Ideal Politics : Jim Wallis may seem like a contradiction in terms--an evangelical Christian who proseletizes progressive politics. From a Washington pulpit, he calls for peace, justice and tolerance. What’s more surprising is that Wallis actually practices what he preaches.

Next to a sidewalk with weeds in every crack, a purple-blossoming plant was growing: a petunia, planted by someone as optimistic as the writer and political missionary Jim Wallis. On a hot September afternoon, Wallis was leading me through a stretch of Washington, D.C., known as the 14th Street corridor. The petunia stuck out among the forsaken patches of a neighborhood--Columbia Heights, 20 blocks from the White House--that has lain in waste since the 1968 rioting. Rounding a corner, we came upon five youths standing over another young man who was prone on the sidewalk, breathing loudly, his face messed up, skin broken, blood running onto his shirt. His assailants looked murderous, but, seeing Wallis, they changed their minds and pedaled away on bicycles.

Wallis signaled to another teen-ager standing nearby. “Get him cleaned up, will you, please?” The two were friends, and, arms around each other, herky-jerky, they went across the street. It occurred to me that a group of avengers with automatic weapons might appear at any second. Wallis, streetwise and shaman-like, seemed oblivious to such a danger, and events would bear him out.

Wallis has had 20 years to learn how to tell the merely horrible from the tragic along the 14th Street corridor. He is the founder and leader of the Sojourners Community, a ministry cum commune cum social movement started by mostly middle-class, mostly white evangelical Christians who threw in their lot with the inhabitants of Columbia Heights in the last gasp of the do-good ‘60s. Wallis and about 50 others live in cooperatively owned row houses there, within walking distance of each other. In a former crackhouse, they run education programs for adults and children, a tenants’ rights organization, a food bank and an all-purpose Neighborhood Center.

Wallis’ idea, and the force behind Sojourners, is that bibilical faith compels radical social action. While most of us accept the successes wrought by public policy on behalf of justice, peace and the poor--small successes that admit, in essence, that injustice, war and poverty will always be with us--for Wallis, that isn’t good enough. His conscience leads him to take on these issues again and again, firsthand, every day.

He is surely the only participant in President Clinton’s prayer breakfasts who chooses to make the 14th Street corridor his home. He regularly gets himself arrested in acts of civil disobedience. In a quixotic protest of the wildly popular Gulf War, he fasted for 47 days. He presides at the funerals of neighborhood youngsters gunned down at close range and then takes on the improbable cause of a nationwide gang truce. In the late ‘80s, he sneaked into South Africa to report back on the anti-apartheid movement. When the United States was arming the Contras, he mobilized thousands of Witness for Peace and joined them in Nicaragua as they made it known that they were willing to take a bullet to stop the fighting.

“There has to be more than just writing about a vision of social transformation,” the 46-year-old Wallis explained to me. “You have to give your life to it--if necessary, risk your life for it.”

Wallis also preaches what he practices. He travels the lecture circuit half the year. When he is at home, he is the lay pastor of the ecumenical Sojourner’s “church,” which meets every Sunday in the Neighborhood Center. He contributes to Sojourners magazine, which he co-founded and edits. In his just-published third book, “The Soul of Politics,” Wallis delivers a sermon that has to be called a manifesto.

The world isn’t working. . . . Ideologies and policies of liberal and conservative, Left and Right, have run their course and come to a dead end. . . . Politics has been reduced to the selfish struggle for power among competing interests and groups. . . .

We need a personal ethic of moral responsibility, a social vision based on bringing people together, a commitment to justice with the capacity also for reconciliation, an economic approach governed by the ethics of community and sustainability, a restored sense of our covenant with the abandoned poor and the damaged earth, and a renewal of citizen politics to fashion a new political future.

We must, writes Wallis, “find common ground . . . by moving to higher ground”--or perish.

It is no accident that “The Soul of Politics” arrived on bookshelves at the height of another electoral season. Against the 1994 campaigns--cutthroat, cynical, divisive and manipulative---Wallis’ jeremiad can’t help but sound like a righteous voice crying in the wilderness, a voice made all the more prophetic, according to social critic Cornel West, because of his rare standing as “visionary . . . who grounds his reflection in concrete action.

