Ron Sider's unedited words to conservatives

Next Monday is the fourth anniversary of Ron’s death in 2022. He was liberal, the author of Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. I was conservative. I liked Ron a lot and interviewed him.

In 2014, during the closing days of the Bush/Obama era, I interviewed Ron Sider, founder of Evangelicals for Social Action, in front of largely conservative students at Patrick Henry College in Virginia. In 2016 the Donald Trump era began, and the rest is hysteria. Here are Ron’s unedited comments. My questions are boldfaced.

It’s a real privilege to be here with Ron. We occasionally have some political disagreements.

RS: Once in a while.

MO: Once in a while. I do esteem Ron as a person who believes strongly in Christ, continues to live in such a way that shows his faith, and is a very honest and faithful Christian. Regardless of our political disagreements, I hold him out to you as a person who knows how to live a life dedicated to Christ. So thank you for your 40 years since founding ESA. And let’s go back. You were born in September 1939 in Ontario, 275 acre farm. So tell us about farming and about being a hockey player.

RS: (laughs) Um, I grew up on a farm. My dad was selected by lot to become a preacher as he was a full-time farmer. He only went to grade 8, so it was important that his kids went on to high school. I discovered that I liked all that, so I went on beyond high school. But I loved the farm and every Canadian boy plays hockey. And I loved to play, which I did all through high school. Even though I had to wear glasses and we didn’t have helmets. They flew off but I never got my eyes poked out.

MO: Wearing glasses did not hurt you in hockey playing the way my poor eyesight hurt me in baseball. You were still able to shoot and skate.

RS: It was a Christian high school and only a hundred students, so you didn’t have to be really good to play. So I played forward and loved it.

MO: You went to Waterloo Lutheran College and thought about becoming a high school history teacher perhaps. Then something changed to increase your ambition. Not to say that there’s anything wrong with being a high school history teacher… .

RS: I discovered that I liked school. And so, I decided that I should. I was getting very good grades, so my third year I decided I needed to get straight A’s because I wanted to get into a good grad school. And I was grateful to God when that happened.

MO: I understand that a person some of you have met because he is occasionally here at Patrick Henry and teaching – John Warwick Montgomery – had a big influence on your life…

RS: In my first year at college, it was a nominally Lutheran college, but really it was a secular school by then. In my first two years, I was struggling with whether or not I could be an honest thinker in the modern world and still believe in historic Christianity. And John Warwick Montgomery came in as my major history professor, or one of them, in my last two years. And his whole apologetic, grounded in an historical argument, which his evidence was quite good. If you don’t have a bias against the possibility of miracles, the historical evidence is quite strong that Jesus was alive on the third day, and that was very important to me intellectually. And I continue to use that apologetic in certain circles.

MO: As you’re going to college and graduate school at Yale, what was your developing view of government, and how trustworthy and efficient it is in carrying out certain public purposes?

RS: Well, I don’t think that I had a very sophisticated view of that at that point in my life. I did have a developing sense of call in the latter part of my 6 years at Yale to encourage the evangelical world to be engaged in issues of social justice. I thought particularly about racism and economic justice. White evangelicals were at best silent and often on the wrong side during King’s, Dr. King’s, great crusade. And, um, we had a black landlord and landlady, the last two years in New Haven, we sat with him the night Dr. King was killed and was developing a sense of the tragedy of racism in American culture. So was developing a sense of a call to help evangelicals in those kinds of issues. It’s, uh, over the last 40 years that I’ve developed, I think, a more sophisticated answer to the question that you’ve given.

Let me just take one step back. Any issue that I try to deal with, I try to start with a biblical framework. I think, for any issue of public policy, every person who thinks about it, whether they’re conscious of it or not, starts with a normative framework. And I want to start with a biblically informed, normative framework. And, when you do that, it seems to me, you want to say two things basically about the role of government. One, is that government should be limited. I think the two basic reasons for that, there’s a positive reason and a negative reason. The positive reason is that God created every person in the image of God and we’re all called to be stewards and to shape the created order. If all the decision are made a few powerful people than most of us cannot fulfill our creation mandate and we can’t shape history the way God intends us to.

