Late last week, The Great Awakening book tour brought me to Seattle, Washington. On the media circuit we had a day packed with four back-to-back radio interviews. Almost more interesting than the interviews themselves was the diversity of listening audiences represented by each station.

Interviews ranged from a progressive Seattle rock station (the first to break the news of Kurt Cobain's death back in 1994), to moderate NPR, to conservative talk-show host Michael Medved, to Salem Christian radio. The appearances on these shows has become archetypal of the ways we are reaching people across the spectrum—all the way from left-wing Air America (the previous day in Portland), to NPR, to centrist AM talk radio, to right-wing talk radio, to conservative Christian stations.

I ended the day with Thor Tolo [you can download the mp3], a conservative evangelical radio talk-show host, and had perhaps one of the most thoughtful interviews I've ever engaged in on a Salem radio station—and one of the most interesting of the book tour so far.

When our discussion turned to the subject of poverty, I brought up how all too often our lack of relationship with the poor is a deeper problem than our ideological debates about how to solve poverty – how very few of us, including liberal Democrats, including Christians, have real relationships with the poor.

As a committed Christian and committed conservative, Thor believes it's primarily the church's responsibility to address poverty—not the government's. Even so, he admitted, "I feel very convicted by what you just said," and admitted his lack of relationship with poor people, even though he had concerns about government helping to promote a cycle of dependency.

I said we need a grand alliance between conservatives and liberals on the issue, an alliance that calls on liberals to address family breakdown, out-of-wedlock births, and other dimensions of poverty involving personal responsibility, and for conservatives to champion strategic investments in housing, health care, and education—with clear outcomes and results.

But I added, "When did Jesus ever call his followers to serve only the deserving poor?"

Smiling, he conceded the point. It's hard to disagree with Jesus.

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Here's some of Krista Tippet's introduction to her interview with Jim:

I've resisted interviewing Wallis as he's risen to a new kind of fame, in part because he has had so much exposure in major media - from Hardball to Fresh Air. But now I've come to see in Jim Wallis' rise not just a story of an individual activist becoming a leader, but of the world changing around us. ... There is plentiful evidence that younger people, including younger evangelical Christians, share Jim Wallis's concern for the poor and the dispossessed, for inequities in global economy and ecology. Half of his audiences across the country these days, as he tells it, are under 30. He does not claim to represent a majority of American evangelicals in his views and positions, but he does draw packed crowds of young evangelicals at Christian colleges. He urges them to emulate the 19th-century evangelicals who inspire him, some of whom founded today's Christian colleges — abolitionists and social reformers who took their Bibles and their God with the utmost seriousness.

After the rise of the Religious Right in the early 1980s, and again after the 2000 and 2004 elections, some prophesied that the U.S. was headed for "theocracy" — a takeover by conservative religious ruling elites. What is happening instead is what Time magazine has called the leveling of "the praying field." Conservative Christianity hasn't disappeared, but it is increasingly met, and measured, by progressive and liberal religious voices in politics and beyond.

There are also conservative evangelicals with a broadened political and social agenda and a willingness to form coalitions with diverse religious and secular others to combat urgent human crises.

Last week Jim was on The Tavis Smiley Show and talked about how the changing political landscape will affect the upcoming '08 election. Jim and Ken Blackwell, former Ohio secretary of state, debated and discussed both the impact of "value voters" on the election and what those values entail.

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Jim Wallis on the BBC Radio program "Reporting Religion," talking on July 30 about faith, politics, and Gordon Brown.

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