Wallis is politically idealistic beyond the bounds of anything that is familiar or conventional in Washington. The fact that he wants the rest of us to follow him may make him a saint or God’s fool, or maybe an ordinary American revolutionary.

The cliche about saints is that they are insufferable in person. In this regard Wallis has achieved a breakthrough. He is engaging at a level that wins over a wide variety of people. One recent day, he talked business on the phone with a financial officer who was with a women’s community in the Catholic Church’s Dominican Order while holding a second conversation, by hand signals, with two reformed California gang leaders who had dropped by his office.

One secret to Wallis’ likability is his unpolished, shy social manner: He has a stutter; when he’s in a hurry, he eats Chinese food with a fork. Also, he is willing to admit to periods of heartache and depression. Many evenings, his soul is heavier than when the day began. “Washington is in crisis, America is in crisis, the world is in crisis and I will sometimes get to a point, realizing I am not totally together in my own life either, where I wonder how worthwhile is it to go on,” he told me. “On those nights I come home, drop in my chair and drown out everything with music--jazz, rock, it doesn’t matter. I love the soundtrack from the movie ‘The Mission,’ all those haunting Indian wind instruments, but lately I’ve been listening a lot to the old spirituals; they really satisfy my soul.” That Wallis goes through his ups and downs, in my mind, invests him with a humanity he might otherwise lack. There is suspense in his character.

A man of middle height with a bodybuilder’s physique, Wallis has a soft face. His burly arms are hairy, his sandy hair is combed in an early rock ‘n’ roll style, his complexion is reddish. The son of a World War II romance, he was raised in suburban Detroit in a Middle-American family anchored by the church. His home today is a modest brown-brick, two-story row house. The day I visited, the smell of burned beans hung in the air; a phone call had distracted him while he was cooking supper the night before. Upstairs was a treadmill, the only evidence of the boutique spirit of the late 20th Century that I could find in the house.

On the wall of his dining room, in a shrine effect, Wallis has affixed about 25 crucifixes and crosses made of wood or tapestry and collected from around the world. On one of them, two thin sticks glued together, the name of a Salvadoran priest, Ignacio Ellacuria, and the date of his murder, 11-16-89, has been printed. Wallis thought it had been lost in a police storage room--he was carrying it during a protest that resulted in his arrest--but a police officer went to the trouble of retrieving it. “This was a hardened, tough-guy cop, a guy you’d expect to stomp on you, but he did a decent thing,” Wallis said. “So you see why, no matter how down I get, I never stop believing in hope.”

Few of the standard positions of the Left or Right, nothing about national security or the gross national product, are of much concern to Wallis. What drives his activism, both as a citizen of his destitute neighborhood and as a citizen of the wider world, is an inclusive and egalitarian power-to-the-people, spread-the-wealth, peace-be-with-you morality. The sum of his political strategy is to encourage people to take responsibility and fight for their own local issues, whether an end to poverty or an end to apartheid. The sum of his philosophy is a Christian humanism based on the concept that all people were created in the image of God.

“Most of the world’s religions believe in this concept, imago dei , which is to say that the value of each person is the same. A rich person’s life is no more sacred than a poor person’s,” he said to me. “If we could only adopt this simple concept in our lives, how might the world be transformed?”

When I asked him about breaking the cycle of poverty and violence in neighborhoods like Columbia Heights, he corrected me. “Poverty isn’t the root problem; poverty leads to hopelessness, which is a deeper, spiritual problem. These kids see no reason to grow old. All they own are a few matters of pride. That’s what they kill each other over. Who flirted with my girlfriend? Who looked at me the wrong way? Who disrespected whom?” The ultimate answer, he said, lies in the old-fashioned notion of letting people take charge of their own lives, referred to popularly these days as “empowerment” and favored nominally in Washington by both liberals and conservatives. It is not clear what politicians mean by the term, but it is likely a far cry from the sweeping forms of self-rule and self-responsibility Wallis has tried to institute.

The Sojourners Community has tried to find every means possible whereby its mostly African-American neighbors, who now hoard dribs and drabs of income for the landlord, can gain their own stake in the city, through expanded tenant rights, cooperative housing, accessible mortgages, whatever it takes. As far as Wallis can see, neither liberals nor conservatives truly believe in sharing power with poor people. “Most conservatives want to abandon the poor, and most liberals want to control the poor. There are liberals who give money to our little operation solely because they want to stop the violence. They care nothing about rebuilding society.”

