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As the retirement gala for Ron Sider, the founder and president of Evangelicals for Social Action (ESA) for the last forty years, got underway last weekend, emcee Tony Campolo lamented the difficulty of the task at hand. “How do you roast a peace-loving, simple-living Mennonite?” he asked. There just isn’t a lot of material. A long list of luminaries—including Wes Granberg-Michaelson, Jim Wallis, Tom Sine, David Gushee, Dean Trulear, Rabbi David Saperstein, and Heidi Unruh—tried. And a few of them landed some blows to the pacifist Sider, most of them having to do with his decidedly non-pacifist fishing habit and his penchant for wearing brown suits purchased at thrift stores. (In fact, gala invitations instructed attendees to wear “Ron Sider Casual,” which meant your thrift store finest). But most of the roasts “devolved” into paeans to Sider’s integrity, kindness, and love for Jesus. At the evening’s conclusion, Sider confessed to being a sinner with feet of clay, but the love-fest suggested that the man was a saint with angelic wings.

As a historian of progressive evangelicals, I found the roast—and accompanying conference called Follow.Jesus.2013—utterly fascinating. I met four surviving original signers of the 1973 Chicago Declaration. I heard about a new book that lays out future directions of ESA (more on this in my next post). I observed a surprisingly large contingent of younger evangelicals who are continuing Sider’s legacy of evangelism and social justice (in his closing remarks, Sider noted that white evangelicals of the 1970s needed to hear about justice. In the future, he mused, they may need to hear more about evangelism). I led two workshops that contemplated the legacy of Evangelicals for Social Action—and discovered that the man (Wes Granberg-Michaelson) sitting to my right was the star of the cover of my book!

The tone of the conference was equal parts wistful and celebratory. Wistful in that the evangelical left’s great rivalry with the religious right had been a rout—not in ESA’s favor. One of the running jokes of the weekend was how bad Sider has been in supporting winning presidents—starting in 1972 with his leadership of Evangelicals for McGovern. In terms of electoral politics, right-wing organizations and individuals such as the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, Jerry Falwell, Jim Dobson, and Pat Robertson have swamped moderate wings led by Sider, Wallis, and Mouw.

The celebratory tone came from the recognition that Sider’s legacy is significant. Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger has now sold nearly half a million copies. And while ESA has remained small and Sider has been laboring for decades with little help on issues of poverty, women’s rights, and inequities in the global economy, the evangelical left seems to have anticipated contemporary evangelical concerns. Sider’s views are rapidly becoming standard among moderate evangelicals. For the Health of the Nation, which was released in 2005 by the National Association of Evangelicals, reads like a consistent-life tract that progressive evangelicals might have written back in the 1980s. (Ron Sider in fact co-chaired the committee that drafted the document.) In a statement that sounded like a description of Sider himself, historian Mark Noll remarked, “This document is, in unusual measure, compassionate, well-balanced, thoughtful, remarkably comprehensive, humble, well-informed, noncombative, irenic, and wise. Believe me, in over thirty years of lecturing and writing about the history of evangelical Christianity, I have very rarely been able to use all of those adjectives all at once about the same thing.” There may not be many card-carrying members of the evangelical left (my least favorite joke when I told people I was writing my dissertation on progressive evangelicals was: “The evangelical left—all three of them?), but their legacy is not insignificant. The steady, often saintly, leadership of Sider is one reason why.

*** Cross-posted at The Anxious Bench ***

I spent a week last month at World Vision International headquarters doing research for my next project. To prepare for my trip, I read Erica Bornstein’s The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe (2005). The book explores the work and theology of two large Christian development organizations: World Vision* and Christian Care. During the mid-1990s when Bornstein was doing field research in Africa, these two organizations were working on rural agricultural development, including sanitation, irrigation, education, clean drinking water and micro-enterprise.

Spirit of Development got positive reviews in anthropological and religious studies journals. Non-governmental organizations are important sources of aid in weakened African states, and reviewers appreciated Bornstein’s exploration of the religious aspects of many NGOs. The book describes how development workers seek holistic development (both spiritual and material) and practice “lifestyle evangelism,” which means “living a life in the manner of Christ and providing examples for non-believers.” To development specialists and anthropologists, Bornstein’s observation that “development becomes a religious act” seemed novel, even provocative. After all, economic development would seem to be a highly rationalistic project, not one rooted in otherworldly faith.

