“Admittedly,” Jim Wallis begins The Great Awakening, his newest manifesto on religion and politics, “religion can be a confusing subject.” It’s a telling admission, yet it might have been more accurate had it been presented as a warning to anyone hoping to come away from the book with a clearer view of the role of faith in public life.

Hopelessly jumbled and largely substance free on both policy and theology, The Great Awakening is a masterpiece of wishful thinking from a man desperate to reconcile his lifelong faith with his progressive politics. In the end, the only thing that is clear is that when it comes to religion, Wallis is indeed confused.

He is the front man for a movement that urges Christians to shuck their affiliation with the Religious Right and adopt progressive politics—the closest thing to a rock star the movement has produced. Just as Jerry Falwell and James Dobson have become synonymous with Christian conservatism, Wallis has, over the past few years, become the go-to pundit for faith-based liberalism, as well as a strategist of sorts on the ways in which the Democratic Party might make inroads with the evangelical community.

Wallis claims he’s not partisan but an independent above the fray. He says he’s “in no party’s pocket” and that what he proposes is “not necessarily a shift to the left.” But even a passing glance at his favored policy positions says otherwise. He supports increased federal and state poverty assistance, substantial increases in foreign aid, loosening of border restrictions, civil unions for gay couples, a robust program aimed at carbon reduction, and greater internationalism—all in the name of his great, abiding concern: social justice. Moreover, he explicitly sets himself up as an alternative to the Religious Right, which he sees as having twisted the role of faith in public policy.

Despite having written several books on the subject, Wallis has never been able to present a coherent view of how government and religion ought to interact. “There is a biblical role for the state, just as there is for the church, and they are not the same,” he writes, but the details of those roles are never fully or clearly articulated.

On one hand, the book makes a strong case for government that is heavily influenced by religious belief. Wallis hankers for a “political agenda drawn … from our deepest moral values.” He wants “religious convictions” to be “translated into moral arguments, which must win the political debate.” His stated purpose is “to explore the prospects for a revival of faith that changes politics.” He argues that issues such as immigration are, in fact, “religious issues.” Clearly, he wants religious communities to work through and with the government toward religious goals and wants faith and its advocates to make a definite impact on public policy.

Or does he? Wallis warns, “it is a tactic of religious fundamentalism … to try to make the state an enforcer of religious belief and practice, and it is always dangerous.” The church, he insists, must maintain its “independence and separation from any state.” And while he feels that religion ought to play a deciding role on issues that energize him, like immigration and Third World poverty, he seems to think that on other issues Christians should accept compromise. On abortion, for example, he cautions opponents against pushing too hard to outlaw the practice, suggesting that their efforts might be divisive. He approvingly quotes someone calling the practice “a necessary evil.” (Where is it in the Bible, I wonder, that Jesus shrugged his shoulders and sighed, “Look, sometimes evil is necessary. Let’s just try to minimize it.”) Government and religion, then, are to work hand in hand to achieve moral goals—except, well, when they shouldn’t.

If his vision of the role of government seems muddled, perhaps that’s because it’s grounded on such a shallow foundation. For when it comes to the minutiae of public policy, Wallis is simply lost. In each of the chapters devoted to policy, he begins by quoting a few Bible verses, goes on to claim that whatever it is he’s talking about is a moral issue, and then more or less assumes the argument is over. Almost all of his actual policy arguments are outsourced, with substantial chunks of others’ work simply copied into the text, usually with only a line or two of summary on his part to break it up. He often notes that the policy issues are “complex,” but never makes much of an attempt to explicate them.

What’s more, he proposes almost nothing of substance to solve the problems he identifies. In order to deal with poverty, for example, he says that there are “three critical steps.” These turn out to be “compassion for the poor,” “the call for social justice,” and “the movement into solidarity … with the poor.” Far from critical steps, these are inane moral signifiers that offer no concrete way of reducing poverty. By this point, though, Wallis has already given up the game: one of his “rules of engagement” for Christians is “faithfulness comes before effectiveness.” So much for making a difference.

Instead of substantive policy prescriptions, Wallis falls back on repeated calls for America’s faithful to generate the “moral and political will” to solve its problems (and the rest of the world’s). He apparently thinks that if everyone simply believes enough, cares enough, hopes enough, things will fix themselves.

