I’m in a group that reads and discusses books related to faith and politics. It’s a great group with lots of political and theological diversity. Our current book is the newest offering from Ron Sider which is entitled The Scandal of Evangelical Politics: Why Are Christians Missing the Chance to Really Change the World?
The timing is interesting for me. I haven’t read any Ron Sider books since I read his provocative Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger in the early 1980s. But I recently heard Sider give several talks at Denver Seminary and I had a chance to ask him a couple of questions in an informal discussion session over lunch.
Full disclosure – I’ve never been a big Sider fan. His heart is in the right place but I’m frequently skeptical of his proposed solutions to issues of poverty and injustice and skeptical of many of the inferences he draws from Scripture.
My skepticism was not assuaged when just five pages into the first chapter I encountered this complaint about evangelical political involvement: “Consider the inconsistency with regard to the sanctity of human life … many highly visible evangelical pro-life movements focus largely on the question of abortion. But what about … the millions of adults killed annually by tobacco smoke?”
I suppose that anyone who writes and speaks as much as Sider will inevitably make some silly statements but his argument here is just drop-dead loony!
If I take Sider at face value, it seems that he does not distinguish between a choice made by an adult for himself that has a statistical chance of shortening that adult’s life versus a choice made by a third party for an in-utero baby that is guaranteed to end the child’s life in a matter of minutes.
Have I missed something? Has there been a recent revelation that adults are being strapped to gurneys and having tobacco smoke pumped into their lungs against their wills?
In fairness, I imagine that Sider believes that tobacco companies have killing millions of people by concealing the connection between smoking and cancer. If so, I can only record my belief that such an assertion is unsupportable.
The first Surgeon General’s report linking cancer with smoking appeared on January 11, 1964. The SG held a big press conference and the news was in all the papers. In fact, I’m almost sure I saw the actual live broadcast of the press conference when I was sick and stayed home from school that day.
In 1965, Congress passed the first law requiring a warning label on cigarette packages. My dad quit smoking in 1968 because he knew he might get lung cancer if he continued this habit. My sister and I were frequently embarrassed by my dad in the late 1960s when we would go to restaurants because he would strike up conversations with smokers at adjacent tables about the dangers of cigarette smoking. He was positively “evangelical” about it.
You can’t make a credible argument that adults don’t know about the dangers of smoking or that they are somehow being “killed” by smoking in the same way that babies are being killed by abortion. The only people in America over the age of ten that are unaware of the health risks of smoking are those people in a coma.
At any rate, I’ll keep you posted on my new adventures with Ron Sider. He had some interesting things to say when I heard him speak at Denver Seminary and I’d like to see where he goes with some of those ideas. Hopefully his analysis will be more enlightening than what I’ve encountered in Chapter 1.
As always, your comments are welcomed and encouraged.
Mike…
…indeed
…you ARE a theological chef
…always stirring things up
…and the fare is always tasty
…so will there be ripe or rotten apples on the Sider menu, in your opinion, of course
Hey Mike: I’ll admit the smoking thing was a little crazy, but I complete support this notion of a broader meaning for the term “pro-life”, which I think is what he’s getting at.
A quick example: If your issue is the ending of a helpless, defenseless life, and the decision to end that life being made by someone else, you must feel the same way about innocent children killed in war time. How come we don’t get upset and carry signs around about that?
I like Sider. He’s still sometimes a little too “Capital E Evangelical” for me, but I appreciate that he’s taking very provocative positions, and trying to do so from inside the camp, as it were.
Hi Mike,
Not having read Sider’s book I can’t really comment on where he actually goes with this, but wonder if Mike Todd isn’t right that the issue is the relative silence from evangelicals on critical life issues like “collateral damage,” especially in wars that strain historic Christian “Just War” doctrine to the breaking point and the deaths of 23,000 daily to hunger related causes. Damages our credibility mightily.
Wes … thanks for the encouraging words about my blogging efforts especially since you probably disagree with many of the viewpoints I express. You are a gracious man.
Mike and Marty … thanks for the challenging words. In part, I write to clarify my thinking and your comments and objections are immensely helpful in that regard. You too are gracious men.
Mike and Marty are both right. Sider’s larger point is that evangelicals are not consistently pro-life. He is not alone in making this allegation. It is a common complaint by a number of well-known evangelicals. Sider’s poor choice of examples aside, we can deal with the larger question.
