Speakers Warn Against “Entrenched” Positions of “Conservative White Men” at Evangelical Conference

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David Gushee, Evangelicals, Evangelicals for Social Action, IRD Blog, Kristin Rudolph, Lisa Sharon Harper, Paul Alexander, Ron Sider, Shane Claiborne, Soong-Chan Rah

(Dr. Ron Sider, founder and president of ESA retired this year. Photo Credit: Surrender.org.au)

Kristin Rudolph (@Kristin_Rudolph)

Evangelicals for Social Action (ESA) gathered July 12 – 14 to celebrate the retirement of their founder and president, Dr. Ron Sider, the installation of two new co-presidents, and the organization’s 40 year anniversary at Eastern University near Philadelphia, PA. The conference, called “Follow. Jesus.” drew a few hundred attendees. Through plenary sessions and small group “conversations,” the conference explored Christian participation in social and political activist causes like economic inequality, immigration, climate change, abortion and racial division, among others. The focus of the main sessions was the history of evangelical activism and what the future may hold for American evangelicalism.

Dr. Michael Lindsay, president of Gordon College, reviewed the 40 year history of ESA, pointing to the 1973 Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern as a turning point for evangelicalism, and remarking the organization made Micah chapter 6 verse 8 “become embraced by a much wider constituency” of evangelicals. The verse, “And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God,” is indeed an oft cited one among Christian social activists.

ESA, Lindsay said, became a voice for what evangelicals were for, rather than what they were against after the social upheaval of the 1960s. Although evangelical organizations have long been involved in mercy ministries, justice work “really started 40 years ago. Sure justice has been around for a lot longer than that but … there hasn’t been organizational focus,” he claimed. But, Lindsay continued: “If you really want to make a difference you’ve got to think about institutions because those are the things that last.”

In a panel discussion on the future challenges for evangelicals, Dr. David Gushee, professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University complained “the culture wars will remain with us, but in a sense they should be over.” He observed “40 years of arguing over mainly sex related moral issues in public … continues long past when one might have hoped that those arguments would be so central … and the polarization doesn’t seem to me to be changing.” Gushee predicted “as conservative white men … feel increasingly threatened by pluralistic post-white America, the heels are gonna get dug in and the positions are going to remain entrenched.”

He continued: “America’s religion and politics in the next generation will be defined as a contest between those who fully integrate the emerging racial ethnic and national background diversity of our country and those who seek to resist it.” Gushee asserted “the future of Evangelical Christianity hinges on getting past the ‘White Male Club’ as the people in charge of everything.”

Similarly, Lisa Sharon Harper, Director of Mobilizing for Sojourners said evangelicals have become “divorced from people who are not like ourselves.” She also pointed out a “deep [scriptural] illiteracy in the church,” which renders believers vulnerable to “politicking people … [who] twist the Scripture and make it mean something it doesn’t mean.”

This illiteracy “bears itself out in everything,” most recently the immigration reform debate, Harper said. “If we don’t know the Scripture, then we don’t know that 92 times in the Old Testament the word ger [the Hebrew word for immigrant] is mentioned … We don’t know or understand the fact that Jesus himself was an immigrant,” she lamented. Harper concluded the “lack of Scripture and a lack of compassion, lack of relationship” with those different from ourselves, makes evangelicals “ripe to be used, to be wielded like a sword in the public square in the hands of people who are politicking in the name of evangelicalism.”

In the same panel, Rev. Dr. Soong-Chan Rah, professor of church growth and evangelism at North Park Theological Seminary pointed out the “multi-cultural, multi-ethnic reality of society and Christianity,” and that “declining American Christianity is not rooted in these minority communities it’s actually rooted in the decline of White Evangelicalism.” With this shift, he warned of “the danger of framing [justice and social action] in an American exceptionalism and triumphalism that doesn’t make sense anymore.”

Yet evangelicals should not abandon that label and claim a new name, because evangelicalism has “a history that needs to be confessed” over things like slavery and racism, and evangelicals should not “[excuse themselves] from that history,” Rah said. Instead, he suggested God may be “calling us to engage in a lament rather than in the triumphalistic, exceptionalistic approach to justice,” instead of the long standing “absence of lament in the liturgical traditions in America.”

