The Gospel According to Jim Wallis

"And," Wallis says, "I think that's the night I left [Christianity] in my head and my heart."

Race riots were occurring in cities across America by 1967. Wallis was 19. "All the white world I had grown up in was terribly afraid," he says. "And I was feeling connected to the people inside the barricade." As a student at Michigan State University, Wallis was becoming increasingly involved in the antiwar and civil rights movements. He became fascinated with Martin Luther King Jr. and was listening to Bob Dylan, reading Ho Chi Minh, Karl Marx, Che Guevara, "all the luminaries of the time. And I was not finally satisfied with them," because, as Wallis recalls, he came to believe that the leftist activist creeds did not speak to the spiritual. As Wallis was finishing college, he found that he could "never quite get rid of Jesus. He was always hanging around in my head and in my heart. So I decided to take one last look . . . I began to read the New Testament one last time. I got to the Sermon on the Mount . . . and I realized I had never heard a sermon on the Sermon on the Mount. Then I got to the 25th chapter of Matthew, and that became my conversion text, when Jesus said, 'I was hungry. I was thirsty. I was naked. I was sick. I was in prison. And you never came to me.' And the people say, 'Oh, Lord, when did we see you hungry, thirsty, or naked, or sick or imprisoned?' And he says, 'As you've done to the least of these, you've done to me.' The people who I'd met and were fighting with before were the very ones he was talking about in that passage. So I had to leave the church to find Jesus."

Wallis decided to go to the conservative Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Ill. Within months, he found a group of students who believed as he did, and an early version of his movement, Sojourners, was born. It grew to become a national Christian organization based in Washington, and remains fundamentally charged, about three decades later, with lifting people out of poverty.

Yet for all the attention directed at Wallis, 58 now and married and the father of two sons, fundraising for his organization has not dramatically increased. When I tell Wallis that some of his conservative critics say he is a general without an army, he responds: "I think we do have an army. You don't sell 200,000 copies of a book if you don't have a constituency. We are not organized, institutionalized or mobilized the way the right is. They have been doing this for 30 years."

BY THE 1970S, DEMOCRATS' DIVERSITY was a central component of their dilemma. They became "much more of a patchwork," as Clemson University's Olson puts it. Compared with the relative cultural homogeneity of the FDR coalition of labor, Catholics, ethnic whites and Southern whites, the modern Democratic Party began to focus on "a lot more little narrow constituencies under its big tent," such as the civil rights and feminist movements, which were like "little fiefdoms they had to make happy," Olson adds.

"When the Democrats became just the party of rights, they lost something, a moral appeal," Wallis contends. The Democratic patchwork frayed as some of its largest constituencies, particularly working-class whites, began to feel culturally estranged from the party. The breaking point was in 1972, when Republican Richard M. Nixon argued that a vote for Democrat George McGovern was a vote for "acid, amnesty and abortion." To many voters, McGovern embodied an emerging perception that liberals were outside the American mainstream.

Pivotal Supreme Court rulings only furthered the emerging divide. Between the presidency of John F. Kennedy and the failed bid of John F. Kerry, the court prohibited school prayer and ruled that pornography was legal and that obscenity was subject to contemporary community standards. To conservatives, this reeked of liberal relativism. By 1973, when the court ruled there was a constitutional right to abortion, religious Christians were ready to be mobilized by conservatives. But Carter was able to stem the tide of churchgoing voters from the Democratic Party.

"Carter -- because he was really one of them -- they thought, 'Well, he'll come in, and he'll be able to turn back the clock on some of these scary policy decisions that have been made,'" Olson says. "Like legalized abortion, the removal of prayer from public schools, stuff like that. But Carter couldn't hold on to them. The perception that Carter had weakened the country internationally was especially damaging," Olson adds. "Part of what fueled the emergence of the Christian right was anti-communism . . . [communism] being rightly perceived as godless was very threatening to people of faith."

By 1980, "Reagan is able to identify a constituency that is extremely ripe for mobilization, a constituency that is easy to track down," Olson continues. "The other piece of that is that even though he himself is an incredibly unlikely representative for this constituency because he's from Hollywood, he's divorced, he has not been religious his whole life like Carter, but instead, he's able to craft himself as a viable representative of this constituency just through symbolic appeals."

Reagan's call to get "government off our backs" resonated with religious Christians, many of whom by 1980 saw the federal government as furthering an overall secularization of society.

In 1980, the party platform included the "pro-life plank" for the first time. Reagan also advocated for the biblical story of creation to be taught in public schools as an alternative to evolution. And when it was still uncommon for presidential hopefuls to visit evangelicals, Reagan came and spoke at a convention of leading evangelical Christians in Dallas during the campaign, where he famously said, "Well, I know that you can't endorse me, but I only brought that up because I want you to know that I endorse you."

Reagan's appeal worked. In 1976, Carter won the white Baptist vote, 56 to 43 percent. In 1980, Reagan won it 56 to 34 percent, according to an ABC News-Harris survey at the time. In presidential elections, Democrats have not won religious Christians since. Richard Land, a longtime leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, says the sea change was deeper than any one issue. To Land, the debate was fundamentally over the worldview that social issues symbolize.