’s new book tour, where he boasts of having absolutely no regrets for any of the momentous decisions he took part in. These are decisions which have made the world an even more divided, polarized, dehumanized, and dangerous place — 10 years after September 11, 2001.

But, fortunately, the official and failed response of Washington to the terrible tragedy of 9/11 has not been the only response. A new generation of Christians has asked how Jesus would respond to these same events. Many of them would agree with what Methodist Bishop Will Willimon recently said in the evangelical magazine Christianity Today: “American Christians may look back upon our response to 9/11 as our greatest Christological defeat … when our people felt vulnerable, they reached for the flag instead of the cross.” As many of those who have grown up in the decade since 9/11 confront the conflicts of their world, they are reaching for different things than their government. They are forging alternative responses to issues of injustice and violence, and rejecting the terrorism and war sequence of Washington’s twisted and failed moral logic.

And despite the hateful diatribes of fundamentalist leaders in all our religious traditions, other pastors have decided to love their neighbors, and even their enemies in response to Jesus’ call. Their stories are slowly being told, from American neighborhoods where Muslims have moved in, to conflict areas around the world where faith is being used for bridge building and healing, instead of more revenge killings. Christian leaders are sharing meals, fasting, and prayer with Muslim leaders. Some have defended each other’s congregations and homes in the face of heated threats and rhetoric. While differences between faith traditions are not being glossed over, the nature of a loving and reconciling God is being courageously affirmed across religious lines. In all of this, we are saying that government responses need not define our own.

Last weekend, my son Luke just turned 13 years old, and my son Jack is now eight years old. They both understand what Christianity and Islam are and are not. In their classrooms, they have friends who are Muslim. The other day, my son Jack, who missed the events of 9/11, heard a disparaging remark on television about Islam and quickly retorted, “That’s not true, there is a Muslim boy in my class, and he is not like that at all.” Luke and I recently watched the National Geographic special that described the events of the day, which we remember this week. It helped him to put the pieces in place from his memories of 9/11 as a three-year-old. I was struck with how he looks at the world with more sympathy than fear, and how strongly he feels about war’s inability to solve any of the problems and conflicts between people.

Last year, the actions of extremists marred the commemoration of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and ignited international violence. This year, many interfaith services will mark the 10th anniversary. Sojourners is co-sponsoring a press conference with the World Evangelical Alliance on Friday, September 9, which will overlook Ground Zero in New York City. Global Evangelical leaders will be calling for peace and unity, and we will say that while religion has historically been the cause of conflict, it can also serve as a solution. We will give examples of Christians and Muslims living together peacefully, even in the most conflicted parts of the world, and call for Christians to be good neighbors to the Muslim community. As we gather in our houses of worship this Sunday, September 11, many pastors will remind their parishioners of two fundamental truths: We must not be overcome by evil, but rather overcome evil with good, and “they will know we are Christians by our love.”

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Jim Wallis is the author of Rediscovering Values: A Guide for Economic and Moral Recovery, and CEO of Sojourners. He blogs at www.godspolitics.com. Follow Jim on Twitter @JimWallis.

That will leave approximately 70, 000 troops in Afghanistan, roughly double the number of troops (34, 000) when he took office in 2008.  The president said these remaining troops will be withdrawn “at a steady pace” going into 2014.

But that’s not good enough.   President Obama had an opportunity to pivot his policy on the war in Afghanistan — to focus on the still real threats of terrorism, rather than on failed wars of occupation with massive numbers of troops on the ground. Public opinion polls now consistently show that 50 to 60 percent of the American people want the troops to come home. Two-hundred-four members of the House, from both parties, voted in late May for the McGovern-Jones amendment — which calls for an accelerated withdrawal and a responsible exit from Afghanistan.  Two members of Congress, Jim McGovern and Walter Jones, one Democrat and one Republican, were the authors of that measure and have been the real leaders of political and moral conscience on this war.  Twenty-eight bipartisan senators also called for an accelerated withdrawal in a recent letter to the president.  A wide array of political leaders, from both parties — including senators Carl Levin, Max Baucus, and Richard Lugar, and Republican presidential candidates Jon Huntsman, Mitt Romney, and Ron Paul — are expressing reservations about the war strategy. Obama could have built on these changes in public opinion and announced a dramatic change in war policy for Afghanistan. But last night, he did not.

We constantly hear the message, “Support the troops.”  It’s on bumper stickers, at ball games, and on banners in airports. As a Christian who opposed the two wars our troops have been fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, I can say that I do support the troops.  They are primarily young, from lower-income and working families, who in the current economy have few other options. The military promised them the opportunity for a job, training, and perhaps the chance to go to college on their return.

But that promise to young people with few other options came at a high price.  So far, 1, 552 Americans have died in the war in Afghanistan; 11, 200 have been wounded. In one study of the 300, 000 returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan who sought help from Veterans Affairs health centers, nearly 37 percent of those treated for the first time were suffering from mental health problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, or alcohol problems. These problems too often result in suicide. During the first half of 2009, more American soldiers committed suicide than were killed in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. In June 2010, an average of one soldier a day committed suicide.  Furthermore, 11 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are unemployed.

