Jim Wallis’s On God’s Side comes in two parts. In the first, he argues that biblical Christianity involves not only the personal, individual standing of the Christian before God and the individual’s relationship with Christ, but also a deeply communal element that inspires genuine concern for one’s neighbors. In the second, he fleshes out how these sometimes-competing concerns ought to influence Christian political thought and engagement. Wallis’s inspiration for the title of the book is a quote from Abraham Lincoln—“My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side”—and he uses this second half of his book to explore exactly what being “on God’s side” would entail, tackling several prominent and hotly debated issues ranging from the structure of the American political system to specific policy issues.

Wallis opens his political discussion by focusing on some of the structural elements of American electoral politics, beginning with political discourse. He argues that our political dialogue has become fundamentally flawed, concerned more with blame than honest engagement with ideas. In response, he emphasizes the need for compromise between conservative and liberal political views in order to raise the level of political debate.  For Wallis, both conservatives and liberals have important contributions to make to political discourse that align with the dual biblical notions of personal and social responsibility that he introduced earlier. The traditionally conservative view of family values, for example, helps to encourage personal accountability, while taking a more traditionally liberal view of the state aligns more with the Christian’s responsibility to promote social welfare.

Wallis believes that compromise between these two political groups is the best way to capture the fullness of a “Christian” politics, and that it will also open eyes to the important contributions that various political groups have to make to our larger political discussions. What remains unclear during this discussion, however, is exactly why Christians ought to support precisely this set of compromises and why this type of reasoning ought to carry any weight at all in the broader, pluralistic political dialogue. Wallis appeals to conservatives and liberals generally to be more open-minded in political dialogue, encouraging both sides to borrow the “best big idea” of each view. But the position that personal and social responsibility ought to play equal parts in our political reasoning is just as substantive, normative, and contestable a claim as saying that either one of those ought to take precedence over the other.