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On homosexuality, Sider unblinkingly employs the Religious Right's preferred incendiary term, "gay lifestyle," implying that sexual orientation is simply a matter of volition. (As a gay friend of mine once asked, incredulously: "Why would anyone choose to be gay?") On the separation of church and state, Sider dithers before finally lending his endorsement to the disestablishment clause of the First Amendment. But he misses his best arguments: Religion has flourished here in the United States as nowhere else precisely because the government—for the most part, at least—has stayed out of the religion business, and the collusion between church and state ultimately trivializes the faith. Sider can't bring himself to take a position on taxpayer-supported vouchers for religious schools, however, and at times his ducking and weaving borders on comical. What about "In God We Trust" emblazoned on our currency, government-supported chaplains, or references to the Deity in the pledge of allegiance? "I doubt that either retaining or abandoning these practices would be very significant," Sider concludes, "although the debates will undoubtedly continue."
Sider does make some good points. He argues that the importance once ascribed to the holding of property should be reconfigured as equal access to education; knowledge, he writes, "is the primary source of wealth creation." He also warns, in a distant echo of the Chicago Declaration, that "Christians must be extremely vigilant against the ongoing temptations of idolatrous nationalism."
By the time I finished reading The Scandal of Evangelical Politics, however, I was scratching my head. Where's the scandal? Sider's criticisms are so measured and his proposals so tepid that the book reads more like an endorsement of evangelical political behavior over the last several decades than a critique. What happened to the author of Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, who boldly summoned us to heed Jesus' injunctions to care for "the least of these"? Surely, those of us who profess allegiance to the scandal of the gospel cannot simply accede to the status quo or the tired playbook coming out of Colorado Springs.
So what is the scandal of evangelical politics? The persistence of hunger in a land of plenty? The fundamental contradiction between pressing for "intelligent design" in public school curricula and utter indifference to the handiwork of the Intelligent Designer? The failure to purge misogynists and white supremacists from the highest echelons of evangelical leadership? The failure of evangelicals to rise up in collective moral outrage over the present administration's persistent and systematic use of torture?
I returned to Sider's preface in search of a scandal. The best that I could determine was that evangelicals had failed to "move from a commitment to Jesus Christ and biblical authority to concrete political decisions that lead us to support or oppose specific laws and candidates." Fair enough, though it's not clear how the book helps us address that scandal.
What made me even more uneasy was the triumphalism that tinges the conclusion to Sider's preface. "All around the world," he writes, "evangelical thinkers and politicians are wrestling at a deeper level with how to act politically in faithfulness to Christ." And the payoff? "If even a modest fraction of that rapidly growing number of 500 million evangelicals and Pentecostals would develop a commonly embraced, biblically grounded framework for doing politics, they would change the world."
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