The negative reason is sin. In a fallen world, you concentrate power and you get totalitarianism. Concentrated, unchecked power will always be used for the selfish advantage of the powerful. So, government must be limited. But the other side of what I think the Bible says is that government has a positive role, not just making sure that the judicial system is run fairly, although that’s important. But to empower poor people, to step in if there’s need and people are hungry, but especially to empower people.

I like to say that my basic definition of economic justice comes from going back to the Old Testament, to an agricultural society, looking at what happens to the land. When the children of Israel move into the land, a few wealthy people don’t own all of it, the government doesn’t own all of it, or much of it, what you have is every family getting its own land—a fundamentally decentralized economic system. And then the prophets shout and scream and the time of the kings when a few powerful people, sometimes by legal trickery, sometimes by other ways, but they’re getting the land and the poor people don’t have the resources and the prophets say, “the country is going to go into captivity because of this economic oppression and idolatry. But when the messiah comes, everybody sits under his own vine and his own fig tree. They’ve got the land again.” So my principle that I get out of that, my brief definition of economic justice, is that God wants every family and every person to have access to the productive resources, so that if they act responsibly, they can earn their own way and can be dignified members of their community.

Now, I think it’s a very important role of government to try to set up frameworks and structures and measure that enable people to have that genuine access. I don’t believe in welfare rograms that increase dependency, although I think that if people are hungry, we out to feed them. I think the essential role of government, is yes, limited, but yes, to do the things that we need that the government alone can do, to in fact empower poor people.

MO: Say a farmer has a 275 acre farm and, biblically instructed, he and his employees do not get every last crop. They leave the corners of the field there for people to come and glean. And if they have fruit trees, they leave fruit on the upper branches. People have to work to climb up, to glean, but it’s there so people aren’t going to starve. A system like that encourages charity on the part of the landowner. He isn’t maximizing his economic advantage. He’s leaving some for people to work and glean. It also creates a certain sense of thankfulness among the people who are gleaning, thankfulness to God and perhaps thankfulness toward the farmer. They have a relationship between them. Isn’t that better, when you have a cheerful giver and a cheerful recipient, rather than a grumpy taxpayer and a recipient who is annoyed…

RS: And you talk about that in your “Tragedy of American Compassion,” and I think you’re half right that the side that you just talked about is very important. And it’s better for private programs helping poor people to require work, some kind of contribution. It’s better for their dignity, and it’s better for their own sense of not falling a dependency.

The other side, if I may say so, you miss is the structural side. There are structural causes of poverty. With African Americans it was slavery and then history racism they didn’t get their 40 acres and a mule. You know, the way white farmers. The government wisely, when white farmers moved across the country, didn’t have huge plantations. They in fact divided, every farmer could get his own land. That was a great measure of economic decentralization. But native Americans and African Americans, there are structural problems that also need tob e wrestled with. And I would say with regard to specifically the Old Testament.

The Old Testament not only says that God doesn’t like poverty and that some people are poor because they are lazy and that’s wrong, they should work hard, and it also says, not only that you let the edges of your fields be gleaned by people who are poor, but that every 50 years the land goes back to the original owners. So there are structural mechanisms which the rulers were supposed to carry out, that would in fact make sure that you didn’t get a situation that goes on in definitely where a few people have all the basic capital, which is what land is in an agricultural society. So it’s not just you can glean, but at the jubilee you get your land back. And at the sabbatical, every seven years, if you’ve fallen into slavery because of poverty, you’re freed with the resources you need to earn your own way.

MO: Thinking about structural problems: Agreed that slavery and then the continued economic subjugation of African Americans was terrible. Would we agree, possibly, that a huge structural problem in American society right now is the public school system and the lack of vouchers, so that lots of people in inner cities, and often particularly minorities, are trapped in terrible schools and don’t get what they need to advance economically?

RS: I think one of the huge injustices is precisely is the dreadful schools that large numbers of African Americans, latinos, and poor whites have to go to in our great cities. I’ve lived lower middle class sections of Philadelphia for most of my adult life. I’ve seen people striving hard to make it. If you compare the kind of quality education that white suburbanites get to what large numbers of inner city African Americans and latinos get, it’s simply outrageous and immoral.

