Sider's Socio-Christianity
DIIULIO, JOHN J. Jr.
SlDERS SOCIO-CHRISTIANITY A Challenge from the Religious Left By John J. Dilulio Jr. Some months ago, I got into a debate with a friend about the religious Right. My friend, a religious man,...
...Only two things are certain...
...This year, he has played a leading role in getting liberal evangelicals mobilized to support school vouchers...
...rights-industry counterparts, and a distressing number of Catholic churches and charities are little better than self-serving supplicants for Caesar's coin...
...He teaches at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania and is the founding president of the Philadelphia-based Evangelicals for Social Action, an organization that works in partnership with other Christian social-service organizations to provide loans and other assistance all over the world...
...My friend had no answer, but I now do: Ronald J. Sider...
...In his book of virtues, such behavior is not merely immoral, it is "abominable to our God": Rich Christians risk Hell...
...Sider, 58, is the author of the religious Left's anti-poverty bible, Rich Christians In An Age of Hunger...
...For example, the Christian Coalition's Samaritan Project promises to raise $10 million to help 1,000 inner-city churches assist the urban poor...
...As I read Rich Christians, I counted no fewer than 325 distinct references to Scripture (about one per page) in passages such as, "Like the rich Corinthian Christians who feasted without sharing with the hungry members of the church (I Corinthians 11:20-29), we have failed to comprehend the concept that the church worldwide is one body...
...Maybe so, but the text is punctuated by wide-of-the-mark uses of data on poverty rates and demographic trends, and by adjectives that exaggerate conditions that need no exaggerating (for example, the 1.3 billion people living in poverty worldwide become 1.3 billion people in "absolute" or "desperate" poverty...
...The just-released and much-revised 20th-anniversary edition opens with a chapter on global poverty ("A Billion Hungry Neighbors") and ends with practical suggestions for alleviating poverty at home and abroad ("Watching Over One Another in Love...
...Likewise, he makes a mantra of certain summary statistics...
...A few pages into the book, however, it is painfully clear that he was not also trained as a social scientist or policy analyst...
...Citing both the Old Testament and the New, Sider searingly warns that more and more Christians are acting as if the "size of one's salary (and house)" are "more important than God, neighbor, and the creation...
...In fact, more and more people value making money more than marriage, parenting, or even honesty...
...True, but in many less-developed nations, a buck can buy you plenty of daily bread...
...Not good enough, argues Sider, least of all for self-professed Christians who participate in such blessed-are-my-dividends behavior...
...His problem, he said, was that many Christian conservatives "talk Jesus but don't walk Jesus" on the poor...
...I've learned more about economics," he proclaims in his new preface...
...A Canadian by birth, Sider and his wife, Arbutus, shop at thrift stores and live with their daughter in a tiny row house in a nearly all-black inner-city neighborhood, one of Philadelphia's poorest...
...In a recent interview published in the "alternative evangelical" magazine Prism, Sider explained that he has joined "with friends like these" in order to further "a political realignment where theologically orthodox Christian voices from a wide variety of political and ethnic backgrounds together endorse an agenda that is pro-life and pro-poor, pro-family and pro-racial justice...
...After reading the book, I visited the Siders in their home and spoke to many people who know them well...
...And while proclaiming his newfound faith that the spread of market-oriented economies has led to dramatic drops in poverty in Asia and elsewhere, he innocently parrots economically illiterate left-wing lessons about poverty, income inequality, and race in the United States as if they were the gospel truth...
...He warns rich Christians that the Bible condemns not only "individual sinful acts" but participation in "evil social structures" that seduce Christian consumers into guilt-free economic gluttony and Christian producers into denying the sacred humanity of customers (by manipulating them for profits) and workers (by treating them as purely expendable...
...Before drafting Rich Christians in the mid-1970s, Sider received a Ph.D...
...My friend, a religious man, accepted the right of religious people to court political influence...
...Charles Col-son's Prison Fellowship Ministry saves or rehabilitates countless hardcore criminals...
...The message of Rich Christians has a credible messenger: The Siders practice what the book preaches, including the give-most-in-come-to-the-poor "graduated tithe" system outlined in Chapter 9 ("Toward a Simpler Lifestyle...
...Over the years, Rich Christians has quietly sold more than 350,000 copies...
...He wants us to be forgiven...
...All Sider's royalties have gone, and will continue to go, to charity...
...And last year, he added his voice to those of his newfound Christian-conservative friends in championing the charitable-choice provision of the 1996 welfare-reform bill, which enables religious organizations to partner with government in the delivery of social services without having to divest themselves of their religious identities...
...from Yale and was trained as a theologian and scholar of religious history...
...teaches eighth-grade American government classes in an inner-city Philadelphia Catholic school...
...And so on...
...The other is that, having read Rich Christians and gotten to know Sider, I'm having a miserable time acting on my desire to dump my old but reliable compact car for a new, more expensive model...
...Fortunately, none of Sider's empirical sins of omission saps the strength of his ethical edicts and Biblical interpretations...
...Sider achieved wider visibility earlier this year when he signed a joint public statement with Chuck Colson and other prominent Christian conservatives calling for greater constitutional acceptance of the legitimacy of active religious belief in public life...
...While living in material poverty is not itself a Biblical ideal, he stresses, giving freely of oneself and sharing one's material resources with the poor is a genuine Christian ideal...
...Yes, I agreed, but don't lump pray-for-the-poor conservatives with devil-take-the-hindmost libertarians...
...The $20 million Michael Jordan reportedly received in 1992 for promoting Nike shoes," he writes, "exceeded the entire annual payroll of the Indonesian factories that made them ...In response, Nike claims their [Indonesian] workers earn 50 cents an hour (twice the country's minimum wage) as well as free meals and health care...
...What is most challenging about Rich Christians is that the title refers not only to Christian corporate moguls, celebrities with seven-figure salaries, and those with vast inherited wealth...
...One is that, if it does take shape, Sider will be an indispensable voice and witness for the religious Left...
...I reassure myself with a passage from Sider's book: "God does not want us to be or feel guilty...
...It refers equally to the Siders themselves, and to the two-earner, two-car, $100,000-a-year Christian couple in the suburbs, and to those who have been "brainwashed to believe that bigger houses, more prosperous businesses, and more sophisticated gadgets are the way to joy and fulfillment...
...For instance, over a billion people "live on less than one dollar a day...
...Running through each chapter is this unabashed message: "God wants every person, or family, to have equality of economic opportunity at least to the point of having access to necessary resources (land, money, education) to be able to earn a decent living and participate as dignified members of their community . . . The Bible clearly and repeatedly teaches that God is at work in history exalting the poor and casting down the rich who got that way by oppressing or neglecting the poor...
...A true Christian's war on poverty would do more to imitate the example of Mother Teresa than to increase the budget of Donna Sha-lala...
...Whether any such novel religious "political realignment" will take shape, and on what terms, remains to be seen...
...Besides, I continued, when it comes to helping the poor, mainstream (that is, liberal) white Protestant churches, their black civilContributing editor John J. Dilulio Jr...
...So, pluck the anti-poverty beam from the eye of the religious Right, but first list leaders of the religious Left who have actually "talked and walked Jesus" on the poor...
...In print (but not, I was relieved to discover, in person), Sider is hard on card-carrying Christians who shrug off Biblical teachings about property, possessions, and, as Sider calls it, "economic fellowship...
...Despite his steadfast refusal to bend the Bible on abortion and homosexuals, Sider has been a revered figure in the world of radical-progressive evangelical politics ever since his book appeared in 1977...
Vol. 3 • November 1997 • No. 8
