"God's Politics"?

Lately, Jim Wallis and his book "God's Politics" have been getting a lot of attention. He was on John Stewart last week, he's been making the rounds on all the Air America shows, he's been on lots of TV shows, etc. Basically, he's an evangelical Christian arguing that Christianity demands progressive, not conservative, politics. A nice idea, and one that's certainly more in line with my understanding of the Bible from back when I used to read it, and it certainly provides a needed counter-weight to the hegemony of the Christian Right in this country, but I'm still uneasy about a "Christian Left." Surely, throughout history, Christianity has served as a source of organization and inspiration for Left and Right alike, but, while I admit I haven't actually read Wallis' book, Katha Pollitt identifies several of the reasons I'm uneasy about this stuff in the book. For example:

...throughout God's Politics: "religion" and "faith" are usually synonyms for Christianity, and Christianity mostly means evangelical Protestantism. Evangelicals get most of the credit for everything good in US history, from women's suffrage to the civil rights movement. This would surprise skeptics like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who spent her life battling scriptural arguments for male supremacy, and the secular Jews and leftists who made up so much of the civil rights movement's white base. And what about the opponents of women's rights and racial integration? Weren't a lot of them evangelicals too? At times Wallis seems to be in a kind of denial: If it's wrong, it isn't truly evangelical, therefore evangelicalism is purely good. Today's robust evangelical right is the fault of--wait for it--"secular fundamentalists"! Blame it on the ACLU.

Wallis's God calls on Christians to fight racism, poverty, war and violence--what's wrong with mustering support for these worthy goals by presenting them in the language spoken by so many Americans? The trouble is, the other side does that too. You can find anything you want in the Bible--well, almost anything. Thus, the more insistently people bring Christianity into politics, the more political argument becomes a matter of Christian hermeneutics.