It's a moment he has worked and waited decades to see.
"There's a new faith coalition that's replacing the religious right in this country," says Wallis, founder of Sojourners, a liberal faith-based advocacy group begun during the Vietnam War.
The election of Barack Obama as president marks the beginning of the end of the religious right's hold on the politics of the United States, says Wallis, whose book The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America was released earlier this year.
In its place are young evangelicals, the growing Hispanic presence in the Catholic church and progressive voters in all religions that Wallis says have become increasingly organized in recent years.
"The election is a vindication of what a lot of us have been seeing around the country," Wallis told the Star in a telephone interview
The mix of politics and religion in the U.S. has traditionally favoured Republicans, who have used hot-button issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage to drive a wedge between the Democrats and voters of faith.
"The religious right has practiced a zero-sum game where somebody else has to lose for us to win," Rev. Richard Cizik, vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals, told a conference call with reporters the day after the election.
In the past, Democrats were accused of not respecting evangelicals, a sentiment the Republicans exploited.
But by appealing this time around to a broader spectrum of evangelical values and concerns - over issues like poverty, the environment, peace - rather than focusing on narrow and divisive issues, the Democrats showed evangelicals a depth of understanding about their faith that translated into a kind of respect, Wallis says.
Wallis, who has known Obama for several years, says ending the divisiveness of faith-based politics in the U.S. has been a priority for the president-elect.
Last June, Obama launched a program targeting young Christian voters by stressing the social justice message of the Bible. Through community hall and church basement meetings, volunteers urged evangelicals to "vote with all their values" on Nov. 4.
The idea was never to win over all the religious vote, just enough to make a difference. Exit polls from Tuesday's election would suggest it worked, with Obama narrowing the "God gap" between Republicans and Democrats.
Among those attending church once a week, for instance, the Republican advantage fell by more than half - from a 29 per cent Republican lead over the Democrats in 2004 to 12 per cent on Tuesday, according to polls by Faith in Public Life, based in Washington.
Reversing results from 2004, Obama beat John McCain both among those attending church monthly, and Catholics.
In Florida, with its growing Hispanic population, the turning of the Catholic vote helped Obama take the state for the Democrats for the first time since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
In Colorado, which also switched to the Democrats, evangelical support for Obama was 14 per cent higher than for John Kerry in 2004, according to CNN exit polling.
For people like Wallis and Cizik, who promote progressive evangelism, Tuesday's results bring to light an evolution of religious thinking in America.
"There is a spiritual renaissance occurring here," says Cizik.
And while they and others acknowledge that much of the old religious right remains, especially among older white evangelicals, cracks have begun to appear.
"There is clearly a fracture between the evangelical right or the Christian right and the rest of the country, and the rest of the evangelical community," says David Gushee, professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University.
Under Obama, Gushee expects to see centrist and progressive evangelicals playing a larger role on issues such as poverty, torture, immigration, the environment and nuclear weapons than the religious right.
Like Obama, he says, they prefer co-operation over division.
"A
posture that says we don't have to agree on everything, but we can work
on these things together is going to put us in a better position to
have a constructive player in the next four years than a stance that
says the apocalypse is upon us."
Source; Toronto Star
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