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Evangelicals believe the Bible: they not only maintain classic Christian beliefs about it, but their piety is structured around it: in individual, family, group, and congregation study, in the centrality of preaching in public worship, and in the Bible's epistemological supremacy in all areas of life;
Evangelicals engage in mission: they view themselves as called by God to perform his will in every activity of life, and particularly in sharing the message of salvation with others and caring for their needs; and
Evangelicals recognize each other across denominational lines as kin: thus evangelicals cooperate in a wide range of organizations and activities to further the work of God beyond the reach of their respective congregation and denomination.
Nowhere does Sider lay out such a definition. And if he had done so, as we shall see, he would have saved himself and his readers considerable trouble. What he does instead, after his vague historical sketch, is plunge immediately into a series of poll data of American evangelicals, showing how worldly evangelicals are. And the terminological confusion appears right away.
"This," Sider says in his introduction, "alas, is roughly the situation of Western or at least American evangelicalism today." Well, it certainly isn't the situation of evangelicals in Canada or Britain, who have not, in fact, had nearly the access to their chief executives that Americans have had to theirs. No, this is about America—and all the subsequent data are American. Then Sider says, "Scandalous behavior is rapidly destroying American Christianity. By their daily activity, most 'Christians' regularly commit treason. With their mouths they claim that Jesus is Lord, but with their actions they demonstrate allegiance to money, sex, and self-fulfillment."
But wait a second. The advertised subject is evangelicalism, not Christianity. And I pick on this terminological imperialism, which suggests that evangelicalism and Christianity are synonymous, because it is rampant in evangelicalism. Whenever I hear an evangelical academician discuss "Christian colleges" in the United States, I always ask, "You mean, such as Notre Dame and Catholic University of America?" Um, no. Whenever I hear an evangelical missionary talk about how few "Christians" there are in a given country (such as Poland or Ireland—yes, I have heard both used as examples, despite the fact that their church attendance figures are higher than America's), I know that once again we are encountering this syndrome.
Now, to be sure, a lot of people in Poland and Ireland are merely nominal Christians, and by evangelical standards, that's not authentic Christianity. So one can see the half-truth in the missionary claims. But that brings us smack-dab into the fundamental problem affecting Sider and so many (not all) of his sources: they, too, fail consistently to define evangelicalism as it in fact has usually been defined by evangelical leaders through the centuries. Thus their "evangelicals" include large numbers of merely nominal evangelicals, which seems on the grounds of the definition outlined above to be a contradiction in terms.
So who are the worldly, compromising Americans who are scandalizing Ron Sider, and apparently many others, in the name of "evangelicalism"? Is the problem truly in the "evangelical conscience," or is the problem in the surveyors who are looking at the wrong people to examine that conscience?
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