Perhaps Wallis’s lack of concern for the details of public policy can be forgiven. He is, after all, a preacher, not a policy wonk. One might reasonably expect, then, that his strength would lie in words. “Language is important,” he admonishes those who wish to share their ideas with others. But if language is so important to him, why is he so frequently sloppy with it?

Wallis writes that he wants Christian progressives to move “from sound bites to sound strategy, and from rhetoric to results.” That he delivered this wish in a compact sound bite ought to be evidence enough that he is still stuck, flailing, in the realm of rhetoric—and mostly trite rhetoric at that.

Throughout the book, he traffics in hollow boosterism, repeating dull phrases that mean nothing and add little to his argument. Besides his many invocations of “moral and political will,” we are treated to an endless stream of vapid maxims. Over the space of just six pages, he writes that he “can feel a new momentum and movement.” He tells us that the future “is feeling very bright to me” and that “a fresh dialog about how to apply faith to social justice is springing up across the land.” One of his trips is described as a “dramatic demonstration of a sea change that will be significant for both faith and politics in America.” Later, he finds himself thrilled that certain issues are “provoking a deeper and healthier dialog.” This is rhetorical cotton candy, fluffy and empty, but it’s all that Wallis has to carry the book forward. Without clear direction, he lets his ideas sail on wave after wave of vanilla uplift.

And when he is not peppering his paragraphs with bland sentiment, Wallis fills them from his endless well of questions.

If globalization is unstoppable, what are the moral ethics of globalization? Do unfettered economic growth and unlimited corporate profits really serve everybody best? Should there be any rules and, if so, whom should they protect? What are the ethics for such nations in their relationship with the poor countries for their own development and for the problems of the rest of the world? Is free trade the goal, or should it be fair and just trade? And how do individuals and communities make trade justice possible? In an interconnected world, how do we develop a new moral ethic for globalization?

Wallis does not proceed to answer any of these questions. He never even tries. No, he follows with yet another, even longer, string of questions. Indeed, the paragraph above comes near the end of a chapter. For him, questions are not a starting point; they are the conclusion.

Of course answers were never the point. Wallis’s goal is to square the two things that have defined his life—his Christian faith and his progressive politics. But in any personal battle between the twin masters of government and religion, one will almost always lose. For Wallis, politics seems to have come out on top.

Despite his claims of independence, he is in some ways a tool used by the Left to promote a liberal agenda that has little use for faith except for its potential to rally political allies. The Democratic Party has increasingly become a secular institution that caters ever more to the non-religious. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public life reported that in 2006, for example, 67 percent of voters who never attend church voted Democratic, up from 55 percent four years previous. Among party activists hostility toward religion is common, especially on the Internet.

But the Democrats are not above throwing a bone to the country’s believers if it will help them in the polls, which explains some of the stilted God-talk emanating from candidates and party leaders. Wallis almost admits as much in the book, writing that some of the party’s recent friendliness toward religion can be chalked up in part to “soul-searching,” but also to having done “some political math.” For all his passion, Wallis merely helps them run the numbers.

That’s not to say he doesn’t go along willingly. In fact, he courts the role by neutering Christianity into something so bland not even Christopher Hitchens could find cause for worry. On multiple occasions, he declares, “religion has no monopoly on morality.” He also says that “Jesus being the Son of God does not mean that Christians are … more suited to govern and decide political matters than non-Christians,” which is strange considering how much energy he devotes to arguing that religious people ought to rely on their beliefs to help them decide political matters. This serves as a message to the secular world: “There’s no reason to fear us; we don’t even know what we’re talking about.”

As he attaches qualification after qualification to what religion can—and mostly can’t—do, one begins to feel sympathy for Wallis. When you’ve based your entire life on something that has such a weak conviction in its own truth and morality, on a belief system that can hardly muster the strength to argue for its own correctness, it must be maddening. No wonder he’s confused.

“Something is happening,” Wallis intones several times throughout the book, seemingly as much to convince himself as his readers. But after 309 pages of moral admonishing, vacuous principles, and cheerleading for progressive politics, I still have no idea what, and I suspect that, for all his fervor, Wallis doesn’t either. 

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Peter Suderman is associate editor of Doublethink.