Evangelical author Tom Sine called for a radical “third-wave Christian citizenship” to correct flaws of both the right and left at a Baptist ethics conference. Sine, author of “Cease Fire: Searching for Sanity in America’s Culture Wars,” spoke at a “Leadership Through the Culture Wars” conference sponsored by the Baptist Center for Ethics.
Sine said churches in America are being torn apart by polarization between liberals and conservatives. “Many people, mainline Protestants, Catholics and Evangelicals, are looking for a new place to stand,” Sine said. “They are not happy with the polarities of the right and left.” Sine offered “not a middle position between right and left” but “a radical biblical alternative” to both positions.
“My contention is neither side takes Scripture seriously,” Sine said. The Religious Right takes the Bible “literally,” Sine said, but doesn’t bring it to bear on public policy issues such as poverty and injustice. Churches on the left, meanwhile, have their identity tied up in being “social progressives,” even if it means ignoring moral teachings of Scripture, he said. “Many of our understandings of discipleship, missions and social responsibility simply don’t square with the Bible,” he said.
Sine contended that the greatest threat to Christianity is not “secular humanism,” as Francis Schaeffer argued, but an “enlightened secularism” that defines “a better future largely in economic terms.” The “real secularism” threatening American Christians consists of “materialism, individualism and consumerism,” Sine said.
“We really have not done the work we need to do to set our folks free,” Sine said. He cited “the outrageous busy-ness” that results in people being preoccupied with activities at the expense of time for Bible study and devotion. “The enemy is not the liberal on one end or the Religious Right on the other,” Sine said. “Pogo said it best, ‘We have seen the enemy and he is us.'”
Sine called for a “third-wave Christian citizenship” to transcend debate between the left and right. “We’re using a two-legged milk stool,” Sine said, by emphasizing a faith that focuses on “getting our hearts right with God” and “getting our moral lives cleaned up. God wants to define our cultural values, too,” he said.
Sine suggested that individuals and families write “mission statements” that “challenge people to whole-life discipleship and whole-life stewardship.” He also challenged tithing as a standard for stewardship, citing a growing consensus among biblical scholars that “there’s no basis in the New Testament
for 10 percent stewardship.” He suggested “calling our people not out of guilt but out of opportunity.” Sine called for a “reorganization of how we use our time and money” that includes spending less on one’s self and more on others. “I’m convinced we could help a new generation create a way of life that is more festive and celebrative, where they put first things first, where Jesus’ vocation is our vocation,” he said.
Sine said Americans often compartmentalize religion by thinking about their faith only a few hours a week and not allowing it to make a difference in their daily lives. “I don’t think the first call of the gospel is to proclamation,” Sine said. “I believe in evangelism, … (but) I think the first call of the gospel is incarnation.” American Christians need “to flesh out something that has the character” of the Kingdom of God, Sine said. “We desperately need to rediscover the meaning of community. We are going to need some new metaphors,” he said. “The church we need for the new millennium is not a building we go to once a week.”
Sine suggested beginning “cooperative communities” as an alternative to
suburban living. A starter home in Seattle, he said, costs an average of
$150,000. Financed over 30 years, the accumulated cost is $500,000, he
observed. By contrast, homes can be built in a “six-plex” with common
activity areas for about $60,000, financed over five years. Eventually, a husband and wife living there could afford to cut back to 20 hours of work per week, freeing up more time to spend with children and for ministry. “We’re going to have to think that radically,” he said.
“The single-family detached lifestyle is the most expensive way to live,” Sine said. “If we don’t create a community where people start to care for one another, we don’t have a future.” “We need to be the part of the community that stands against the status quo,” Sine said. “We need to be a subversive community.”
Sine said Christians “need to be leaven in society,” but should not equate patriotism with doing the will of God. “We need to realize we are called to work beyond making America great. The Bible makes clear that God’s agenda is a transnational agenda. My first allegiance is not only to God, but to the international community of God. It’s not the United States of America,” he said. “The kind of ‘America-first’ thing doesn’t work for me.”
Christians need to avoid the polarities of right and left in public life and “work in a spirit of reconciliation,” Sine said. He also said Christians “should not be afraid” of losing in the political sphere because “our trust isn’t in a free market or left-wing politics; our trust is in God.”
Sine urged Baptists to re-educate people in their churches who have been co-opted by the Religious Right. “Everybody assumes the Religious Right and Christian Coalition speak for all of us,” he said, but polls say most born-again Christians disagree with those groups on many issues. “We have lost our voice,” Sine said. “The Religious Right has educated our people.”
Evangelicals need to “take back education” of their own constituencies, Sine said. “Our people have been educated to the politically correct views of the Religious Right. We have done a lousy job of educating our constituency. We have let others do it for us.”
By adopting “a new biblical vision that simply transcends those of the right and the left and the American dream,” Sine said, “I think the people of God could be the people who help birth a new dream not only for America’s future but for the future of a world as we enter the new millennium.”