For some years, the building across the street from Wallis’ row house was inhabited by crackheads. On one occasion, these neighbors used a heavy object to smash through his front door and rummage inside for valuables. Then, remarkably, the building was sold to a young professional couple, and the addicts were evicted. Over the weeks, Wallis observed the couple, evidently well-off, as they converted what had been apartments into a mansion of rooms for themselves. A masonry wall was erected out front, topped by a fence of black wrought iron. A gate was installed for the driveway, and marigolds and geraniums were planted in profusion.

Wallis had a reaction that cuts against the grain of a materialistic age. “I don’t know which is the worst evil, the crackhouse or the gentrified house,” he said to me. He spoke in a mild voice, as if expressing an ordinary opinion, as if he was not rebuking most of his peers in contemporary America.

When Wallis is in Washington, he spends his days at the offices of Sojourners magazine, on the outer edge of the corridor in an old Gothic building with finely carved moldings and domed-ceiling rooms. For awhile, during the reign of the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua, that country’s ambassadors to the United States were based in this building. In the 1980s, Wallis devoted many pages of the magazine to Nicaragua and caused himself to be arrested at demonstrations, all in an attempt to stop the Reagan Administration from returning to power the Somozatistas, then called the Contras. The irony of moving into the old Somoza embassy, the rent now at ghetto rates, was not lost on Wallis. “We hope by being here we can settle a karmic debt,” he told me good-naturedly.

His humor that particular September morning was a little forced. He had just learned that the entire Sojourners operation had slipped into yet another financial crisis, perhaps the most threatening ever. Revenues for 1994 were going to be well short of the projected $1.2-million budget. The magazine might have to miss an issue. Layoffs seemed inevitable; there might be payless paydays, a nightmare for a staff already stretched to the limit (almost everyone who works for the magazine belongs as well to the Sojourners Community). They might even be evicted from the old embassy.

There was a sink-or-swim mood among the Sojourners staffers, many of them young heartlanders wearing sandals, shorts and T-shirts, but by the same token, everyone seemed to be expecting Wallis to resolve the crisis. He had hoped to use the better part of the month to collect himself mentally before embarking on a long nationwide tour to promote “The Soul of Politics,” but instead, he now would have to devote himself to seeking loans from a network of friends.

Aside from the occasional grant, money for Sojourners is raised a few dollars at a time from magazine subscriptions, direct-mail solicitations and book sales (the Sojourners book catalogue has an extensive list of religious Left authors). Wallis took a minute in the mail room to confer with two interns who were about to ship a copy of his new book to England for an auction of the British rights. It would cost $40 for UPS to deliver the book overnight. “Better find a cheaper way,” Wallis said. He thought a minute, finger to lips. “OK, send it UPS, but enclose the bill and ask the publisher to pay.” He gave me an embarrassed smile. “I hate being poor all the time.”

In his office, the walls postered with quotations from Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (“Unarmed truth is the most powerful thing in the universe”), Wallis dialed the number of a prospective lender, a friend at a nonprofit financial cooperative. “I wish I was calling just to say hello,” he said into the phone, “but, the truth is, our back is against the wall. We need $50,000 in the next two weeks.”

Meanwhile, two leaders of Barrios Unidos, a broad-based effort to stop gang violence, showed up at his office for lunch. Daniel (Nane) Alejandrez and Otilio (O.T.) Quintero, from Santa Cruz, had hit it off with Wallis two years ago during preparations for the Gang Summit, an attempt to broker a national truce among Crips, Bloods, Vice Lords, Black Disciples, Gangster Disciples, Black Souls, Cobras, Stones and Latin Kings.

The Gang Summit, co-chaired by Alejandrez and by Fred Williams of the Common Ground foundation of Los Angeles, was held last year in Kansas City. It had several moments of rage that were overcome by praying and gospel singing, and thus far the summit truce has exceeded many expectations. Not that Wallis didn’t have his doubts about it, or about his role as an outside peacemaker. “Most of the time I was the only white guy in the room. I could see the question in their eyes: ‘What the hell is he doing here?’ I felt I was being continually tested. I think the deciding factor, for me as well as for them, was where my home is. I’ve been living in a war zone for 20 years--I know street violence,” he told me.

