What Scandal? Whose Conscience? – John Stackhouse

Christianity Today: What Scandal? Whose Conscience? – John Stackhouse. I think I linked Stackhouse's blog version of this article earlier. It is practically a book in itself but well worth the read.

Some reflections on Ronald Sider's Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience.

Ronald Sider's sermon to American evangelicals, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, is entirely "seasonable," as all good jeremiads are. The Church is always entangled in worldliness of one form or another, and prophetic voices wisely rouse us to recognize our peril and our dereliction of duty. Yet Sider's book is also encumbered by confusion that blurs the sharp point he wants to make. And this confusion shows up constantly in evangelical publishing and preaching, so it is worthwhile attending to what keeps us from sounding clear, sustained, and accurate notes on our prophetic trumpets.

Sider's central thesis is clear enough: American evangelicals fail so badly to live according to the gospel that we are, in many respects, indistinguishable from the world around us. But his apparently shocking statistics of evangelical worldliness, culled from George Barna, George Gallup, and a variety of others, do not all stand up to closer scrutiny. Furthermore, Sider's contention about evangelical declension founders on a variety of other shoals: basic matters of terminology, sociology, history, theology, and pastoral practice.

The first, and arguably most damaging, difficulty appears right away—indeed, in the title itself. What does Sider mean by "evangelical"? He doesn't actually say….

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More to the immediate point, Sider himself allows that "when pollsters make more careful distinctions between nominal Christians and devout believers, there is evidence that deeply committed Christians do live differently." In a very brief conclusion, he notes that Gallup, Barna, and others have found that people they call "super-saints" or those "with a biblical worldview," respectively, score very highly in volunteerism, avoidance of pornography and tobacco, Bible reading, attendance at church and small groups, and belief in and practice of personal evangelism.

Now here's the kicker. The definitions of these extraordinary Christians line up pretty well with the basic definition of evangelicalism with which I began—that is, as just what evangelicals are supposed to be and do by definition, and not as some special group of "super-saints."

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What is it, then, that Sider and his sources have actually found? I think they have found that American evangelicalism is a victim of its own success. Evangelicalism spread far and wide across the American landscape in the 19th century. And this spread has meant a twofold problem for any Siderian comparison of "evangelicals" and "society."

First, American society has been largely shaped by evangelical, or at least by broadly Christian values, from the time of the Puritans. So we should expect at least a rough similarity in values between even token believers and the most observant—which scale takes in the vast majority of Americans. It is not as if we were comparing evangelicals in a society with, say, nominal communists (as in China) or quasi-Shintoist, quasi-Buddhist secularists (as in Japan), or so-called animists (as in much of Africa).

Second, because evangelicalism is, in fact, the "mainline" in the South and is common in many other parts of the country, we should expect quite a range of degrees of adherence. That is, we're not living in a binary situation: "in" or "out," "us versus them," first-generation evangelicals boldly striking out in a new religious direction versus a religiously hollow society, but in a multigenerational sedimentation such that evangelicalism is the inherited "default" religion of many millions. The mere fact that someone tells a pollster that she is an "evangelical," or answers correctly a few questions of generic evangelical confession, doesn't say much about how authentically evangelical is her piety—in intensity, clarity, or extent.

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At the same time as I endorse Sider's call to holiness, however, I don't think we need to worry quite so much about what finally amounts to this: the various degrees of adherence among evangelicals. People are taking various paths at various paces, and before their own Master they stand or fall. Jesus himself had a range of disciples, and we see various shades of adherence in the New Testament churches as people make their way along the path of faith—as we have ever since. Pastorally, we can and should be both idealistic and realistic.

So by all means let us, with Brother Sider, "Lift High the Cross." And let us invite everyone to come, drawing them closer as best we can.