Mike and Marty bring up the question of innocent civilians killed in war as a better example of how evangelical Christians have been inconsistently “pro-life”. In general, Evangelicals actively oppose abortion but don’t actively oppose war.
Dealing with the question of civilian deaths in war is fraught with danger. Such deaths are unspeakably tragic and evil. Any attempt to deal with the issue intellectually runs the risk of seeming indecent and insensitive.
In addition, I have lived my whole life safely insulated from these kinds of injustices. I’ve never lived in a situation where I and my family might be caught in the crossfire of a military conflict.
While I’m sensitive to the emotional angst raised by civilian deaths in war and to my own lack of experience with it, I still think we need to bring intellect and reason to bear on these types of question. When I do so in this case, I can’t agree that civilian death in wartime is equivalent to infant death in abortion.
I find myself in a world where evil people sometimes come to power and commit acts of aggression against their own people and other nations. The Japanese rape of Nanking, the Nazi holocaust against Jews along with their invasion of surrounding countries and Saddam’s takeover of Kuwait come to mind.
When such events occur (Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur), innocent civilians are being killed by the aggressors. How do we as followers of Christ respond? Some Christians urge pacifism; not only as a personal response, but as the response that a society should make (pacifism does not necessarily mean inaction but various kinds of active, non-violent opposition). Others urge diplomacy and economic sanctions with military action as a last result. Some advocate more immediate and aggressive military intervention.
But notice that all of these responses will involve the death of additional innocent civilians. It is not true that military intervention will kill people and non-military strategies will not. Any response is going to lead to the additional loss of innocent life.
Pacifism takes time to work. The same is true of diplomacy and economic sanctions and you have the additional issue that the economic sanctions themselves are alleged to cause the deaths of innocent people. During this time lag, lots of innocent people are going to die.
I’ve read pacifist literature that argues that even Japanese and German aggression leading to WWII could have been countered with non-military strategies. While I disagree, it is undeniably true that such an approach would have resulted in lots of civilians deaths.
We can see this clearly by comparing Germany and the Soviet Union. Even with military intervention, six million Jews and other innocents died in Nazi concentration camps. Without military intervention, 20 million died in the Soviet gulags. Lots of innocent people died in both cases despite the two different responses to aggression and oppression.
The same is not true when it comes to abortion. If an abortion is performed, an innocent human dies. If an abortion is not performed, no one dies (I’m ignoring for the moment the fairly rare case where the life of the mother is endangered by a continued pregnancy; In such cases, as well as in the case of pregnancy resulting from rape or incest, I believe abortion must be allowed).
In short, the decision on abortion does not involve a choice between the lesser of two evils when it comes to the issue of the death of innocents while the decision about war/violence always does. I can be against abortion because eliminating it consistently saves innocent life. There is no position on war and aggression that always puts me on the side of innocent life.
Thus, I find Sider’s charge that evangelicals are inconsistent on the issue of life to be unfounded. He mistakes disagreement with inconsistency.
Another issue frequently raised in the “consistently pro-life” debate, is the issue of capital punishment. How can a Christian oppose abortion and support the death penalty? Isn’t this being inconsistent on the life issue?
No. The concept that unites my view on abortion and the death penalty is not life but justice. It is unjust to take an innocent human life that has done nothing wrong. It is unjust not to take the life of certain individuals who commit heinous acts. By justice here, I am referring to human/societal justice – not divine justice.
The broader “pro-life” debate raised by some evangelical authors seems more semantic than substantive to me. It arises from the fact that opponents of abortion have chosen the term “pro-life” to describe their position. I believe they have done so for marketing purposes. In the marketplace of ideas, it is better to be for things rather than against things. The “pro-life” moniker has allowed some pundits to seize on the word “life” to suggest a broader application. If abortion opponents had simply continued to describe themselves as “anti-abortion”, this semantic link between abortion and issues like war and capital punishment would not arise.
I’m not saying that there is not a link between issues like abortion, war and capital punishment. I’m just suggesting that “life” might not be the most appropriate unifying category under which to consider these topics.
Mike – a very rational argument.
My problem with it is that Jesus never seems to rely on my intelligence. He never said, “Think it through and do your best.” Or, “Consider your options and go with the one that kills the least people.”
I’m a simple guy, so I’m thankful he kept it simple. “Love your enemies.”
As I see it, when we create a world where we spend our time debating the relative differences in deaths, rather than turning our attention to what Jesus said, nothing happens. Abortions continue, the deaths of the innocent in war (and the guilty, for that matter) continue, and nobody even bothers to consider what Jesus actually did say. That is, at the very least, ironic.