Of course, there are very few children of members of Congress, or of finance and business executives, in the military.  Those who run the country are not sending their children to fight the wars they continue to prolong.  Frankly, war is good business for those who run the military-industrial complex that former President Eisenhower warned us about.  Generals always recommend more war because it’s their business.  It gets them promotions and advances their careers.  And they often distort the facts to stay in business — claiming progress in order to justify continued war — when there really is no significant progress at all. Meanwhile, more young people get killed or damaged for the rest of their lives, and the cost for so many innocents is even higher. That can simply no longer be justified in Afghanistan.

The president acknowledged and honored the sacrifice of the troops, and said we need to shift from nation-building in Afghanistan to nation-building at home. But the meager reduction of troops he announced last night simply doesn’t support either goal. I heard on Morning Joe this morning that John McCain has more staff on Capitol Hill than the CIA reports al Qaeda now has in Afghanistan.  And the threat of Bin Laden was not ended by the war in Afghanistan, but by focused intelligence and counter-terrorism in Pakistan. Yet, after the president’s announcement last night, the United States will still have nearly 100, 000 troops in Afghanistan for the rest of this year, and will spend more than $100 billion in the coming year. It seems the war in Afghanistan will go on and on and on.

To truly support the troops who are fighting and dying in Afghanistan, we must commit our resources where they are most needed. We must make the courageous decision to end the war in Afghanistan much faster than the president called for last night. Incremental and gradual drawdowns of troops over many years is not the correct response to a failed war. We needed a pivot to a new policy last night — but we didn’t get it.

The president’s decision to finish his first term with twice as many U.S. troops in Afghanistan as when he took office is a political and moral mistake.  This week, nearly 40 religious leaders delivered a letter to the White House saying “we are united in the belief that it is time to bring the U.S. war in Afghanistan to an end.” We must now build on that to mobilize resistance to the war across the religious community. It’s time for the faith community to help lead the movement that will bring this unnecessary and unjust war to an end. The president’s message last night was “the war goes on.” Our message on Afghanistan must be: War No More.

+Click here for Sojourners’ FREE “War No More” bumper sticker as a gift for your involvement!

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Jim Wallis is the author of Rediscovering Values: A Guide for Economic and Moral Recovery, and CEO of Sojourners. He blogs at www.godspolitics.com. Follow Jim on Twitter@JimWallis.

The post is provided via our partnership with Sojourners.

I have to speculate sometimes at the conversations that occurred during those 50 days from Easter until Pentecost. There were, I am sure, some nervous exchanges. Jesus had appeared to them: he had offered Thomas an opportunity to place his hands into his wounds; he had eaten fish with his disciples by the shore. But where was this promised comforter who would be with them always?

Pentecost is a part of the Christian calendar today, but for the disciples, it was the Feast of Shavuot, or the “Feast of Oaths.” It was a festival remembering the covenants God made with Noah after the flood, Abraham and the Israelites about a new homeland, and Moses on Mt. Sinai. It was a time to remember God’s faithfulness.

When I read Acts 2 and imagine the room filled with the small band of believers, a sound “like the rush of a violent wind” and tongues “as of fire” resting above each of their heads, my faith is encouraged. I am reminded that there are greater things at work in this world than what is at first visible. There is power and strength in the Spirit that God sent to the church. While there had only been 120 gathered in that room, 3, 000 were added to their number that day.

While much of my work revolves around challenging unjust systems and structures, I do not doubt that the world we see around us of broken people and institutions is only a small portion of what is real. The Spirit of God extends wider and deeper and is at work in my life, the lives of others, and in the communities and institutions of this world. While I work for societal transformation, I try to stay rooted in the transforming work that the Spirit is constantly doing in me.

Too often, it feels like we need to make a choice between the work of this world, and the work of the Spirit, or between a personal focus, or a social focus of the gospel. “Either/or” marks how some churches present the Christian faith. Often, however, this is a false dichotomy. Early in the days of the Sojourners community I remember that one of our favorite words was “and.” We would talk about personal salvation and social justice, prayer and peacemaking, faith and action, belief and obedience, salvation and discipleship, worship and politics, spiritual transformation and social transformation. These were things that complemented one another and deepened each other instead of being in opposition.

In two weeks, my family and I will be headed down to Shakori Hills, North Carolina for the Wild Goose Festival. In the Celtic Church, the symbol for the Holy Spirit is a wild goose  — wild, free, and untamed. The festival will be a weekend of justice, spirituality, music, and the arts. It is an “and” kind of space, more than an “either/or.” It will, no doubt, be a busy weekend. But I am looking forward to it, not just for the activities, but for the reminder that it is by chasing after the wild goose, the Holy Spirit’s movement, that we see ourselves, and our world, transformed.

Take a minute to watch this video below. It’s not too late to join us.

Wild Goose Festival – June 23 – 26, 2011 – Shakori Hills Farm, NC from Wild Goose on Vimeo.

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Jim Wallis is the author of Rediscovering Values: A Guide for Economic and Moral Recovery, and CEO of Sojourners. He blogs at www.godspolitics.com. Follow Jim on Twitter @JimWallis.

The post is provided via our partnership with Sojourners.