While Wallis worked the phones, I asked Alejandrez, a Vietnam veteran and onetime heroin addict living in the Santa Cruz barrios, what his first impression of Wallis had been. “I don’t remember meeting Jim, but I remember, later on, thinking, hey, this white guy, he’s blending right in,” he answered. Quintero added: “Jim’s not sanctimonious. He’s not a guy from some foreign white world. He’s like one of us.”

Alejandrez and Quintero, sporting business suits and Cesar Chavez buttons, were scheduled to meet later in the day with sub-Cabinet officials of the Clinton Administration. Their sudden high standing in Washington was owed, in part, to Wallis, who had helped underwrite their credibility as owners of small businesses. A few months ago, Wallis volunteered to help them obtain funding for a sloganeering-T-shirt enterprise and barrio-related computer software; given their tattoos and their backgrounds, they were having no luck with commercial lenders.

Wallis took the request to Gaylord Thomas, director of community services for the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, headquartered in Chicago. The selling job was not made any easier by the arrest of one of Wallis’ closest allies in the gang world, the Vice Lord leader Sharif Willis, implicated in the killing of a Minneapolis police officer. While no charges were filed against Willis, the front-page headlines about the gang-related homicide in the Midwest reinforced an understandable nervousness about associating with gangs. Nonetheless, a $100,000 loan for Barrios Unidos from the Lutheran church is being arranged. “It was out of the respect and love I have for Jim that I went ahead,” Thomas, who is African American, told me.

Having finally put down the phone, Wallis explained in a matter-of-fact voice the state of emergency now surrounding Sojourners. Alejandrez stood up and pulled Wallis into a big hug. “You can’t go under,” he said emotionally. “You’re the mouthpiece. We need you.”

Wallis looked straight at him. “We will not go under,” he said. He may not have the manner of the fiery televangelists, but the fire is there.

Lunch, far behind schedule, was to be takeout chicken and Chinese vegetables. Wallis discussed economic development and how groups such as Barrios Unidos could access a pot of gold, altogether about $35 billion, that exists in the pension funds of Christian denominations. “It’s invested in blue-chip stocks, doing absolutely no good for anybody except the blue-chip companies,” Wallis said. “If Jesus were on Earth, he would tell the churches to give the whole $35 billion away, give it to the poor. All I’m asking is for them to move it around a little, invest it in projects like yours.”

Might Wallis be able to tap into the pension funds for his own organization? “No, probably not. You have to look far and wide for a source of money that we qualify for.”

Difficult as it is for someone stigmatized by the violence of gangs to raise money, it may be even more difficult for Wallis, the veteran pacifist. The ambiguity of Sojourners, in terms of standard political ideology, makes him an alien among the professional fund-raisers aligned with either the Christian Right or the public-interest Left. “Sojourners falls between the cracks. We are anathema to both sides,” he explained. “The Christian Right will not help us because we talk about racial and economic justice and are opposed to war; the liberal-funding world is remarkably biased against religion.”

It is easy to understand why Wallis has found little common ground with a Christian rightist like William J. Bennett, who codified the Republican vision of self-determination in his recent bestseller, “The Book of Virtues.” Bennett promulgates resistance to change, whereas Wallis seeks transformation and will settle for reform. Wallis traded point-and-counterpoint with Bennett in June at the Christian Booksellers convention in Denver. Said Bennett, calling in by speaker phone: “Why is it that Christians are not welcome in the national political debate?” Replied Wallis: “Why is it that progressive evangelicals aren’t welcome in the Christian debate?”

Wallis has even less in common with Jerry L. Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority Inc., with whom he also has tangled in public. Kindness to his enemies is considered one of Wallis’ political failings, but he had notably unkind words for Falwell: “He is blustery, always interrupting, and he is combative where Bennett is scholarly.”

