A Failure of Nerve

At a time when evangelical leaders were slobbering over Richard Nixon, Ronald Sider’s voice was tonic—especially for a college student still puzzling over how a tradition once identified with social justice could have negotiated such a radical right turn. By the time Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger appeared in 1978, Sider had emerged as one of my evangelical heroes. Here was a man who had organized Evangelicals for McGovern in 1972 (whose entire caucus, I suspect, could be tallied on two hands), and who had been the guiding force behind the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern the ensuing year.

In light of the rise and the eventual dominance of the Religious Right later that same decade, the sentiments expressed in the Chicago Declaration seem quaint now. But it was a remarkable statement. “We deplore the historic involvement of the church in America with racism,” the declaration read, adding that evangelicals must “challenge the misplaced trust of the nation in economic and military might.” At the instigation of Nancy Hardesty, then an English professor at my Christian college, the Chicago Declaration included a passage that, harking back to the rich tradition of evangelical feminism in the 19th century, rebuked evangelicals for having “encouraged men to prideful domination and women to irresponsible passivity” and called “both men and women to mutual submission and active discipleship.”

Following the Chicago Declaration, Sider went on to form Evangelicals for Social Action and to write a number of books (including Rich Christians), which generally fall under the rubric of evangelical social ethics. His latest contribution is The Scandal of Evangelical Politics: Why Are Christians Missing the Chance to Really Change the World?—a book that, on the whole, is as disappointing as Rich Christians was bracing.

Sider notes that the “absence of any widely accepted, systematic evangelical reflection on politics leads to contradiction, confusion, ineffectiveness, even biblical unfaithfulness, in our political work.” Reviewing the political ideologies of various Christian thinkers through the centuries, from Augustine and Aquinas to Martin Luther, John Calvin, and the Anabaptists, Sider makes the point, echoing Luther, that the primary function of the state is the restraint of evil so that the gospel can flourish. Sider also considers, and finds wanting, the ideas of John Rawls, though I wish he had spent some time—any time at all!—on Jeffrey Stout, especially his Democracy and Tradition.

All of this is useful, and the author renders his thoughts cogently and persuasively. But as Sider moves from what he calls a “solid framework” to an “evangelical political philosophy,” he suffers a disheartening—and uncharacteristic—failure of nerve.

Sider speaks eloquently about the possibilities of peacemaking and invokes the “just war” tradition, but he neglects to mention that the invasion of Iraq meets few or any of these criteria. He rails against no-fault divorce, which is a defensible argument, though it ignores the fact that vindictive spouses can “game” the system to punish entire families with protracted divorce proceedings. He asserts that a “strong evangelical support for global human rights (especially religious freedom) led to what some have called a new evangelical ‘internationalism,’ ” but he fails to note the current “evangelical” president’s demonstrated disregard for human rights.

On homosexuality, Sider unblinkingly employs the Religious Right’s preferred incendiary term, “gay lifestyle,” implying that sexual orientation is simply a matter of volition. (As a gay friend of mine once asked, incredulously: “Why would anyone choose to be gay?”) On the separation of church and state, Sider dithers before finally lending his endorsement to the disestablishment clause of the First Amendment. But he misses his best arguments: Religion has flourished here in the United States as nowhere else precisely because the government—for the most part, at least—has stayed out of the religion business, and the collusion between church and state ultimately trivializes the faith. Sider can’t bring himself to take a position on taxpayer-supported vouchers for religious schools, however, and at times his ducking and weaving borders on comical. What about “In God We Trust” emblazoned on our currency, government-supported chaplains, or references to the Deity in the pledge of allegiance? “I doubt that either retaining or abandoning these practices would be very significant,” Sider concludes, “although the debates will undoubtedly continue.”

Sider does make some good points. He argues that the importance once ascribed to the holding of property should be reconfigured as equal access to education; knowledge, he writes, “is the primary source of wealth creation.” He also warns, in a distant echo of the Chicago Declaration, that “Christians must be extremely vigilant against the ongoing temptations of idolatrous nationalism.”

By the time I finished reading The Scandal of Evangelical Politics, however, I was scratching my head. Where’s the scandal? Sider’s criticisms are so measured and his proposals so tepid that the book reads more like an endorsement of evangelical political behavior over the last several decades than a critique. What happened to the author of Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, who boldly summoned us to heed Jesus’ injunctions to care for “the least of these”? Surely, those of us who profess allegiance to the scandal of the gospel cannot simply accede to the status quo or the tired playbook coming out of Colorado Springs.

So what is the scandal of evangelical politics? The persistence of hunger in a land of plenty? The fundamental contradiction between pressing for “intelligent design” in public school curricula and utter indifference to the handiwork of the Intelligent Designer? The failure to purge misogynists and white supremacists from the highest echelons of evangelical leadership? The failure of evangelicals to rise up in collective moral outrage over the present administration’s persistent and systematic use of torture?

I returned to Sider’s preface in search of a scandal. The best that I could determine was that evangelicals had failed to “move from a commitment to Jesus Christ and biblical authority to concrete political decisions that lead us to support or oppose specific laws and candidates.” Fair enough, though it’s not clear how the book helps us address that scandal.

What made me even more uneasy was the triumphalism that tinges the conclusion to Sider’s preface. “All around the world,” he writes, “evangelical thinkers and politicians are wrestling at a deeper level with how to act politically in faithfulness to Christ.” And the payoff? “If even a modest fraction of that rapidly growing number of 500 million evangelicals and Pentecostals would develop a commonly embraced, biblically grounded framework for doing politics, they would change the world.”

Change the world by “doing politics”? That’s a remarkable statement, especially from someone who hails from the Anabaptist tradition. Anabaptists understand better than most Jesus’ renunciation of earthly power and his declaration that his kingdom was not of this world. The cautionary lesson from the sorry saga of the Religious Right lies not in the movement’s political ineptitude, egregious as that has been, but in its devaluing of the gospel in the quest for political influence. The New Testament suggests that religion always functions best from the margins of society and not in the councils of power—a principle strongly reinforced by an overview of American history. Whenever people of faith begin grasping after power, they lose their prophetic voice. This was no less true of mainline Protestantism in the 1950s, tethered as it was to white, middle-class Eisenhower suburbanism, than it has been of the Religious Right in the decades surrounding the turn of the 21st century.

Am I arguing that people of faith should not make their voices heard in the arena of public discourse? On the contrary: I believe that public discourse would be impoverished without those voices. But we should never delude ourselves into thinking that “doing politics,” to use Sider’s phrase, represents the highest or the best or even a proximate expression of our prophetic mission. A prophet always stands at the margins, calling the powerful to account. Misplaced allegiance to political power represents a form of idolatry, and the failure of evangelicals generally and the Religious Right in particular to call politicians to account, especially those politicians they propelled into office, is the stuff of, well, scandal.

In a very real sense, albeit in a backhanded way, The Scandal of Evangelical Politics attests to the frightful potency of the Religious Right. The fact that one of our clearest, most prophetic voices has been reduced to equivocation may not rise to the level of scandal. But it is a tragedy.

Randall Balmer, an Episcopal priest, is professor of American religious history at Barnard College, Columbia University, and a visiting professor at Yale Divinity School. He is the author most recently of God in the White House: A History: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush (HarperOne).