The Anti-Manichaeist

I received a copy of the latest Prism E-pistle from Evangelicals for Social Action.
It included a letter from Ron Sider about Bush´s budget proposal. He wrote,

“When the king is concerned with justice, the nation will be strong, but when he is only concerned with money, he will ruin his country.”
Proverbs 29:4
…
Every budget is a moral document. Your family budget reflects what you value. President Bush’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2006 tells us what he values. As the House and Senate reshape the president’s proposed budget, they are telling us what they value.
…
Do evangelical Christians really want to support tax cuts for millionaires paid for by cuts in food stamps, healthcare, housing vouchers, and nutritional programs for poor Americans? Is that the meaning of compassionate conservatism? If evangelicals want to implement the new NAE declaration’s call to empower the poor to improve their circumstances, they will have to demand that the president and Congress reprioritize the 2006 budget. Eliminating proposed tax cuts for the richest 5 percent of Americans would make available tens of billions of dollars to empower the poor.

I appreciate how Sider sets out facts of the situation in the US and the consequences of the BushAdmin´s policies. I also went here and wrote letters to my elected officials that concerned my desire for better leadership that would make me able to be more proud about my country and its future. I also decided to write another letter to Ron Sider, as I think he and the NAE could help the situation some by taking a different tact to change the dynamics of US politics.
Here is what I wrote to Sider:

I was thinking/hoping that it would be good if Sider would perhaps admit that he was wrong before the elections to accept hook, line and sinker the cultural wars issues as they were framed by the religious right. He gave an awful amount of weight to these issues in his letter to e-pistle readers as part of an NAE-style “biblically-balanced” approach. I still don´t understand why we do not push to have these issues reframed so that they do not continue to crowd out so many other issues from being decisive in our elections!

I would suggest that in the future, it might be wise not to have the NAE be a special interest group. What if the NAE did more to condense and inform objectively its members of the political records of politicians, without assessing for them what a biblically-balanced choice would be, and tried to ensure more ethical conduct by the parties during elections? Now, that would do more to improve our witness to others than picking sides on various issues. If we’re going to champion reforms, perhaps it would be better to concentrate on reforms at level of the rules of the game. The key sorts of reforms I think would improve our witness to others would be to help reduce the importance of the freedom of $peech in our gov’t and to foster a more viable multi-party system.

We don´t need to claim to have “the” biblically-balanced approach to political activism. All we need to do is to affirm that an active involvement in politics can be glorifying to God if done in an ethical manner that is not dogmatic and seeks to widen the range of interests that potentially can be served by the government.

dlw

I´ve written to Sider before. I regret I did not get to talk to him much on this when I was at his conference this spring. He carries an enormous weight on his back as he strives along with Wallis to perform the prophetic role for the US and, particularly, white USEvangelical Christianity. But he don´t draw attention to the fact that we are all fallible in the specific sorts of reforms we advocate and how we frame and evaluate them. He, as an intellectual/analyst/activist, can point better to the consequences of how we act or fail to act on these matters and he, as a man of faith, can and should point out the need to appeal to biblically grounded moral norms to evaluate proposed policy changes. But we still see as through a mirror darkly, and should not privilege the theologian/analyst/activists judgment in our final considerations as to what Jesus would do.

dlw