On the other hand, the estrangement between Wallis and the liberal establishment was to me a little less understandable. It is true that Wallis doesn’t toe the line of pure liberalism; his position on abortion, for example, is notably tortured. In his new book, he lets his female counterparts speak on the issue, and they come down on the side that almost all abortion is immoral, but that criminalizing it is no answer. Wallis believes it should be society’s goal to eliminate any need for abortion. But the Left’s real problem with Wallis, according to the politically idiosyncratic author Garry Wills, who is a contributor to Sojourners magazine and something of a politial loner himself, is “the learned liberal superstition that the separation of church and state must mean the separation of religion and politics.”

For Wallis’ part, he has taken pains to separate himself from the Left as well as the Right. “(Both) have run their course and come to a dead end,” he declares in the introduction of his new book. “Liberalism is unable to articulate or demonstrate the kind of moral values that must undergird any serious movement of social transformation. . . . Conservatism still denies the reality of structural injustice and social oppression.”

Wallis was on the phone again when our lunch was delivered. Alejandrez, Quintero and I ate off cracked china plates at a coffee table. Hanging up, Wallis managed only two mouthfuls before another call interrupted. Linda Wertheimer, at National Public Radio, was asking him to rush over to the studio to be interviewed about Haiti. “I don’t have an easy solution for Haiti,” he said, “but OK.”

We piled into one of the Sojourners vehicles, a pickup truck, and crossed into downtown Washington, the well-dressed Alejandrez and Quintero acting out an impromptu bit of mad-lark theater from their perch on wheel rims in back, scanning the streets and playing the part of Secret Service agents. At that moment President Clinton was hours away from a televised speech announcing a countdown to an invasion of Haiti. Bob Dole, the Republican leader of the U.S. Senate, had already declared his opposition, saying: “I don’t think invading Haiti . . . is worth one American life.” Most Democrats, however, justified an invasion as a necessary evil in the furtherance of democracy.

This was the point Wertheimer tried to drive home in her interview with Wallis, and, listening, I began to have a better understanding of the difficulties he poses for anyone who wants to define things with neat political labels. Even while dismissing Dole’s view (“I hear racism in that statement”), Wallis criticized Clinton for trying to make the ends justify the means. The issue for Wallis was that an invasion would cost lives, American and Haitian. “People are going to die. I can’t defend that.” His belief in the sanctity of life is one of the constants on which he has predicated politics for nearly 30 years.

Wertheimer, who clearly accepted the inevitability of a military invasion, grew exasperated with Wallis and demanded that he come up with an alternative. Reluctant to add to his criticism of Clinton, of whom Wallis is generally respectful, he allowed, “It’s an agonizing decision.” But then, pressed further, Wallis took a breath and laid out his solution. He spoke in a clear baritone; his stutter had disappeared as soon as he entered the radio booth.

“Well, some of us have been talking about a different kind of invasion, an unarmed invasion of religious leaders. Why not send in a boatload of ministers and teachers with several tons of food? I think you could find enough of us who would put our lives on the line.”

Realpolitik, Wallis style. Wertheimer wasn’t buying it. She talked right past him and ushered us out with a tight smile: “We might be able to use some of it.”

On our way out, a tanned, easily recognized man joined us in the elevator: George McGovern, just back from talks in Cuba with Fidel Castro. Wallis extended a hand, “Hello, senator.” After a few seconds sorting through his memories, McGovern said delightedly, “Jim Wallis. You were the seminarian who was banned from campus.”

In 1970, after making a radical name for himself in anti-war and civil-rights protests at Michigan State University, Wallis enrolled for postgraduate studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Ill. There he organized prayer vigils for Vietnam peace, which he justified to his professors with neglected passages of the Bible. Alumni tried to have him expelled, and at nearby Wheaton College, another conservative Christian school where he also spoke against the war, he was banned from subsequent formal speaking engagements.

In 1972, when an anti-war McGovern, himself a former seminarian, challenged Nixon for the presidency, Wallis brashly volunteered to arrange for a candidates’ night at Wheaton. Wallis sneaked onto the campus (“I had to go by night like Nicodemus”) and persuaded the student government to ask both Nixon and McGovern to appear. Richard Nixon declined the invitation, so McGovern got his chance alone.

McGovern seemed to impress the superpatriotic Wheaton students, although the presidential election was a lost cause. After his defeat, McGovern sought counsel from a number of religious leaders, including Wallis. “He was extremely, extremely downhearted. I remember saying to him, young as I was, ‘Well, senator, this might be a backward step, but it’s only one step in a long struggle. You have to carry on,’ ” he said, smiling at his earnestness.