In an evening plenary session, Dr. Mimi Haddad, president of Christians for Biblical Equality called for a “renewed commitment to gender justice in the Church and around the world.” She described how “ideas have consequences,” and theologies and philosophies that teach the inferiority of women result in tragedies like sex slavery, sex-selective abortion, and other abuses.

Later, explaining his work toward renewal in impoverished Philadelphia neighborhoods, activist Shane Claiborne said “It’s hard to believe you have a beautiful creator if everything you look at is ugly.” Pointing out the bad reputation Christians in America have, he joked “You can believe in the bodily resurrection and still be really mean to people.” Being a Christian is not just about “right believing” but “right living,” Claiborne said.

He continued: “Poverty is every person’s responsibility … things like good health care and good education are not just privileges for the few that can afford it but they should be available to everybody. That’s what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves.” He urged attendees to follow the advice Ron Sider had given to him years before during the founding of the Simple Way, and keep Jesus at the center of their justice work.

In a concluding worship service Sunday morning, Dr. Al Tizon and Dr. Paul Alexander were installed as the new co-presidents of ESA.
[Note: A report on Tizon’s and Alexander’s remarks is forthcoming]

Presbyterians Exploiting Lent for Gun Control

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gun control, Jeff Gissing, PCUSA, Presbyterian, Ron Sider

How does the church pursue the common good? (Photo credit: Internet Monk)

By Jeff Gissing (@jeffgissing)

One of the chief points of differentiation between theological ethics in the evangelical tradition and in the mainline tradition is the locus of authority. For evangelicals the chief—even the exclusive—source of authority is sola Scriptura (Scripture alone). Despite authoring numerous confessions and catechisms, all viewed as penultimate, Scripture remains the centerpiece of evangelical theological ethics. Beliefs and practices require some biblical warrant in order to be binding upon the conscience of the individual Christian.

In contrast, the mainline Protestant notion of authority developed quite differently. Mainline Protestants came to believe that an ethics derived exclusively from Scripture and experience would necessarily be blind to the insights of the social sciences—handmaidens of the Social Gospel experiment.^[1] In their so doing, they exhibited a blindness of their own since the late twentieth century has provided some rigorous critiques of the social sciences as a tool for theology and ethics.^[2]

This difference of authority is demonstrated quite clearly in the Lenten petition issued by the PC(USA)s Office of Public Witness. Most Christians understand that, as a penitential season, Lent provides us with the opportunity to examine our own hearts and to embrace new disciplines and practices that will enable us to follow our Lord more closely.

Lent is a solemn observance that enables Christians to prepare for Holy Week and our celebration of Christ’s sacrificial death and subsequent resurrection victorious over both death and sin.

This has traditionally involved prayer, repentance, charity, and some form of self-imposed discipline. In other words, we misunderstand Lent when it becomes an opportunity to inform someone else of their sin, to demand that they engage in some prescribed action we suggest, and then to baptize it with language of theology. This is precisely what this petition seeks to do when it states, “The resolution [Gun Values, Gospel Values adopted by the 291th General Assembly in 2010] calls both the church to support and the federal government to establish laws that will prevent and reduce gun violence.”

As I’ve noted elsewhere, the PC(USA) fits squarely in the mainline tradition, which places a priority on “social righteousness” above the other purposes of the Christian church. The petition acknowledges this and calls “people of faith” to “make earnest strides to challenge the pervasive culture of violence that permeates our social fabric.”

All Christian can surely agree that a culture of violence—in all its macabre manifestations—is something we ought to resist.

We all can agree, I would hope, that “bring[ing] peace to our homes, streets, and public venues” is something we can embrace. Where we will differ is in our understanding of how this “bring[ing] of peace,” this change to the “social fabric,” will take place. The petition envisions peace almost exclusively through the enactment of legislation limiting access to certain types of weapons and ammunition. There may be some wisdom in this, but is it really within the purview of the church to make decisions as to what legislation will be efficacious in reducing gun crime?

