“Ron Sider was the first evangelical writer who opened my eyes to the whole gospel,” Tim Costello tells the Other cheek. “As a young 22-year-old reading his classic 1977 book Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger was both explosive and formative. It set me on the path for my future ministry. I am so thankful for his profound teaching.”
Ron Sider died late last month, aged 82.
His book Rich Christians In an Age of Hunger exploded onto the evangelical scene and was nominated by Christianity Today as one of the most influential Christian books of the 20th century.
Melissa Lipsett, CEO of Baptist World Aid Australia points out why evangelicals needed – and still need –a Sider. “Ron Sider’s call to Christians is that it isn’t enough to just have a transforming relationship with Jesus, but that we are called to also have a transforming relationship with the world shouldn’t be necessary. Sadly, it is as this crucial aspect of being Christian has been seemingly overlooked by so many individuals and institutions alike. In calling it out, Sider was a faithful and passionate prophet in the face of a shockingly unjust world. His call to the Church to see the primacy of working for justice and the alleviation of poverty has arguably never been more important or timely.”
Sider’s message was to ask Christians to be alert to their conscience: “Can over-fed, comfortably clothed, and luxuriously housed persons understand poverty? Can we truly feel what it is like to be a nine-year-old boy playing outside a village school he cannot attend because his father is unable to afford the books? (Which, incidentally, would cost less than my wife and I spent on entertainment one evening during the writing of this book.) Can we comprehend what it means for poverty-stricken parents to watch with helpless grief as their baby daughter dies of a commonchildhood disease because they lack access to elementary health services?
“Can we grasp the awful truth that eighteen thousand children die everyday, most of hunger and preventable diseases?”
In the 2015 edition of Rich Christians, Sider describes a world with billions still in poverty but acknowledges how real improvement has occurred, for example in the drastic lowering of poverty in China. “It is difficult to obtain precise statistics, but the World Bank estimates that 1.2 billion people live in that kind of grinding poverty-trying to survive on $1.25 a day.’
“In addition to these 1.2 billion who live in almost absolute poverty, another 1.2 billion are very poor, living on two dollars or less a day. That means almost one-third of the world’s people (2.4 billion) struggle to exist on two dollars a day or less.
“Hunger and starvation stalk our world. Famine and disease are alive and well on planet Earth. Those suffering in grinding poverty are at the greatest risk. Eighteen thousand children under five die every day, most from hunger and preventable diseases. A third of those deaths result from pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria – which are easily treated or prevented.” In 2010-2012, 870 million people were chronically undernourished.”
Sider lays out the statistics of an unequal world which conceal “agony and anguish.” “For persons in the U.S. spending 6.6 per cent of their consumer expenditures on food, a 50 per cent increase in food costs is troubling but not disastrous. But for persons already spending nearly 50 per cent on food, a 50 per cent increase means hunger, malnutrition, and perhaps starvation.”
It will be difficult for many readers to remember a time when evangelical Christians largely ignored these facts, looking away because the “social gospel” was seen to be a pre-occupation of what then was called “Liberal Christians,” today’s progressives.
Critics saw Ron Sider as “the prophet of the “evangelical Left.” It is a mark of the political polarisation of 21st-century politics that Sider has been mocked, and his message is seen as belonging to one side.
“Productive Christians In An Age Of Guilt Manipulators” is the Title of a critique of his work by conservative critics. Christians with a social justice concern are dismissed
“Some of them are Marxists in the Lamb’s clothing, while others are merely Fabian socialists in the Lamb’s clothing. Some of them just aren’t willing to say…yet. (Tactics, you understand.) Ron Sider belongs to the third group. Author Chilton critiques “Sider for failing to understand neither the Bible nor economics when it comes to his conclusions about profits, taxes, foreign aid, and Western guilt for the Third World poverty.”
But Sider was clear-eyed about changes that had occurred since he first wrote the book, citing the lifting of hundreds of millions out of poverty in countries such as China and Indonesia.
“The world has changed, and so have I” Sider write in the latest edition of Rich Christians. “ In the almost forty years since I wrote Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, amazing changes have occurred in the world.
“Communism has collapsed. Expanding market economies, increasing global trade, and new technologies have dramatically reduced poverty. As we moved into the twenty-first century, it was clear that “democratic capitalism” won the major economic/political debate of the last one hundred years. Communism’s state ownership and central planning had proved not to work; they were inefficient and totalitarian. Market economies, on the other hand, have produced enormous wealth. And not only in Western nations. Most countries have adopted market economies. The result has been a dramatic drop in poverty. Between 1990 and 2014, the number of people living below the international poverty level ($1.25 per day per per- son) plunged by more than 50 per cent!
“My thinking has also changed. I’ve learned more about economics.
“And I have continued to study the Scriptures.
“When the choice is communism or democratic capitalism, I support democratic government and market economies. That does not mean, however, that the Bible prescribes Either democracy or markets. Nor does it mean ignoring the problems and injustices of today’s market economies.”
Sider fits in the evangelical mainstream with conservative views on topics like human sexuality. And in reading the economic progress of the last half-century he has come to see more clearly the benefits of free markets and the rule of law. He makes a poor socialist.
“I believe that private property is so good, everybody should have some,” he writes.
In the opening chapter of Rich Christians, Sider asked us to compare our possessions with those who have little. The critics see that as inducing guilt. But there is a better way to look at that – the task measuring whether we love our neighbours as ourselves.
It was the same with Wilberforce who came to see slaves as his neighbours.
Notably, Siders’ critics come from his “homeland” in North American Christianity. He provesJesus’ saying “A prophet is not without honour, except in his own country.”