Yet we have seen many moments in recent history when the churches emerged as the leading voice of political conscience. There were key times in the South African struggle against apartheid when churches became the critical public voice for political challenge and change. Leaders like Desmond Tutu, Alan Boesak, and Frank Chikane served as church and public figures. Who can forget the role of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador during the 1980s, church leaders in the Philippines during the revolution that ousted dictator Ferdinand Marcos, or the critical opposition to communist rule in Poland? In many other oppressive circumstances, churches and church leaders have risen to the call to prophetic public leadership.

But even in democracies, churches have responded to that same prophetic vocation. In New Zealand during the 1990s, when conservative forces ripped that society's long- standing social safety net to pieces, it was the churches in partnership with the indigenous Maori people who led marches, ignited public protest, and emboldened a wobbly Labor party to recapture the government and restore key social programs. During the Thatcher years in Britain, it was church leadership that reminded the nation of its responsibilities to impoverished urban communities, to the ethics of the common good over private gain, and to peace. And, in the United States, black churches under the leadership of Baptist ministers like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., provided the moral foundation and social infrastructure for a powerful civil rights movement that reminded the nation of its expressed ideals and changed us forever.

	Chancellor Gordon Brown once told me that he believed the Jubilee debt cancellation campaign was the most important movement in Britain since William Wilberforce and the anti-slavery crusade (another faith-inspired social revival, and one led by conservative Christians).

Now a U.K.-U.S. trans-Atlantic church alliance is emerging in response to the urgent moral call to dramatically reduce global poverty. And churches in the U.S. and the U.K. are telling the Bush and Blair governments that such a moral and political initiative aimed at the root causes of global injustice will enable the campaign against terrorism to succeed far better than continuing a policy of endless wars.

We must transform our religion and our politics, which acknowledges that the old ways don’t work. But we need more than critique. We must ask what’s wrong, but also what the answers are. At its heart, we must offer a challenge to hope, which is the only real path to change.

Jim Wallis is convener of Call to Renewal, and editor and executive director of Sojourners.