‘British people are not like Americans,’ he wrote on 20 March 1996, who ‘seem to want their politicians banging the Bible the whole time.’ In Britain, by contrast, those ‘who didn't believe didn't want to hear it; and the ones who did felt the politicians who went on about it were doing it for the wrong reasons.’

This can be frustrating for those British Christians whose faith leads them into politics. But before we start yearning for a culture in which we can talk openly about God in public, we should read Jim Wallis.

According to Wallis’s new book, Seven Ways to Change the World, the political debate in the US is ‘polarized and paralyzed’. In spite or perhaps because of its public acceptability, Christianity has damaged politics, becoming limited to two main issues and then used as a kind of cudgel.

Things, however, are changing. Wallis thinks the era of the ‘religious right’ is over, with more Christians searching for a political ‘third way’, based not on soggy compromise but on ‘a moral centre that focuses on the common good.’

He is careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, however. Too many Christians have discovered the Bible’s passion for social, economic and environmental justice, only to forget its more personal moral concerns. Wallis is not amongst these. He campaigns for economic justice and for the protection of the family. He calls for creation care but insists ‘sexual ethics are important’. The Bible, he recognises, is for all of life, not just those bits that happen to be fashionable today.

How do we achieve this balance? British Christians may not be obsessed by a tiny number of personal morality matters (despite what many people think), but we all, consciously or not, favour certain issues over others. For Wallis, the answer is relationships. Everything, he writes, ‘is rooted in the call to right relationships, which is at the heart of the biblical notion of justice itself.’ Relationships – ruptured, reconciled and restored – capture the Bible’s big story. But they also cover the tiny details and sub-plots of our everyday lives: from the annual shareholders’ meeting to the snatched conversation at the Tesco till.

Changing the world is not a question of name-checking God in public. Rather, it is living in right relationship, with each other and with the one in whom all things are reconciled.

Nick Spencer

Nick is Director of Studies for Theos, the public theology think tank: www.theosthinktank.co.uk

additional links

Find out more about Seven Ways to Change the World here: http://www.lionhudson.com/product/9780745952987.htm

Read Jim Wallis’s blog here: http://blog.beliefnet.com/godspolitics/?gclid=CIjg9L6avJICFQhE1AoduUt6bQ

Visit the Sojourners website here:http://www.sojo.net/

Find out about the work of the Relationships Foundation here: http://www.relationshipsfoundation.org/