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Jim Wallis was a long-haired student activist in the early 1970s who read Marx, marched against the Vietnam War and had little use for evangelical Christianity. But one day he conducted an unusual theological experiment that would change his life.

Wallis and several friends wanted to know how many scriptures in the Bible dealt with issues such as poverty, oppression and justice. So they took a pair of scissors and cut out every biblical verse mentioning the poor.

“When we were done, all of those verses had fallen to the floor — about two thousand verses in total,” Wallis recalled. “We were left with a Bible full of holes.”

Wallis would devote his life to championing those discarded scriptures. He is now one of the most eloquent defenders of a brand of evangelical Christianity that insists that faith is not entirely a private matter — that the church should address racism and public policy issues that affect the poor.