MO: What if you compare the education that some inner city people get in good Christian schools, compared to what they get in their local public schools?

RS: Catholic schools and some other evangelical schools, and unfortunately too many of those evangelical schools were started because they didn’t like the end of racism in the South. But they are often good schools that do often help minority kids. And they often do it with less money and are more successful. So in my chapter on education in my book, “Just Generosity: A New Vision for Overcoming Poverty in America,” I say that not only is it absolutely intolerable to have this ongoing dreadful education for so many minority kids, and it’s wrong to be spending a lot more money on white suburban education than on city education, and that’s still unbalanced in that case. But we also have two proposals for overcoming the awful education system today: one is reform the education system and the other is vouchers. I say, I don’t know which is finally better. I certainly don’t know enough to say, “let’s go this way.” But I say, “Catholic schools, at lower cost, are having such success, that we ought to at least have a big test.”

So let’s spend 5 years, let’s take the very best reform proposals to reform the public schools and let’s test those in a dozen kinds of school districts—big cities, and smaller. And let’s take the best educational voucher approach and let’s test that. Whatever works better for minorities and poor folk, let’s do that. I do have a hunch that vouchers would work better, but I don’t enough to say we should go that way. It’s striking to me that precisely teacher’s unions don’t want to have the test. It’s also striking, that at least in some polls, the people who are most in favor of vouchers are African Americans, at least between the ages of 25 and 35. Let’s at least have a major test and let’s do what’s best for poorer people.

But one part of it is certainly be to correct the injustice where wealthy white suburban folks spend vastly more money per person in their educational system than inner city African American kinds of communities. If white evangelical would say, ‘that’s wrong and immoral and we demand equal money being spend across the state,’ that would make a difference. But they’re not doing that.

MO: Let me continue with that voucher question. Your hunch is the vouchers would work better. It would be good to experiment, but that’s your hunch. What about in social services, for example in fighting drug addiction? I’ve seen that a lot of places, including Teen Challenge places, do a lot better job of fighting addiction, at a much lower cost than government financed programs. Would you be in favor of extending vouchers to social service programs, and in what areas do you think it would be most effective?

RS: Let me start that by saying that I can blame you, or give you the credit for some extent, for voting for George W. Bush in 2000.

MO: This is a shock.

RS: Dr. Olasky, as I’m sure you all know, was very instrumental in persuading the government of Texas to embrace compassionate conservatism. And I genuinely hoped that here we had a Republican who really cared about the poor who would come up with a different set of proposals. So those silly Democrats don’t know how to do this, they always mess this up, but we’re going to do this in a better way. I have to say that I was disappointed, although I do think that President Bush did a very important thing in his White House office in his whole emphasis on expanding charitable choice so that private, faith-based organizations could access government money. I think he did a great job with that. I knew all the heads of that office and was incredibly supportive. I’m delighted whenever we can get private organizations to do more to deal with social needs—poverty and so on.

But it seems to me, totally impossible, for a couple reasons, for those organizations to take over all of that. There are about 5 federal anti-poverty programs, if we were to privatize all of those things, each congregation would have to add about a million and a half to its budget every year. I don’t know if your congregation could do that, but mine certainly couldn’t. Lawndale is a marvelous example of 30 doctors or more, thousands of people cared for every year, in a Christian, private medical program, but almost all this money comes from the federal government, from Medicaid. Or to put it differently, we have thousands of organizations in churches providing food aid, but all of those organizations provide 5 percent of food aid every month. Ninety-five percent comes from the government.

And so, yes, as soon as Christians are more willing to be generous, and expand their programs, I am eager to have them take over more of those services. I think that the more you take care of the body and the soul, you get better results. But Christians are too selfish and they don’t give enough to do it, and two, the needs are so vast that it’s so totally out of the question in the foreseeable future, five or ten years to have government step back and let private agencies do it.

MO: Let’s talk about the funding for a minute. I think we’d agree regarding one of the equitable things: if people give money to charitable organizations and are in a very low tax bracket, they may get nothing off their taxes, or maybe they’ll get 15 percent. Other people will get 30 percent, 40 percent off their taxes with state taxes kicking in. Wouldn’t it be better to have an across the board tax credit of perhaps, 50 percent, for everyone giving to charitable groups?

