Jim Wallis

Jim Wallis (born June 4, 1948, Detroit, Michigan, U.S.) is an American Evangelical pastor and social activist who was the founder and editor in chief of Sojourners magazine. He also founded Call to Renewal, a religious ecumenical organization committed to overcoming poverty and racism. A prolific writer about religion and American politics, he is often viewed as the voice of the religious left.

Wallis grew up in Redford Township, a white middle-class suburb of Detroit. He became socially active against the Vietnam War and for civil rights at Michigan State University and was involved with Students for a Democratic Society. He went on to attend Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Illinois, and he and fellow seminarians founded a religious community known as the People’s Christian Coalition in Chicago in 1971. That same year Wallis founded a Christian magazine named Post American. In 1975 the community moved to Washington, D.C., where they adopted the name Sojourners and the magazine was likewise renamed. They lived and worshipped communally and were active in neighbourhood and national activism, ranging from after-school programs to antiwar and antipoverty protests.

The Sojourners community dispersed from shared households to an international community of believers with the mission to integrate spiritual renewal and social justice. Wallis wrote regular editorials for the magazine about topics such as religion in U.S. politics, global and domestic poverty, the immorality of war, the need to protect the environment, the need to maintain a consistent ethic of the sanctity of life, and the importance of sustaining family relationships. In 1995 he and other religious leaders founded Call for Renewal, which sought nonpartisan political action to eradicate poverty. In December of 2005, Wallis and members of Sojourners and Call for Renewal were arrested by Capitol police for their protest of what they believed to be an immoral national budget.

Wallis wrote numerous books, including God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It (2005) and The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America (2008), both of which were New York Times best sellers. In Christ in Crisis: Why We Need to Reclaim Jesus (2019), he explored how Christian faith can lessen the divisiveness in the United States.