Since age 14, Wallis had known he wanted to turn his life into a mission. It was not at the urging of his parents, who, although they were founders of a Bible-based church, had raised him in Little League and Boy Scouts and public school. “To them, faith was a personal act. They didn’t relate it to people’s suffering on the larger scale of war or racism. But I kept asking, why do we live in this nice little white, middle-class enclave, while a mile away, black people are living in slums? Eventually I got in so much trouble with my parents’ church over this issue that I spent my teen-age years attending black churches in Detroit.”

Wallis never got a degree at Trinity, probably much to that institution’s relief. After the anti-war movement was rendered moot and the civil-rights movement finished its heyday, Wallis tried to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. He came up with a list of essentials. He wanted to establish a national forum for the discussion of religion and social action; he wanted to provide a place for spiritual renewal, a nondenominational church; he wanted to live tribally among friends and colleagues, and there would have to be a way in which he could do service to the poor. Among the ‘60s generation, there were a lot of namby-pamby, wouldn’t-it-be-nice approaches to doing good. Wallis, the quintessential idealist, took a more pragmatic approach and succeeded.

Forming the Sojourners group with friends from Trinity, Wallis located first in Chicago, then, as of 1975, in the Fourteenth Street corridor. Five years later, as the high-living--some might say greedy--’80s kicked off, Wallis would be leading a community of about 45, who pooled their income, mostly from Sojourners magazine, which had a circulation of 45,000. Dozens of neighborhood residents would flock every Sunday to Sojourners services, which were nondenominational and led by lay pastors. A day-care center would be up and running, and Wallis would tell a Washington Post reporter, “We’ve become a fixture in landlord-tenant court.”

From time to time, Wallis is asked by strangers if he has ever contemplated pulling up his roots in the corridor. “Yes, I’ve thought of getting out,” he tells them, in much the same way you or I might say we’ve thought at times of being Good Samaritans ourselves in a place like Columbia Heights.

In the abstract, you can fool yourself into believing that Wallis is not so different from the rest of us. That is especially so if, like me, you came of age in the ‘60s. Wallis and I have lived in proximity most of our lives, growing up in similar Michigan households, protesting the war on Michigan campuses, even getting tear-gassed in 1969 at a stop-the-war protest in Washington. Both of us became writers and settled in the capital. However, Wallis has always resided inside the city limits, and I outside them, just 10 miles apart, but a distance that constitutes a world of difference.

After I met Wallis, the abstract became concrete: He is not likely to move out of the 14th Street corridor, and I am not likely to move in.

At the Sojourners office, a piece of good news had arrived--the likelihood of $25,000 in short-term credit. Wallis, who has a good Midwesterner’s aversion to debt and a conservative’s sense of self-responsibility, began immediately to scheme about ways to repay the loan. Perhaps the new book would bring in a bonanza of new members. “We could use that cash to pay it off,” he said.

“Or we could use that cash to pay off the rest of our bills so we’re not all bald by Christmas from tearing out our hair,” interjected Elizabeth Holler Hunter, the thin, tense-looking director of development for Sojourners. She was trying to be flip, but her voice was all worry.

“By Christmas, this will all seem like a bad dream, I hope,” Wallis said, patting her shoulder.

A man in Wallis’ position is obliged to be reassuring, to make things appear stable. But there is nothing stable about day-to-day existence for Sojourners or the corridor. Life in these communities will always be life on the edge. When Wallis first moved into Columbia Heights, many houses were boarded up, and 9 of 10 of the others were occupied by African-American renters. Today, there are significantly more property owners, but there is greater enmity. “Now there are warring factions: the Latino immigrants against the African Americans, the white homeowners against the tenants. The tensions are very high,” Barbara Tamialis, who is Wallis’ sister, told me.

The prematurely silver-haired Tamialis, who is a year younger than her brother, has lived in the corridor as part of Sojourners from the beginning. She directs the Neighborhood Center. With her husband, Jim, a high school math instructor and the guitar player at Sojouners services, she has raised three children in the corridor and now is valiantly raising two more, an 8-year-old adopted as an infant and a 9-year-old rescued from the foster-care system. A decision was made to send the three oldest Tamialis kids to public schools outside the corridor. The reasons were practical ones. “Our children always played with the neighborhood kids,” their mother said, “but the teachers were teaching them to hit back while we were teaching them not to hit. And the schools were at a lower level.”

