JIM WALLIS & ABORTION - An evangelical? Crisis solution?

I was reading Marcus Brown's blog the gimmick and came upon two common but still erroneous beliefs -

First, that Jim Wallis is an "evangelical" and, second, that "the key to the abortion issue is one of preventing crisis pregnancies."

Both comments are from Brown's blog post of February 11, 2005. Brown's blog included no mechanism to contact him for comment. My apologies if I've misunderstood him.

Evangelical?

Wallis is anything but an evangelical, even in the loosest sense. Saying so is tantamount to saying lumping the United Methodists in with Southern Baptists and claiming they're all one big happy evangelical family. Doing this is why many on the outside have a hard time understanding what a real evangelical is.

Like D. L. Moody said, "You can sit in a garage all day going putt-putt-putt, but it won't make you an automobile." [my paraphrase; heck, I'm not even sure Moody is the one who said it.] The point is, Wallis and Sojourner can Good News-Good News all day long but it won't make them evangelicals.

Any Christian who has "progressive" and "leftist" used as adjectives to modify their brand of Christianity is no evangelical in my books, and the Good News they peddle is not that of the Bible. Social gospel maybe, but another gospel all the same.

Abortion?

In 1999, 45 percent of women who had abortions in the U.S. had at least one previous abortion. This means that nearly half of all abortions were not "crisis prenancies."

Even if the data can be adjusted for certain other factors, it would still indicate "the abortion issue" could be impacted most quickly and immediately if it were not used for birth-control. [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Abortion Surveillance Report - 1999, November 29, 2002, Table 13, page 27, accessed on June 4, 2003.]