RS: I must confess, I haven’t tought about that, but my first reaction is yes, absolutely. Even with the present system, I’m opposed to President Obama’s wanting to cut off at a certain level the tax deduction for people who give to charitable causes. I think that’s a mistake. We want more institutions in private society, not less. But I like your idea.

MO: So, and this is one of the things that we talked about a lot in the Bush campaign. Once going to Washington, it changed. Moving to the present: President Obama clearly is in a bad state right here. He’s being reviled for having made promises which clearly the federal government is not keeping. What would you advise him to do to get out of this mess where he now resides?

RS: You know, I don’t pretend to have a quick, brilliant answer for all the problems in Washington.

MO: Let’s have the type of thing I like to propose: a slow, stupid answer.

RS: Let’s take a few steps back. It seems to me that, that we’ve had a situation, still do, where 50 million or so Americans, poor Americans, have no health insurance. Studies show they don’t go to a doctor as frequently, they don’t get as good care, they die young etc. It seems to me that’s fundamentally immoral. Health insurance for every individual is a pro-life issue that every evangelical ought to be insisting is absolutely crucial in their political engagement. I don’t know how you can be committed to the sanctity of human life and not say that health care, which in fact preserves one’s life, is not a crucial concern.

MO: Say there’s the requirement that all individuals should have access to health care when they are having health difficulties, and that should be across the board, which is not quite the same thing as health insurance. We in a sense already had that system, a very inefficient system of emergency units of hospitals.

RS: Yeah, and everybody agrees that in the current system, everybody has access, but the truth they don’t go as early and it costs more, so it’s bad for them and it’s bad for all of this.

MO: It’s a miserable system.

RS: I would like to see a really serious Republican proposal that says: “Everybody in this richest nation in history must have access to quality health care. And here’s how to do it.” We don’t have that. Absent that, I’ve been supportive of the basic move of the Affordable Care Act to say we’ll have at least 30 million more covered. I find it absolutely abominable that the provisions in that act, which would make millions of additionally poorer people across the country be able to get Medicaid and therefore much better health coverage—Southern states where evangelicals are most dominant are precisely the states that are not accepting that Medicaid. Now if they had a better proposal and said, “we’re going to cover all of those people and here is a better way to do it,” that would be one thing. But it’s just not there. I find that simply, flatly ignoring one of the most important things that the Bible says, that God is on the side of the poor and God measures society based on what they do to the people on the bottom.

MO: You’re saying that you find vouchers useful and your hunch is that they would work educationally. Could you extend that to medical care? And if Republicans are more likely to desire a decentralized approach like that, what advice would you give them so individuals and communities can do more and the government can do less?

RS: Well, I would say, “show me the plan and I may be excited by it.” But it’s also true that the Affordable Care Act, at a certain level, works with vouchers. Every person, depending on their income, gets a substantial amount from the government so that they can go out on the exchanges--and they’ve got some choices, I wish they had more, but in some states, a lot of choices—and they can buy this or that program. So that’s not totally devoid of a voucher approach. We have thousands of brilliant economists and health specialists who struggle with how to improve this system. And as a Christian theologian and ethicist, I don’t pretend to have that kind of detailed, sophisticated answer. I simply don’t get paid to do that and I don’t have the expertise.

MO: Above my pay grade too.

RS: What I’m clear on is: the richest nation in history ought to have a system where everybody has access to genuine, to genuine equality in healthcare. And that’s not there. And that’s immoral.

MO: OK. Should the government require that everyone be in a plan that includes contraceptives and abortifacients?

RS: No, I’m appalled. I’m very upset with that implementation of the act. Joshua Debois, who is a good friend, he was a head of the white house office of faith-based initiatives, and I know Josh fought hard inside the Obama administration against that particular proposal. That was a totally unnecessary battle that was, I think it was contrary to any reading of religious freedom. That was a mistake.

