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The Scandal of Evangelical Politics
Posted under Ron Sider, Scripture, politics, republicanIn Ron Sider’s new book The Scandal of Evangelical Politics: Why Are Christians Missing the Chance to Really Change the World? Sider gives the reader a short piece on how Ed Dobson lamented on the Moral Majority’s need for a coherent political philosophy (at the time Dobson was Vice President of the Moral Majority). This failure to reflect, Dobson felt, contributed to many of the movement’s failures.
Dobson says that “a ready, aim, fire” approach led to the thinking of an American favored nation status while neglecting what the Bible teaches about the poor, unfairly attacking enemies, and using manipulative fund-raising techniques.
The book argues that the “absence of any widely accepted, systematic reflection on politics leads to contradiction, confusion, ineffectiveness, even biblical unfaithfulness in political work.
Consider the inconsistencies with the regard to the sanctity of human life. Almost all evangelicals agree with the principle. But many evangelical pro-life movements focus largely on the question of abortion—as if, as one wag commented, life begins at conception and ends at birth. But what about the millions of children who die every year of starvation or the millions of adults killed annually by tobacco smoke? Are those not also sanctity of life issues?”
Sider points out that Jesse Helms was a prominent pro-life leader who happened to represent happened to represent the largest tobacco growing country in the United States—even supporting government subsidies for tobacco growers shipping America tobacco to poor nations under America’s Food for Peace Program.