November 29, 2009, here on slacktivist: Pulling a Lieberman
Ron Sider’s book Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger is an unflinching, uncompromising assessment of the Christian obligation to share with those in need. I know of few people able or willing to live up to that book’s powerful call to sacrificial generosity, but Sider himself has done so for many decades. He is a gentle, irenic man and a Good Man.
But he is a Good Man in a Bad System — a system that requires a pervasive and unavoidable kind of badness that seeps into and infects the good of Good People trapped within it, preventing them from even imagining any alternative. …
I have enormous respect and affection for Ron Sider, so much so that my regard for him is able to withstand even something like his dismaying endorsement of the overwrought, corrupt and corrupting “Manhattan Declaration.”
In partial defense of Ron, though, we should note that his signature and support were secured under false pretenses. It seems he was lied to.
The organizers of this right-wing manifesto du jour needed a token liberal to provide a bipartisan fig-leaf, so they turned to Ron Sider (about as close as the evangelical world allows to a liberal) to be their Lieberman. But to convince him to play this role, they had to lie to him.
I don’t know which or how many of the declaration’s three author-organizers did the actual lying. My money would be on convicted felon and would-be domestic terrorist Chuck Colson. (Yes, terrorist. Plotting to burn down the Brookings Institution in order to silence opposition from centrists is political terrorism.) The two Georges — Robert and Timothy — strike me as less cynical true believers. They’re more like the moral-philosopher equivalent of one of those physicists who becomes obsessed with his design for a perpetual motion machine — railing against friction and entropy and insisting that they’ll make the thing work some day.
But someone — one of those three — deliberately misled Ron Sider about the content and intent of the Manhattan Declaration and Sider, to his discredit, took their word for it.
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