I'm Christa Tippett.

Today, the first in a two-part series on a new generation of evangelical leadership.

We begin with Jim Wallace, a progressive evangelical activist who is advising presidential candidates and world leaders in what he calls the post-religious right era.

There was always a more progressive evangelical spirit. It was a growing kind of phenomenon.

This new generation cares much more about the 30,000 children who died today globally because of totally unnecessary poverty and preventable disease.

Cares more about the 3,000 kids than they do about gay marriage amendments in Ohio. They really do.

This is speaking of faith. Stay with us.

I'm Christa Tippett. Evangelical Christianity has no ultimate hierarchy, but it does have guiding figures in every generation.

This week and next, we speak with a few who are changing imaginations within and beyond evangelical Christianity about the priorities of this faith of over a quarter of the U.S. population.

We begin with Jim Wallace, a progressive evangelical activist who is bringing his vision of religion and politics to a new generation of world leaders.

He is determined to put poverty at the top of America's moral values agenda.

From American public media, this is speaking of faith, public radio's conversation about religion, meaning, ethics and ideas.

Today, the new evangelical leaders.

The association of evangelical Christianity with conservative politics is a relatively recent phenomenon.

It was only in the early 20th century that biblically conservative Christians, who became known as evangelicals, retreated from a 19th century tradition of socially and politically engaged faith.

The religious ride of the 1980s marked their reemergence into the public sphere.

But there has always been an active strain of evangelicalism focused on social justice.

Jim Wallace has been in the vanguard of this for three decades.

And after the 2004 election, many Americans, evangelicals among them, reacted against what seemed a Republican appropriation of faith and a democratic neglect of it.

Jim Wallace's book, God's Politics, why the right gets it wrong and the left doesn't get it, dovetailed with this new national discontent.

The book became a runaway bestseller and he became a player in mainstream political culture.

He has faith.

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