Forty years ago, says Ron Sider, not many evangelical Christians talked about the poor or about social justice, preferring instead to emphasize individual salvation and personal transformation. Thanks to his 22 books and numerous public appearances, all of this has changed.
In the late 1960s, after completing his M.Div. and Ph.D. at Yale, Sider moved to inner city Philadelphia, where he witnessed so much poverty, racism, and economic injustice that he began to develop a biblically grounded response to those problems. In 1973 he and other similarly concerned Christians founded Evangelicals for Social Action. Sider urged evangelicals to think about "how to put together word and deed, spiritual transformation and cultural transformation. My goal then, as it is now,” he tells RBL, “was to help the evangelical Christian world think not just in terms of personal salvation, but also in terms of systems."
In 1977 Sider published what became a kind of manifesto for the evangelical commitment to social and economic injustice. Now translated into nine languages, with lifetime sales of more than 400,000, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: Moving from Affluence to Generosity (Thomas Nelson) was hailed by Christianity Today magazine as one of the 100 most influential books in religion in the 20th century. Sider condemned the ways in which evangelical Christians' emphasis on materialism, a misunderstanding of the biblical idea of prosperity, and an emphasis on personal salvation not only kept them from witnessing the poverty in their own communities and in the world, but also from understanding the compelling biblical teachings about the poor.
In Good News and Good Works: A Theology for the Whole Gospel (Baker 1999), Sider called the church to embrace evangelism, social engagement, and spiritual formation. "Jesus commands me to care about the whole person," says Sider, "and my first commitment is to love the whole person—not just his soul alone or his physical needs alone—and out of that commitment grows my emphasis on overturning social structures that foster inequality."
Sider's concern with the whole person and with justice is at the center of his new book, Fixing the Moral Deficit: A Balanced Way to Balance the Budget (IVP, Feb.). He writes, "From one end of the Bible to the other, we hear a powerful summons to have a special concern for poor and needy persons. We need to know how to empower poor people effectively, and so we need to continually ask, what is justice?" After exploring some of the reasons the U.S. government budget is out of balance—income inequality, for example—Sider zeroes in on ways that biblically based ideas of justice can help reform the crisis.
"Justice," he says, "does not require equal income or equal wealth, but it does demand that all have access to society's productive resources so that if they act responsibly, they can earn their own way and be dignified members of society.”
