Today's Chicago Tribune story on a group protesting Republican Congressional efforts to curb social spending identifies Rev. Jim Wallis as a "Christian activist." The article reports he is a leader of "a Christian social justice group" and speaks of "Wallis and other progressive religious leaders."
It would be more accurate to describe Wallis as an activist liberal Democrat. He's long been a force within the Democratic party and, as noted in the Weekly Standard, has a " 35-year history of effectively pacifist, anti-capitalist, pro-socialist positions. With the exception of abortion and family values, the political issues that animate him today are the direct descendants of those that launched him into a career of activism back in his student days, when he and his friends were being tear-gassed protesting U.S. involvement in Vietnam, in the heyday of the New Left."
Yet the Chicago Tribune article doesn't even include the word "liberal." The opposite of conservative no longer is liberal, apparently. It's "progressive."
