Ontario-born Author encouraged social action

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/08/2022 (1530 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When people think of evangelicals today, it’s often the Trump-supporting kind in the U.S. that come to mind.

Those evangelicals certainly exist in America, and they get a lot of media attention for their right wing, anti-immigrant, anti-abortion, anti-climate change, pro-military and Christian nationalist views.

But they aren’t the only ones. There are others who don’t fit that stereotype at all. One of the best known among them was Ron Sider.

Sider, who died July 27 at the age of 82, was the author of the ground-breaking 1978 book Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. He also was the founder, in 1979, of Evangelicals for Social Action (later called Christians for Social Action), to promote evangelical involvement in social causes.

Through his life Sider challenged Christians — especially evangelical Christians — to see social action as important as sharing their faith when it came to following Jesus.

“Forty years ago, the standard evangelical understanding was [that] the primary mission of the church was saving souls [by] doing evangelism,” he said in a 2013 interview.

“Today, virtually every evangelical would say we should do evangelism and social action. That’s a huge change.”

Sider, who was born in Fort Erie, Ont., grew up in the Brethren in Christ Church, part of the Anabaptist-Mennonite movement. He spent most of his career as a professor at Palmer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania.

Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger put him on the map; the book was called one of 100 most influential books in religion in the 20th century by the evangelical magazine Christianity Today.

In the book, which is still in print and has been updated several times, Sider reminded Christians about biblical injunctions to assist the poor — and excoriated them for not doing more to help them.

“It is a sinful abomination for one part of the world’s Christians to grow richer year by year while our brothers and sisters ache and suffer for lack of minimal health care, minimal education, and even — in some cases — enough food to escape starvation,” he wrote.

“God’s Word teaches a very hard, disturbing truth. Those who neglect the poor and the oppressed are really not God’s people at all — no matter how frequently they practice their religious rituals nor how orthodox are their creeds and confessions,” he added.

Sider’s decision to start Christians for Social Action was inspired by The Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern, a 1973 document that “called for a rejection of racism, economic materialism, economic inequality, militarism, and sexism.”

The declaration, of which Sider was a principal architect, stated emphatically that the evangelical emphasis on personal salvation was not enough.

“We acknowledge that God requires justice,” it said. “But we have not proclaimed or demonstrated his justice to an unjust American society. Although the Lord calls us to defend the social and economic rights of the poor and oppressed, we have mostly remained silent.”

Sider is held in high esteem among Mennonites for his address at the 1984 Mennonite World Conference assembly in Strasbourg, France.

In the address, Sider criticized those who participated in risk-free pacifism — refusing to participate in war without taking action to prevent violence in the first place.

“Unless we are prepared to risk injury and death in nonviolent opposition to the injustice our societies foster, we don’t dare even whisper another word about pacifism to our sisters and brothers in those desperate lands,” he said.

“Unless we are ready to die developing new nonviolent attempts to reduce international conflict, we should confess that we never really meant the cross was an alternative to the sword.”

Making peace, he stated, “is as costly as waging war. Unless we are prepared to pay the cost of peacemaking, we have no right to claim the label or preach the message.”

That address led to the creation of Christian Peacemaker Teams (now called Community Peacemaker Teams), an organization that puts volunteers in the centre of conflict situations around the world.

Sider kept up his activism right to the end, including editing The Spiritual Danger of Donald Trump: 30 Evangelical Christians on Justice, Truth, and Moral Integrity, a 2020 book that challenged American evangelicals to think again about their support for the ex-president.

If Sider challenged Christians on the right, he also annoyed people on the left with his pro-life views — he was anti-killing whether that was through war, capital punishment, neglect of the poor or abortion.

I regret I never met Sider or had a chance to interview him. But his books and other writings influenced my thinking and helped me see action was as important as belief. And for that, I thank him.

faith@freepress.mb.ca

The Free Press is committed to covering faith in Manitoba through our Religion in the News project. This reporting continues because readers like you step forward to fund it.

Donate now to support our reporting on religion.
Your donation is eligible for a charitable tax receipt. BECOME A FAITH JOURNALISM SUPPORTER