Sider: Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience

Key sentence: "IN A THOUGHTFUL nod to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sider blames the problem on the evangelical 'cheap grace' that reduces salvation to an 'individual personal relationship with Jesus.'

The New 'Mainline' Church, Sojourners Magazine/June 2005: "Ten years ago, historian Mark Noll's important book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind began with a powerful indictment: 'The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.' From there, Noll attacked evangelical anti-intellectualism and issued challenges to remedy the problem.

Ronald Sider, senior statesman of progressive evangelicalism, modeled his new book The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience on Noll's earlier work. However, unlike Noll, whose concern was evangelical intellectual life, Sider claims that contemporary American evangelicals must confront a wider, more devastating issue. Evangelical moral behavior resembles that of other Americans. To paraphrase Noll, the scandal of the evangelical conscience is that there is not much of an evangelical conscience.

The scandal of evangelical behavior, and its parallel lack of ethical conscience, provides a stinging critique of conservative American Protestantism. Even Noll, with his unblinking attack on the evangelical subculture, shied away from criticizing evangelical morality. After all, as a Christian renewal movement, evangelical religion was justly proud of its piety and could take much historical credit for what early evangelicals called 'the reform of manners.' But Sider gives no credit for past successes. Indeed, he goes right for the evangelical heart with his claim, 'Scandalous behavior is rapidly destroying American Christianity' and 'With their mouths they claim that Jesus is Lord, but with their actions they demonstrate allegiance to money, sex, and self-fulfillment.' In other words, evangelicals are hypocrites - revivalists who need to be revived.

To support his claim, Sider looks at a host of polling data (mostly from the Barna, Pew, and Gallup organizations) that reveals that evangelical practice about divorce, materialism, sexual promiscuity, racism, and domestic violence does not differ from the practice of the surrounding culture. In some of these regards, evangelical rates of activity actually rank higher than their neighbors. And it is not just individual evangelicals. Regions of the country with large evangelical populations (the Bible Belt, for example) have the highest rates of divorce, domestic violence, and racism. Thus, the evangelical scandal is not only a matter of individual piety. Rather, it manifests as a cultural problem that erodes the church, undercuts the social power of the gospel, and contributes to the decline of American society.

IN A THOUGHTFUL nod to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sider blames the problem on the evangelical 'cheap grace' that reduces salvation to an 'individual personal relationship with Jesus.' If the church embodied 'the whole gospel' of kingdom ethics, community, humanity, and sin, 'greater biblical fidelity would help end the scandal.' But Sider goes further than the theological solution. He also argues that the 'church must be the church.' Instead of conforming to culture, he urges that evangelical congregations re-vision themselves as radically countercultural communities of holiness, Christian practice, and church discipline. In a short section, he proposes some practical steps of congregational accountability and church membership to move evangelicals toward greater moral integrity. The book ends with some rays of hope - a few less-bleak statistics about evangelical behavior intended to inspire confidence that evangelicalism can reform itself and, once again, be a powerful force of spiritual and social change."