Review #005: "The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience"

Ron Sider is a big name in certain circles, due largely to his book Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, first published in 1978.  I have to admit that I've had that one on my "to-read" shelf for a year or so and haven't gotten around to it yet.  I have read his 2005 work The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, though, and found it both bracing and very frustrating.

Sider begins by restating many of the statistics that we've all heard over the last few years.  Members of evangelical churches, we know, sin at similar -- and sometimes higher -- rates than the general population.  Those who profess belief in Christ and claim to follow him do the same bad things as everyone else.  In every area, from honesty to sexual morality to generosity, evangelicals are as bad as or worse than everyone else.

Sider then looks at why this is, and what can be done about it.  He rightly and forcefully lambasts churches for abandoning the preaching of sin and punishment.  He decries the way in which "seeker-sensitivity" has presented the Gospel as personal fulfillment.  He calls for greater engagement with the world, as opposed to retreating into our Christian ghettos.

All of this is good and needs to be said.  At the same time, though, Sider is infuriatingly vague as to what "engagement" should look like.  He calls Christians to push for social change as well as individual salvation, but never specifies what he means by "social change".  (For that matter, I've met few professing Christians who cared much about the individual salvation of anyone outside their immediate circles.)

Another area of concern is his definition of generosity.  He seems to equate it largely with tithing, pointing out that if every Christian gave ten percent of his income, the additional billions of dollars would be sufficient to wipe out poverty entirely.  There are a few problems with this approach, though.

The first is that generosity is more than tithing.  My own family gives to support native missionaries in India, as well as other ministries and charities.  None of this is considered part of our "tithe", though, because it doesn't go to our local church.  The second is that more income doesn't translate directly into more outgo; American evangelical congregations are notorious for spending on themselves rather than on meeting needs elsewhere.

The third is that Sider appears to have bought into the notion that spending money on a problem will solve the problem.  It's well-known that a large percentage of the aid given to the world's poor every year is wasted, stolen, or foolishly spent.  Doubling the aid sent to, say, the DR Congo won't change the fact that there are many factions there more than willing to take that money or food or medicine for themselves.  Change can't be bought into a nation; it happens at the individual level, a truth that Sider seems to disparage at several points.

In conclusion, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience is a short, useful, but ultimately limited look at a dire problem of our own making.  While I had several points of concern, the main thesis is a sound one:  we who claim to follow Christ need to start following him, or admit our hypocrisy and stop claiming to be his.