The Great Debate: Gary North vs. Ron Sider (April 1981)
This debate took place at Gordon-Conwell Seminary in Massachusetts.
The story behind the debate is strange -- providential, really. In January 1981, a Gordon-Conwell student telephoned me to invite me to come to speak. I replied, "Only if it's to debate Ron Sider." He immediately replied, "We want you to debate Ron Sider."
I immediately called David Chilton, who was a fine writer and a skilled self-taught economist. I had my Institute for Christian Economics pay him to write a refutation of Ron Sider's best-selling book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: A Biblical Study (1977), which was jointly published by the Protestant evangelical publishing house, InterVersity Press, and the Catholic publishing house, Paulist Press.
I told him what I wanted. Each chapter had to begin with a quotation from what Sider had written. Then he was to cite a text from the Bile that clearly held the opposite position.
I put him on a tight deadline. I had to have the book ready to sell on the evening of the debate. He met the deadline. So did the typesetter, David Thoburn.
I provided the title for the book: Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt-Manipulators: A Biblical Response to Ronald Sider. I also told the cover artist what I wanted. My goal for book covers was to get the book's thesis across in five seconds. The artist did a fine job.
We had no time to spare. Several cartons of Chilton's book arrived at Gordon-Conwell on the day before the debate.
At the debate, we were sitting side by side at a table at the front of an auditorium. I placed a copy of the book next to me. Sider looked at it. He asked: "How long has this been out?" I answered: "One day."
I sold them at a table in the back of the room after the debate for $1 each. That would be about $2.80 today. I priced them at a loss to sell as many as possible.
In 1982, InterVarsity Press released a new edition of Sider's book. It proclaimed this: "revised & expanded." It also promised on the back cover to answer his critics. One critic was not mentioned: Chilton.
I had Chilton revise his book to answer Sider's second edition. It was published in 1982. Sider wrote a third edition in 1985. I had Chilton write a third edition in 1985 which answered Sider's third edition. You can download it for free here.
I was prepared to have Chilton keep responding until Sider stopped revising his book.
In 1990, the third edition of Sider's book was reprinted by Word Books in Waco, Texas. It did not sell well. Word Books dropped it.
In 1997, a 4th edition appeared, promoted as the 20th-anniversary edition. It was published on May 1. In the April 28 issue of Christianity Today, there was an interview with Sider, "Conversations: The Rich Christian: How Ron Sider has changed in the 20 years since his first book." In that issue, there was an announcement of Chilton's death. In this edition, there was still no reference to Chilton.
In the 4th edition, he backed away from the anti-free market rhetoric of the earlier editions. He offered recommendations for reform. Some of them had been recommended by Chilton in 1981. I wrote an article about Sider's new outlook in the October/November issue of my bi-monthly newsletter, Biblical Economics Today: "Ron Sider Has Moved in the Right Direction." Read it here.
Herbert Schlossberg, author of Idols for Destruction (Nelson, 1983), in 2010 wrote an article on Sider's revised position: "The Evolution of Ronald J. Sider." You can read it here. He summarized the Sider-Chilton debate.
Arrayed against Sider’s approach in the early years was almost nothing, until David Chilton wrote Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators, published in 1981. When Sider published a new edition of Rich Christians, it was ostensibly to answer his critics, but Chilton’s name was conspicuously absent from the book. Chilton answered Sider’s second edition with his own new edition of Productive Christians (1982), and Sider’s third with his own third (1985).
Sider suffered from poor timing. He debated me four months after Ronald Reagan's inauguration as President. White Protestant Christian evangelical opinion after World War II had been pro-free market. The lure of the New Deal was over. Jimmy Carter briefly got the support of millions of them in 1976, but in 1980, a majority of those evangelicals who had voted for Carter in 1976 reversed course. They have yet to go back.
Chilton's book sold more copies than any book the Institute for Christian Economics published.