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This is not an auspicious time for liberalism, as Sider knows, but his resistance to the label goes deeper than political trends. He deeply wants the body of Christ to hang together, and he finds political labels divisive. He tells, gloomily, of traveling to L'Abri in Switzerland to talk to two leaders who have succeeded Francis Schaeffer there. He had read their criticisms and was sure they simply misunderstood him. Yet he found, after long talks, that they would not see it; when he departed, he felt they still thought him a dangerous person, leading other Christians astray. "Francis Schaeffer—I'm so close to him!" he says in exasperation.

Sider does not usually take his critics so seriously, and he enjoys a good debate, but he is genuinely grieved when people he respects see him as a threat to the body of Christ. For Sider, the church—not politics, not ecology, not even peace or simple living—is the number-one cause. Ideally, he would like to get all politically conscious Christians in a room and, starting with the Bible, work toward common positions. Deep at heart he believes that all Christians believe in the same things that their differences, political or otherwise, are superficial. "If we were really biblical," he says, "our agenda would cut sharply across the issues."

Sider and his wife and daughter (two sons are grown and gone) inhabit an aging duplex in a mostly black neighborhood of Philadelphia. Sider makes a point of saying he doesn't live in poverty, and it is true. The neighborhood is run down but trying hard for respectability—no ghetto. The Siders' decor falls somewhere between Graduate Student and Junior Faculty, comfortably worn. They buy most of their clothes in thrift shops, but they have cordless phones and answering machines and a nice TV.

In some ways, this city life is far from Sider's roots on a 275-acre farm in Ontario, Canada. In other ways, it is not so far: the farm houses of his childhood tended toward comfortable, yet worn furniture, too. The Siders heat with a wood stove, and the stovepipe snaking through the kitchen and the woodpiles in back of the house—Sider scavenges the wood from neighborhood trees and chops it himself, for exercise—are reminiscent of his earlier life.

In times of struggle, Sider reminds himself that he can always go back to the farm. "I loved it. I feel called to the city, but I'm still a farm boy. I would have been very happy as a farmer." His happiest memories are of working side by side with his father, who would talk over which crops to plant.

His father served as a pastor in the Brethren in Christ, an insular, rural denomination that combined elements of holiness, Anabaptist, and pietistic traditions. Sider remembers vividly the guilty struggle he had when he first decided to part his hair on the side, or to wear a tie—choices that were thought vain and worldly. He was converted to Christ in a revival meeting and seems to have little besides happy memories of his church upbringing. "I sometimes say I've been sanctified a dozen times, but it never quite took," he says with a laugh. "But I very much appreciate that side of theology. I think the kind of easy way that mainstream Protestantism tolerates sin without hope of change is not New Testament. The Holy Spirit wants us to keep making progress, although it's a process."

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March (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44