Marvin, I want to take us to another part of the current scene which I think is really crucial. And that is that, at this point in time, the country is more divided. Or, to put it differently, the extremes between the top and the bottom are worse than at any time since the Great Recession, and just before that in 1928. This country has less economic mobility—it’s harder to move up from being poor to middle class or whatever—than western Europe at this point in time. The richest one percent, in 1928, we’re getting about 28 percent of all the income in the country. IN the period of the 50s and 60s when the economy was growing faster than it has in the last 30 years, they were down to 10 percent. And the upper tax rate was higher. It’s very interesting to compare the 1950s to the 80s to the present. But from 1993 to 2007, half of all the income increase—the increasing income—went to the richest one percent. From 2003 to 2009, 65 percent went to the top one percent. And in the last couple years, about 93 percent of the increasing income went to the top one percent.

I think conservatives ought to be worried about that. That’s a centralization of power. Conservatives used to be good, in the 80s, when it was the Soviet Union and you had economic and political power centralized. And they were right, I would have agreed with them, that was a dangerous centralization of power. But right now we’ve got economic centralization of power. And the rich buy the election, so it’s political and economic centralization. I think conservatives ought to be worried about it now, just as they were worried about it when it was the Soviet Union. Where are the conservative proposals for correcting a fundamental injustice where so much of the wealth in the country goes to the richest one percent, who want to cut food stamps, who want to cut Pell grants that enable poor kids to go to college, so that they can have the access to knowledge, which is the basic capital in our society?

MO: This economic dislocation is real, and we also know that people who are raised in single parent situations have a harder time breaking out of poverty.

RS: I think that there’s no doubt that the poverty that we have in this country is caused by a bunch of factors. And one of them is the breakdown of wholesome, two parent families.

MO: Which government has contributed to.

RS: Some, certainly, but I also think there is an economic side. In 1970 more or less, the minimum wage would get you out of poverty. Today, the minimum wage isn’t close to getting you out of poverty. So, it seems to me, another part of genuinely reducing poverty is to say, ‘we ought to agree that anyone who works full time responsibly, should get let’s say, 25 percent above the poverty level and have health insurance.’ And we’re not even close to that. We have millions of people who are working full time and are not even close to getting out of poverty. WE could do things. We could increase the minimum wage some. We could increase the earned income tax credit some—some of the child assistance and so on programs refundable that are not. That way, make sure that anyone who works responsibly would get significantly out of poverty and health insurance.

Partly, we can’t do it because we’ve got a deficit and debt problem. And if you look at the causes of that, the three major causes are the Great Recession three years ago, and two unfunded wars under President Bush, and huge tax cuts that went largely to the richest 20 percent. So, I mean, those are the three major reasons. We don’t have the funding that would enable us to somewhat increase some measures which are linked to work responsibility so they don’t create dependency that would in fact help people at the bottom if they work responsibly.

MO: One thing liberals and conservatives have been able to agree on is the earned income tax credit. The EITC.

RS: Yeah.

MO: Because then you’re paying people to work. You’re not paying people not to work. And we’re agreed that family structure is important.

RS: The collapse of wholesome two-parent families is a huge cause of poverty in this country. And the sociological studies make that clear. And it’s still true that in some liberal circles, it’s almost impossible to get folks to admit that correlation. And it’s even harder to get them to accept proposals, governmental proposals that would work on that. Like making it more difficult for parents with under age children to get a divorce. That would be the same kind of policy change. So, I agree with part of it.

But there’s an economic side too. And there have been studies that show that when you have increased economic deprivation, recession and so on, you get more pressure on marriages and more divorces. It’s also true that I think it’s the average working person, working man, made more in real dollars in 1970 than today. Unions are vastly weaker, so the income of working people has not kept pace with the expansion of wealth in this country. And the economic side is also putting pressure on families.

So, we need ot do a whole bunch of things. Our religious leaders need to persuade evangelicals not to get divorced at the same rate as everyone else, for Pete’s sake. That would be a nice start. And persuade us to keep our marriage vows. That’s absolutely crucial and it’s crucial to overcoming poverty. But, so is the economic side. I don’t know why… Liberals deny one side, and conservatives deny the other, why can’t we see that both areas are important and we need to make changes in both areas?