Evangelical scholars also have been impressed. It is generally an empathetic text, even though Bornstein is not entirely uncritical. A secular Jew, she was hostile toward her subjects when she began her field research. Adamantly opposed to—and even fearful—of evangelicals, she wrote that missionaries carried “an essential ‘evil’ in their attempts to ‘do good.’” Through her research Bornstein remained critical of family disruptions caused by child sponsorship, World Vision’s role in the spread of neoliberalism, and the ways that religious people sometimes spiritualize inequality. (I should note that a lot of progressive and paleo-evanglicals have similar concerns). Still, Bornstein makes it clear that she came to admire the efforts of World Vision workers. Their work empowered women, brought together diverse groups, and improved the lives of many Zimbabweans. In the book’s conclusion Bornstein confessed, “I no longer knew where I stood, morally and politically.”

Which brings me to the point of this post: the self-referential nature of anthropological writing. In some ways, the book was as much about personal development as global economic development. As a historian I’ve been socialized to keep the first person out of my writing. So I’m fascinated when scholars in other disciplines insert themselves into the narrative. Bornstein’s self-disclosures—which were alternately poignant and amusing—don’t disappoint. She describes:

• Her visit to a lively Pentecostal-style worship service, where she felt an urge to accept a Zimbabwean evangelical preacher’s invitation to be “born again.”

• Her claustrophobia and frustration at the “unyielding persistence” of “super-good and super-sweet” Christian morality. In an act of rebellion after meeting with pious World Vision administrators, she listened to heavy-metal “satanic” music on the freeways of L.A. In Zimbabwe, she felt a profound desire “to do evil things” like lift a pink highlighter from a church bookstore. “I was frightened by the urge to steal it,” she writes. “Before coming to Zimbabwe, I never wanted to steal anything. What was happening to me?”

• Her mugging by five men just three weeks after arriving in Harare. They grabbed her with “such violence and desperation” and made her feel fearful, disoriented, and vulnerable. World Vision workers heard about the attack, and one man in particular prayed fervently for her healing and safety. “I was shocked by his act of caring, touched, hailed, and unraveled again. . . . I had new empathy for Christian development, and an understanding of why one might convert.”

As a voyeur, I was fascinated by these confessions of a fellow researcher. As an enthusiast of elegant prose, I found the autobiographical intrusions jarring. As a Christian compelled by St. Paul’s assertion that we “see through a glass darkly” (Bornstein’s anthropological version reads like this: “Field research is like searching for anthropological truth-values through the land mines of people’s understanding of the ethnographer”), I appreciate self-disclosure as a swipe at pretensions of objectivity. That’s a helpful reminder to historians who write from perches high above their subjects.

* For a comprehensive history of World Vision, be on the lookout for David King’s forthcoming book, which is based on his dissertation at Emory.

 

*** Cross-posted at Anxious Bench ***

Evangelical pressure to address climate change continues to heat up. Last week 200 evangelical scientists released a letter to Congress that called for reducing carbon emissions. Couching their call in terms of social justice and as a biblical imperative, these scientists come from some of the most prominent evangelical colleges in the nation. They include Wheaton College, Calvin College, Gordon College, Messiah College, Anderson University, Goshen College, Point Loma Nazarene, Bob Jones University (!), Lee University, a long list of Nazarene schools, Westmont, and Oral Roberts.

Say you’re a pre-Vatican II Catholic concerned about the trajectory of American culture. Where do you defect if it gets too bad?

According to CatholicVote.org, here are the top five options: Andorra, San Marino, Malta, Wallis and Futuna, and St. Pierre and Miquelon.

I must say, there is some lovely, even spectacular, scenery in that list!

One of the fascinating—and sometimes disconcerting—things about researching recent history is that my historical characters are still making history. They write books, participate in protests, and occasionally die. This summer, happily, they’re retiring more than dying. In the span of about a month, two subjects of Moral Minority’s eight mini-biographies are retiring. Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, retired in June. Now it’s Ron Sider’s turn. Founder and president of Evangelicals for Social Action, Sider will step down this weekend after forty years at the helm.

