Evangelical Group Is Rooted in Radical Movement : Sojourners Quietly Make Mark on Nation

While conservative fundamentalist groups capture the headlines, another evangelical movement, rooted in the radical movements of the 1960s, is quietly exerting influence among religious activists across the nation.

At its center is a small Christian community in the nation’s capital called “Sojourners.” Like the Moral Majority, the Sojourners take the Bible literally and desire to make Gospel values “concrete and visible.”

There the resemblance ends.

Sojourners’ mentors are Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., St. Francis and most especially, Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Workers Movement. Like Day, they are trying to establish a community that allows them to engage in works of mercy for the poor while confronting systemic social injustice.

‘Welcome Confrontation’

Their stands bring them into “welcome confrontation” not only with government but with organized religion, which Sojourners see as all too often a tool of the state.

Yet they do not fall into any convenient category. Their opposition to nuclear arms and to U.S. policy in Central America places them at the center of the peace movement. At the same time, their opposition to abortion and support for family values gives them appeal to non-political churchgoers across the country.

Sojourners began in 1970 with a group of seminary students near Chicago. Five years later, they moved to Washington. There are now about 50 members--the Sunday congregation is 125--living in six communally owned houses in a poor black neighborhood. The community is Christian and ecumenical--Baptists, Catholics, Episcopalians, Mennonites, Quakers.

Although some work outside, the community basically survives on subscription income from “Sojourners” magazine, circulation 55,000, and a book club. Earnings totaled about $1 million last year, and only about 15% came from individual donations. The group will not take grants.

Sojourners is committed to taking religion from “the churches into the streets.” Here in Washington, members work with the poor, for example organizing tenants’ unions to help fight gentrification. And last year, at a Sojourners-sponsored “Peace Pentecost,” 241 people were arrested in the Capitol as several hundred others stood outside.

Across the nation, they play an active role in the anti-nuclear movement and in the drive to enlist support for a “pledge of resistance” against direct U.S. intervention in Central America. About 30,000 people have already signed such pledges. The Sojourners have also sponsored a network that tracks a train carrying nuclear weapons and greets the train with vigils, demonstrations and sometimes with church people blocking the tracks.

Sojourners back “Witnesses for Peace,” which has sent more than 1,000 individuals to Nicaragua in teams of 15 to 20 over the last two years. They go to towns attacked by U.S.-supported rebels, known as Contras, and work to rebuild schools and hospitals, pick corn and coffee. Some are more bold. During the recent “MIG crisis” in which the Reagan Administration suspected that the Nicaraguan regime was about to receive high-powered Soviet jet fighters, 40 set up tents at the Port of Corinto. When a U.S. Navy frigate appeared offshore, some religious people got into a fishing boat with a bullhorn and went out to warn it away.

Yet Sojourners do not see themselves as a left-wing reaction to right-wing evangelicals. “We certainly don’t identify ourselves with one political ideology or another,” says Joyce Hollyday, a former Yale divinity student. “Basically we are people of faith.”

Politics Shunned

“I don’t think religious conscience should ever fit neatly into political categories of any ideological stripe,” says magazine editor Jim Wallis, a Baptist who came to Sojourners from the anti-war movement. “We’re trying to break through the polarized options of liberal and conservative, of left and right.”

Many people are now paying attention to “very private, religious values,” adds Hollyday. Opposition to abortion, for example, reflects private morality based on the traditional family--which allows some to ignore “the bigger pro-life issues like the nuclear arms race and intervention in Central America.”

“What we’re trying to get at is a consistent kind of moral value,” she continues. “We’re trying to talk about defending human life wherever and whenever it is threatened, whether it be unborn lives or enemy populations, or the poor in our neighborhoods or campesinos in Nicaragua, or whoever.”

Sojourners differentiate themselves from activists on the religious right by rejecting any tactic not infused with moral values.

Sharply Criticized

“Leading a life consistent with one’s faith, refusing to resort to tactics we don’t agree with--that’s what Sojourners is about,” says spokesman Dennis Marker. “We are not willing to buy ‘the end justifies the means’.”

But some religious leaders have sharply criticized them for using the Bible to meet their own ends. One is Dr. Clark Pinnock, who taught Jim Wallis at Trinty Evangelical Divinity School in Chicago and later joined Sojourners for a time.

In the January issue of the newsletter of the Institute of Religion and Democracy, which has campaigned vigorously against liberalism in church groups, Pinnock says Sojourners “seem to be ‘just war’ people who are pacifist when it comes to American intervention and their own activities, but not necessarily that of others.”