For all the adversities that the Tamialis family has suffered over the years, their row house broken into and so forth, and for all the violence visited upon neighborhood children they have watched grow up and die, they are not drawn to the suburbs. “It’s not nirvana out there. The suicide rate is higher in the suburbs. Wherever you live, you pick your poison,” Barbara Tamialis said. “There are different pluses to the suburbs, but also different minuses. When you add it all up, I do not consider living here a sacrifice.”

The fact remains, though, that the life Wallis has chosen--not just the mean streets, but also the times in jail, the risks to life and limb in far-off places, the denial of security and many creature comforts--is a reminder of why the ranks of priesthoods are often filled by loners. Not until a few years ago did Wallis marry, after falling in love with a young woman who happened to join Sojourners. Now divorced from her, he will not talk for the public record about his marriage, except to say “it has been the most painful chapter of my life.”

Wallis has friends inside Sojourners, some as close as family, and he has blood relatives there in the Tamialises (“There are days when I truly thank God for Barbara and Jim”). At times he has had house mates; once, after trying unsuccessfully to prevent the eviction of a neighbor and her son, he ended up sharing his house with them for several months. Yet the sum of his personal existence today is that he is a middle-aged man who finishes his day alone, the music up loud.

One day after Wallis suggested at NPR that the Clinton Administration consider an unarmed invasion of Haiti, former President Jimmy Carter, the most prominent of America’s progressive evangelicals, began negotiations on Clinton’s behalf. The Carter-led talks in Haiti avoided a war but drew ridicule from many conservatives and not a few liberals who claimed that the former President, while saving lives, had let moral issues dominate the national interest, undercutting Clinton’s strong-arm policies.

Wallis has also been accused of naively choosing the human over the political. I asked him whether tipping the balance in such a direction doesn’t make the U.S. government appear weak and indecisive.

“Governments are fully capable of looking after their own interests. The balance is always tipped in their favor. Governments are survivors. Politicians are survivors. It’s the people who do the dying--usually to pay for the sins of the politicians--and they need all the advocacy they can get,” he said to me.

The U.S. soldiers who finally landed on Haiti, while under orders to shoot if necessary, represented less a conquering force than a band of guidance counselors and security guards--which was, I realized, a not unreasonable variation of the solution Wallis had put forward.

And as it turned out, in Haiti at least, Carter and Wallis--not to mention Bill Clinton--would be redeemed.

On the Sunday evening before Wallis was to depart on his book tour, the Sojourners congregation gathered for services, sitting on folding chairs in the living room of the old crackhouse. On a cloth-covered table there was a loaf of bread and a pitcher of grape juice, and on the wall a peace-dove banner. For most of a month, Wallis had been soliciting money.

“We are a family, and we’ve all been worried about what’s going to happen to us,” he said in his preacher’s voice, sans stutter, rocking on his toes at a wooden lectern. “We’ve raised $40,000 so far, but I’m exhausted at the thought of all we have to raise to keep our little ministry going.”

Outside, somewhere in the corridor, a woman screamed. Wallis went on. “And, I will tell you truthfully, I am also exhausted from all the anger and violence and political polarization we see in Washington every day. I can feel the flood rising, and I wonder, can we stop it?”

In the weeks since we had met, Wallis seemed to have aged noticeably. Some of his hollow look was from lack of sleep, but a lot of it was the strain of holding together his host of quixotic endeavors. Wallis might be devoid of cynicism, I had come to realize, but he is not someone untouched by life.

After the services I asked him what he planned to do next. “Buy a couple pairs of socks and a toothbrush and get my weary butt ready for this book tour. I can raise money from the road if I have to,” he said, flashing a strangely upbeat smile.

What, after all this time, keeps him going? “That’s a good question,” he said. “I know many people admire the work I do, but most of them think I’m crazy. All I can tell you is I’m doing the work I’ve always wanted to do. Call it the Lord’s work, call it anything you like. For me, that’s enough.”