Sider’s list of accomplishments is impressive. In 1972 Sider launched Evangelicals for McGovern, the first partisan political organization of the twentieth century formed by evangelicals to elect a president. A year later he organized a series of “Thanksgiving Workshops” out of which the Chicago Declaration, the landmark document of the postwar evangelical left, emerged. His 1977 Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (which has sold over 400,000 copies—not bad for a dark tome!) argued that global economic injustices cannot be addressed simply through individual social ethics. They must be tackled structurally through such actions as lobbying Congress to reduce military spending and to drop barriers to imports from developing nations. In the decades since, Sider’s progressive vision has persisted. With the exception of a vote for George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” in 2000 that he now regrets, Sider has routinely embraced and stumped on behalf of many liberal Democratic policies.

If social action has defined Sider’s career, it has been grounded in an explicitly evangelical spirit. Sider has stressed the evangelical mandate to lead people “to accept Jesus Christ and personal Lord and Savior.” He has affirmed the uniqueness, deity, resurrection of Christ. In apologetics work for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in the 1960s and 1970s, Sider proffered historical and philosophical evidences for theism. In his 2006 jeremiad Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, Sider pushed for sexual holiness and criticized evangelicals for rates of sexual promiscuity and divorce that surpass those of non-evangelicals. Sounding a lot like Joshua Harris (except for the going on dates part), Sider has written, “Could we behave the way we often do in our families and with our dates if we made those decisions with our eyes fixed intently on the Lord?” Elsewhere, he has written about “devotional snuggling,” his practice of starting and ending days praying with his wife while enveloped in each other’s arms.

This combination of conservative evangelical practices and progressive politics has made Sider a religious and political outlier in many respects. Sider’s pro-life, pro-peace activism, pro-poor, pro-racial justice, pro-sexual integrity, pro-family, and pro-environment politics—articulated most clearly in Sider’s 1987 book Completely Pro-Life—fail to conform to platforms of either political party. This mix of ideals, clearly idiosyncratic in the postwar political and cultural climate, has attracted an eclectic and loyal, if not always large, following.

Devotees of Evangelicals for Social Action will be gathering this weekend in Philadelphia to celebrate ESA’s fortieth anniversary. Called Follow.Jesus.2013, the conference will include a gala and roast honoring Sider as well as an impressive list of evangelical speakers including Shane Claiborne, D. Michael Lindsay, Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, Lisa Sharon Harper, Jim Wallis, and Soong Chan-Rah. I’ll be there too—and will give a report here at the Anxious Bench later this month.

*** Cross-posted at the Anxious Bench ***

The Huffington Post profiles six evangelicals who don’t fit the right-wing caricature. They include Kevin Palau, Gabe Lyons, Lisa Sharon Harper, Jim Henderson, Paul Louis Metzger, and Tony Kriz.

This semester marked Richard Mouw’s last as president of Fuller Theological Seminary. Described by historian Grant Wacker as the “the most influential Evangelical voice in America—a true Evangelical public intellectual,” Mouw began teaching at Fuller in 1990 and then became president in 2000. He has been praised for his interfaith activities with Mormons and Catholics, generous orthodoxy, and keen Reformed mind. He retires this year after fifteen years at the helm of one of evangelicalism’s most important seminaries. (For pictures of his retirement celebrations, click here and here.)

Mouw’s life and career embody the convergence of the Dutch Reformed community and neo-evangelicalism. Baptized in 1940 as an infant in the First Holland Reformed Church of Passaic, New Jersey, Mouw grew up among first- and second-generation Dutch immigrants. Some in fact still worshiped in Dutch-language services on Sunday afternoons. But as Mouw’s mother, a member of the First Holland congregation, cradled young Mouw in her arms and presented him for baptism as a “covenant child,” his father, a more typical homegrown evangelical, looked on suspiciously from the front pew. The product of an irreligious family and a dramatic conversion experience in his teens while a hillbilly musician, Mouw’s father prayed that his son would “someday realize that only a personal faith in Jesus, and not the rituals of the church, could guarantee [his] eternal salvation.”