To put it into the simplist terms for my own benefit, Jesus said, “Love your neighbour? Ha, that’s easy. I want you to love your enemies!” And we, when we fail to embrace an over-arching ‘pro-life’ ethos, end up discussing when it might be OK to kill our neighbours, or at least overlook their deaths. And our enemies we’ve written off a long time ago.
There is a huge disconnect there. My own view, as you’ve heard me ramble on about before, is that we are so far from the teachings of Jesus that we completely ignore this disconnect, and instead debate morality, which is of course very subjective.
A lot of very interesting thoughts.
I have read nothing of Ron Sider’s writing, so I am speaking out of ignorance. The comment comparing smoking and abortion strikes me as plain silly.
Innocent children killed in wartime generally are killed innocently. There are numerous historical exceptions, however: the Russians in Afghanistan with their little explosives made to look like toys; the actions of Hitler’s minions during the Holocost. Many more. But there is no way that responsibility for such behavior can be pinned on the U.S. government as some attempt to do. We have had our own bad apples, but their actions in no way reflect official policy. As Mike (Cooke) pointed out, much of our military behavior has been aimed at stopping the horrors perpetrated by others.
Mike (Todd): We haven’t met, so I am a little reluctant to reply to your comment. I’ll just point out that Scripture contain much more than just the red print. The red print is precious and important, but it has to be viewed as a part of the whole.
Innocent death is always a cause for sorrow. But far more tragic is death without Christ. If someone lives 40 extra years because he was rescued from starvation, what is that compared to eternal separation from God?
In a sense, Mike, your latest comments prove one of the issues I raised earlier in the discussion. I observed: “Dealing with the question of civilian deaths in war is fraught with danger. Such deaths are unspeakably tragic and evil. Any attempt to deal with the issue intellectually runs the risk of seeming indecent and insensitive.”
Your strong visceral and emotional response to my intellectual discussion of death by abortion versus death by war proves that I was justified in being cautious about engaging in such an activity! And on a visceral and emotional level, I completely agree with you. But, in other respects, I still have questions and disagreements with your comments.
You say that “Jesus never seems to rely on my intelligence”. Don’t you agree that we are to love God with “all our mind”? That is part of the greatest commandment and it seems especially germane to our discussion since Jesus mentions it in context with the other great commandment of loving neighbors as ourselves. You are appealing to the second of the two greatest commandments in your comments and thus it seems appropriate to keep the first one in view also. I don’t think that the mind/heart issue is an either/or – it is a both/and.
You say, “And we, when we fail to embrace an over-arching ‘pro-life’ ethos, end up discussing when it might be OK to kill our neighbors,…”. I agree that there may come a time when believers are called to literally lay down their lives for their neighbors and accept martyrdom. But Sider has written a book about how evangelicals should engage in politics. What is the relationship of church and state? The state is not the church and I think each has a different role.
A Christian might support actions by the state that would be completely inappropriate for an individual believer or for the church as a whole. And a Christian might support such actions by the state in obedience to her understanding that this is what Scripture requires or in obedience to her understanding that not all Christian virtues should be imposed on society.
For example, you might have decided for yourself that you would not react violently against an intruder that broke into your home and threatened your life. In following Jesus, you might sacrifice your own life rather than being forced to kill another human being. But, do you think that this should be public policy? Do you think that Canada should pass a law that requires all its citizens to adopt pacifism and non-violence if a drug-crazed homicidal rapist breaks into their homes and threatens their families?
This all goes back to the issue I raised in my inaugural post on this blog just over a year ago (December 7, 2007 – Is Jimmy Carter Promoting an American Theocracy?): How should Christian values affect public policy? This is what Sider is discussing in his book and this is what I was reacting to.
I hear you Mike. This isn’t easy stuff.
I guess what I’m saying is that I have enough to worry about trying to live the life that Jesus asks of me. I’m not qualified to comment on public policy. I understand that’s what Sider might be writing about, but I’m moving past that pretty quickly.
I’ll add that part of Tom’s comment makes my eyebrow twitch. There is more than the red letters in Scripture, but I don’t worship Scripture, I worship Christ. Love your neighbour/love your enemy is brutally clear and simple. And yet we often fail miserably at it. Lets not be too quick to move on to another portion of Scripture that might be more palatable.