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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. And yet he says too many things. He implicitly provides two sorts of definitions. The first, with which he opens the book, is a brief historical sketch of the movement. This is a perfectly good way to define evangelicalism. Indeed, some of the best definitions ever formulated have emerged from historical studies—notably those of David Bebbington in Britain and George Marsden in the United States.1 But Sider doesn't avail himself of their method: careful delineation of the various stages of the emergence of trans-Atlantic evangelicalism in the 18th century and its subsequent metamorphoses—resulting, in part, in contemporary American evangelicalism. Instead, his account of the unnamed "renewal movement" in view is so vague that one wonders if he means, indeed, the Protestant Reformation, or 18th-century revivalism, or early 20th-century fundamentalism, or mid-20th-century American evangelicalism. His narrative sketch concludes with an elliptical reference to American evangelicals dealing with President Bush on faith-based initiatives and the controversy over the redefinition of marriage to include homosexuals.
So does Sider mean the evangelical Religious Right? Or does he mean all American evangelicals—say, those who identify with the NAE or Christianity Today magazine or Billy Graham—many of whom, like Sider's own Anabaptist kin, would not recognize themselves in his contemporary sketch of American evangelical political power brokers? It's not clear. And it never gets clearer.
Sider might have availed himself of the other fruit of all of those historical studies, namely, clear definitions of evangelicalism that literally have stood the test of time, both in the sense that they emerge out of the study of the history of the movement and also in the sense that they have been used profitably—and therefore tested—by many other historians in a number of other countries as well (such as Canada and Australia). These definitions amount to something like the following:
Evangelicals maintain Protestant orthodoxy: they believe what their various denominations have historically taught about Christian doctrine, with special emphasis on Christology and soteriology;
Evangelicals experience conversion: they might enjoy a particular dramatic moment, or they might undergo a long process punctuated by one or more crises, but they all personally commit themselves to Christ and then seek to be fully converted in the process of sanctification;
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