The answer to this question depends on your answer to another question: how is the church is to serve the “common good”? There may be many answers to this question. None of them is, however, that the church was created by God to advocate for specific policy solutions that will bring about a positive result through the state’s coercive power. So when the petition urges legislation that “reinstates the assault weapon ban that expired in 2004—banning all assault weapons and high capacity magazines”; “Require[s] universal background checks when purchasing any firearm”; and, “Make[s] gun trafficking a federal crime” it has overstepped its purpose and misconstrued its mission.

The church, in its theological reflection, frames the issue and defines what outcome is right in the eyes of God (with specific reference to Scripture). The church’s power, as the reformers contended, is simply ministerial and declarative. That is to say, the church can say what Scripture says to an issue. It may not dare step beyond what may, by good and necessary inference, be understood from the Scriptures.

In its Lenten petition the PC(USA) has succeeded in redefining Lent and misunderstanding the purpose of the church to the detriment of both. When it states that the PC(USA) has a “gun violence policy” the petition steps across the border into absurdity. After all, recent ecclesial court decisions and the new Form of Government have established that the church doesn’t really have a policy on whether the doctrine of the Trinity must be believed by Teaching Elders, but it does one on gun violence.

Christians are free to develop convictions regarding whether or not individuals ought to be free to own a certain type of firearm. They may even band together to form para-church entities that will argue their case. It is wrong for the church—as the church—to enter into this sort of specific policy debate, especially where Christians of good faith may differ.

Whatever one’s convictions on the issue of gun control, it will always be the case that the church exists, at least in its most significant form, in the context of a particular parish rather than in some denominational agency or governing body. The Office of Public Witness insists that this petition will “[call] for common-sense federal measures to reduce gun violence,” and states that it “is one small piece of a larger strategy to address the culture of violence that pervades our nation.” Perhaps. What is less debatable is whether anyone, let alone congress, will be watching when this interfaith coalition delivers its petition to congress in Eastertide.

Forming Christians in the virtues—by Word and sacrament—is one of the chief tasks of the parish. The other is carrying the Good News into its community. This doesn’t include “preach[ing] sermons, teach[ing] bible studies, and becom[ing] involved in efforts to change our culture of gun violence.” These twin tasks will enable Christians to live in a way that contributes to the common good. And to the extent that a denomination loses sight of serving this end, it ceases to be a faithful church and has become something else altogether.

 

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^[1] Max L. Stackhouse and Raymond R. Roberts, “The Mainline Protestant Tradition in the Twentieth Century” in Ronald J. Sider and Dianne Knippers, eds. Toward an Evangelical Public Policy. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005), 96.

^[2] See John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).

A Liberal Evangelical Resigns From AARP

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American Spectator, evangelical, Institute on Religion and Democracy, Mark Tooley, Religious Left, Ron Sider

(Source: vimeo.com)

by Mark Tooley(@markdtooley)

Unlike many figures of the Evangelical and Religious Left, Ron Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action (ESA) has sustained an integrity that many conservatives have grudgingly admired. Unlike many of his activist cohorts, he has not prevaricated on Christian teachings about sex, marriage, or abortion. And unlike many of his fellow religionists on the left, Sider has maintained a rigorous concern for the global persecution of Christians when others prefer silence over criticism of Islamist or communist regimes.

Now Sider, as he nears retirement from 40 years as ESA founder and head, has again distinguished himself by dissenting from the Religious Left on the untouchable sacredness of the federal welfare and entitlement state. Sider has very publicly resigned from the Association of Retired People (AARP) to protest its refusal to compromise on entitlement reform.

Calling AARP “selfish and guilty of intergenerational injustice,” Sider chides the self-professed lobby for seniors over its adamant opposition to any reform of Social Security and Medicare. He notes that the “federal government spends about $4 on every senior over 65 and only $1 on every child under 18.” And he notes that the 22 percent poverty rate for children percent is much higher than the 9.7 percent rate for seniors.

Sider describes what is obvious to most but still resisted by much of the Religious Left. “We have a large, unsustainable federal budget deficit,” he writes for Huffington Post. “If we continue current patterns, by 2025 all federal income will be needed simply to pay for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid (health care for poor Americans) and interest on the national debt!”

Specifically Sider criticizes AARP for opposing any increases in Medicare payments even by wealthier seniors or requiring co-payments for “unnecessary use of doctor visits and medical tests by seniors.” He also complains that AARP opposes any reduction in Social Security payments for wealthier seniors. Sider asked: “Is there any reason why a senior with a total income (Social Security plus other income) of $100,000 should not pay income tax on all of their Social Security income?”