And so young Mouw grew up with a foot each in the worlds of neo-evangelicalism and the Dutch Reformed. With his father, he smelled the sawdust in fundamentalist revival meetings. Vaguely anti-Catholic and stridently anti-mainline, he forged friendships within the broad transdenominational world of mid-twentieth-century evangelical conservatism. He attended summer Bible camps with intricate dispensationalist end times charts on the walls. He read Moody Bible Institute devotional guides. Like millions of others in the 1950s, the teenage Mouw was overcome “with a profound sense that God was speaking directly to me” and made the long trek forward toward Billy Graham on the stage at Madison Square Garden to “make a decision for Christ.” “Surrounded by thousands of people,” he remembers, “I felt that I was alone in the presence of the Eternal.” (For a mini-biography of Mouw, read Chapter Seven of my book Moral Minority.)

Mouw as a junior philosophy professor at Calvin College

After college at Houghton and graduate school at the University of Chicago, Mouw recovered his Reformed roots as a philosopher at Calvin College. This college in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was enjoying a golden age in the 1970s. Imagine faculty meetings with the all-star lineup of George Marsden, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Alvin Plantinga, et. al. But Mouw also hung out with neo-evangelicals in the Wheaton-Christianity Today-InterVarsity orbit. He spoke graciously and inclusively of a common “evangelical self-understanding” as he interacted with evangelicals on social action.

As an important member of the nascent “evangelical left” of the 1970s (Mouw and colleagues joined the NAACP, antiwar protests, and urban renewal efforts in Grand Rapids), he pushed evangelicals preoccupied with personal salvation toward a simultaneous embrace of social justice. In the aptly titled Political Evangelism, Mouw denounced the “political passivity that has often been the posture of a culture-denying fundamentalism.” Evangelism, rather, should integrate personal salvation and political activism. Jesus, he wrote, “came to rescue the entire created order from the pervasive power of sin.” Christ’s atoning work “offers liberation for people in their cultural endeavours, in their institutions and the making of public policy.” Political Evangelism came squarely out of the Reformed ethos of Calvin College. Excerpts from the book had been previously published in the Reformed Journal, and in the preface Mouw thanked members of Calvin’s weekly Reformed colloquium. Although greatly influenced by these colleagues, it was his fundamentalist background that helped Mouw translate Reformed thought into language that evangelicals could understand.

Fuller Seminary was a fitting place for Mouw to land. It remains broadly evangelical, but substantially Reformed (as the title of historian George Marsden’s history of Fuller suggests). In fact, his successor is a Presbyterian minister. But the seminary is not uniformly Reformed. Donald Dayton has uncovered a substantial non-Reformed history there. Baptists, Wesleyans, and Anabaptists make their home at Fuller. And it is important to note that the Reformed ethos emanating out of Fuller and Calvin is rather different than the more strident “young, restless Reformed” crowd at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville and Mars Hill Church in Seattle. Mouw may not make the news as much as Mohler, but he represents a very important sector of American evangelicalism.

** Cross-posted at Anxious Bench **

Jim Wallis, CEO of Sojourners, was diagnosed with prostate cancer last December. In this column, Wallis describes his incredulity at the news, his canceled book tour, and surgery (which took place just last week). The prognosis, he says, seems positive.

From the Washington Post:

At the annual Q conference this spring, Christian engagement with public schools was a big topic. Among the quick-hit presentations was a talk on a church-school partnership in Portland, Ore., that many churches around the country are viewing as an inspiration and a model. . .

There is a serious problem with the flight from public education. Evangelicals are realizing there are real human beings in those left-behind schools who are struggling to teach and learn against difficult odds, and the future well-being of those kids and our communities depends on their success. Shouldn’t Christians with hearts full of love and compassion be helping them?

Absolutely yes, argues Nicole Baker Fulgham. Formerly vice president at Teach for America, Fulgham is author of the new book “Educating All God’s Children” and heads an upstart nonprofit called The Expectations Project working to improve outcomes for students in our public education system. Fulgham and her work exemplify a new kind of evangelical engagement with public schools that is dedicated solely to helping kids rather than arguing over school prayer, evangelism, and other culture war flash points.

This must be a hoax. If not, God help us all!

From a customer review: “We bought this for our three boys, Beza, Calvin, and Van Till! They loved every minute of this book! Buying this book will root my children in a holy fear of the Arminian heresy!!! The joy they got out of this book made me almost as happy as when little Calvin started quoting the Institutes, little Van Till argued for the existence of God by assuming He existed, and little Beza threw rocks at that Methodist kid in his class! I know that God has predestined them to great things!!! I am so proud of my three little supralapsarians!!!”