Evangelism and social action fallacies

It is sometimes said that modern conservative Evangelicals have a problem about relating words (evangelism) and deeds (social action), which would be unrecognisable to, say, an ancient Hebrew or many in the Majority World today, who are less dualistic, more integrated in their understanding and not guilty of this false dichotomy.

However, it is clearly true that evangelism and social action can be distinguished. Just to label their separation a false dichotomy is not enough. If they are inseparable, then we must show how and understand carefully how to relate them in practice.

And so what if it is “Western” to sharply distinguish words and deeds? We would not want to fall into a genetic fallacy: even if it is nasty old dualistic Western or Greeks philosophers who divide words and deeds and so on, that does not in itself discredit the distinction – or show us that we should just lump together evangelism and social action somehow.