Sider is rhetorically unsparing: “The AARP is a selfish lobby demanding things for seniors even though modest sacrifices would help us reduce the deficit and enable us to spend more on crucial things like better education for our children.” He implores seniors to rise above “selfish” interests and “make some sacrifices for our children and grandchildren.” And he urges other seniors who care about “intergenerational justice” to follow his example in quitting AARP.

This denunciation of AARP and call for entitlement reform contrasts with the atmospherics of the “Circle of Protection” of 2011, when religious groups effectively sided with President Obama against congressional Republicans during the federal debt ceiling crisis. A coalition of Jim Wallis’ Sojourners, the National Association of Evangelicals, National Council of Churches, U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, and Sider’s ESA urged tax increases and denounced any spending limits affecting “low-income people” in pursuit of deficit reduction. “Circle” representatives met with President Obama, who presumably welcomed the impression of their aligning with his opposition to entitlement reform.

In fairness to Sider, the “Circle’s” official statement specified protections for low income recipients of entitlements. And Sider is now asking for reforms affecting upper income seniors. But few of the other “Circle” participants are forcefully echoing Sider’s demand for responsible Medicare and Social Security reform. And few are likely to.

More typical of the Religious Left is a critic of Sider’s AARP stance who opined his response in Christian Century. Robert D. Francis is a lobbyist with Lutheran Services in America, which seems to have endorsed the “Circle.” He complains that Sider pits “investments” in seniors against those of children.

“Such thinking leaves out other ways America spends its money — the military, tax breaks that largely benefit the wealthy and corporations,” Francis complains. “It also assumes a fixed overall level of public investment, as though we as a society could not decide that we should actually pay for the level of government that we say we want.” He frets over Sider’s “false choice” of throwing “today’s seniors overboard, or tomorrow’s children.”

Francis also has faith that Obamacare will reduce health care costs and alleviate pressure on Medicare. Faith indeed. He hopes Sider “rethinks his rhetoric of ‘greedy geezers’ and intergenerational conflict, whether or not he tapes his AARP card back together.”

Most Religious Leftists like Francis think more Big Government, fueled by tax increases, will solve impending national insolvency caused by Big Government. Naturally they resent their colleague Sider’s disputing their illogic. Sider has had his own infatuations with Big Government over the decades. But he is sufficiently theologically grounded to understand there’s nothing sensible, much less Godly, in flirting with bankruptcy and defrauding one generation to retain the political allegiance of another.

This article originally appeared on The American Spectator

Evangelicals Discuss “The American Dream” at Cedarville University

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American Enterprise Institute, Bart Gingerich, Cedar University, Discovery Institute, Evangelicals for Social Action, Jay Richards, Ron Sider, Sojourners

By Bart Gingerich

On October 25^th and 26^th, Christians from the right and the left convened at Cedarville University in Ohio to debate economic policy from a religious standpoint. Representatives from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Sojourners, Evangelicals for Social Action, and the Discovery Institute touted mathematical figures, ethics, and biblical interpretation before an audience of community business leaders, economics faculty, and students. The conference, part of a “Critical Concerns for Evangelicals” series at the school, provided a forum for Christian leaders to debate issues of social and political importance. Although last year’s lectures on immigration were decidedly one-sided, the “American Dream Conference” offered a lively debate between two prominent economic viewpoints.

Barry James of James Investment Research laid the foundation for the event in his evening lecture. In the true form of an economist, he set out to delineate perceptions from reality. He illustrated how even the poor in the United States are amongst the wealthiest in the world and also showed that America still has a great deal of income mobility (the poor are not perpetually poor nor do the rich remain permanently rich). James then described how—to a certain extent—tax cuts actually increase government revenues in the long run by growing the economy as a whole. He also sermonized on the grave dangers of the nation’s burgeoning debt and the harm of high inflation. The introductory lesson touched on the problems of government regulations, safety nets, tax uncertainty, outsourced jobs, and employment. “A government doesn’t create wealth, but it can destroy it,” James concluded.

Read more here.