Now that his bid for the presidency has ended, John Edwards will face what cynics might call the ultimate credibility test. In our culture, successful politicians are rarely successful social movement leaders. The American public suspects that politicians lie to get elected, but requires their social movement leaders to be selflessly driven by their passion. By dropping out of the presidential race, Edwards has a chance to become a social movement leader instead of a politician. What he does with this chance is critical—he is needed now more than ever.

That Edwards could have the credibility to be a social movement leader wasn’t always a given. There was a time about a year ago when the top chatter of the D.C. gossip circuit was about whether Edwards was sincere in his anti-poverty bid for the presidency. Formerly a centrist and Democratic Leadership Council star who ran in the Southern Democratic tradition of Bill Clinton, Edwards seemed to have reinvented himself overnight as a progressive and populist crusader—running against both the specific policies and the style of politics he had championed only a few years earlier.

I heard from a person on the governing committee of his Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity at UNC Chapel Hill that they had a hard time evaluating his anti-poverty work—it seemed like an awful lot of him going around giving speeches while not much serious anti-poverty policy research was going on. If you look at the key anti-poverty planks in Edwards' 2008 presidential platform, it is true that precious few of them draw on research from his own policy center—lending credence to the claim that there was not much “there” there.

Another person I talked to, a personal friend of the Edwardses, pointed out that of all the things a former politician would opportunistically choose to do, giving speeches about poverty is the least suspect. Others become defense contractors, lobbyists, or CEO's—anti-poverty work is hardly the cynic's quickest way to wealth and fame or the most obvious path to building a campaign for the White House.

A third person, a student member of Opportunity Rocks, Edwards' youth outreach program, told me that he thought the whole thing was a sham. After an initial publicity blitz, the organization hollowed itself out from the inside, and there was nobody in the office to answer the phones. A person committed to doing serious work would not put together an organization like that, he told me.

Still another, a hard-bitten young politico, pointed out that when a terminal cancer patient says that she's dedicating the rest of her life to fighting poverty, calling that a ploy for elective office requires the most callous cynicism. This person couldn't fathom the idea that a dying woman—to say nothing of a woman with Elizabeth Edwards' integrity—would spend her days lying to boost some political career. What are political careers for, in the end, but to accomplish something worthwhile?

And there was Edwards himself—he was long on policy and short on rhetoric, something I had rarely seen in a politician before. To someone who had put at least a little time into trying to understand anti-poverty programs, what he said was well-considered and sensible, even when the best policies were not the best politics. While listening to him speak in April 2006, it was impossible not to get the sense that he actually cared about the stuff.

Over the course of 2006 and 2007, the cynicism waxed and waned. By the time of the first caucuses, almost all the young political activists I talked to had decided that he was a candidate with integrity and that his policies were serious. Whether or not they supported him for the presidency, they applauded his strong positions on labor, healthcare, debt and credit, education, corporate governance, and on being willing to call greed what it is.

While the other candidates were wishy-washy about wealth, Edwards has been the loudest voice challenging our nation to look in the mirror and think about what our distribution of resources says about our souls. There's nothing wrong with a backyard pool, but it is mean-spirited and selfish of our nation to value flashy cars or expensive clothing over education, food, and shelter for poor children. It is disgusting to see our nation saying it can't afford to expand children's health insurance, given some of the other things we do believe we can afford, like mansions and private jets.

Our culture, one might say, is filled with a palpable and desperate spiritual hunger. We struggle to find meaning in materialism, in war, in the idiocies of celebrities, or the celebrity of idiocies, i.e., reality TV. The time is ripe for another of America's great religious revivals, but our generation's revival seems to have fallen from the tree already rotten, corrupted with political power and wealth—a victim of what it was supposed to heal. What we need is honest, spiritual leaders who can call us back to our moral principles—leaders exactly like John Edwards.

Ironically, the end of his presidential bid may have made Edwards more relevant than ever. Jimmy Carter the statesman is far more respected than Jimmy Carter the president, and Al Gore the advocate has won hearts and minds in ways Al Gore the candidate couldn’t even dream of. Martin Luther King and Ralph Nader did things no candidate could ever have done for our nation's soul—Nader's real legacy, in fact, is almost forgotten because of the credibility he lost as a candidate. Robert Kennedy was perhaps the most recent candidate to run a serious presidential campaign rooted in spiritual radicalism. Those who were close to him said that during his last campaign he had a light in his eyes as though he knew how it would end but knew he had to do it anyway. (I am glad this one did not end that way.)

What will John Edwards do next? The decision to run for president is one of the most important a person can ever make, but the decision to keep fighting for justice even after dropping out of a presidential election shows more about a person’s character. With the election no longer a factor, Edwards is better positioned than ever to lead a social movement that will heal our culture—a movement that will surely resonate in the White House as well as in the ghosted mill towns of South Carolina where, I have heard, John Edwards' father once worked.

Kai Stinchcombe is a political science Ph.D. student at Stanford University. He is the founder of the Roosevelt Institution.