Just Church (10)

Last week, we left off halfway through listing the things Social Justice types tend to believe. We had seen that they think justice is a thing that has to happen in this world, now; that the real problem of humanity is not sin but discrimination; and that this discrimination happens primarily through systems and institutions, so that everybody who is in those systems is guilty of the sin of “complicity” with racism, sexism, exclusion, or whatever new pejorative label the Left can come up with, even if they personally have never hurt anyone and hold no unkind attitudes at all. We saw that they view everybody as fated to be mere products of his or her particular social location in race, culture, sex, faith, sexual practice, disability ... or any other divisive category they can invent.

These are also things we’ve all seen in the secular world in the last few years — in education, in the mass media, in politics, in entertainment and the commercial world. But that’s not the complete list, of course. There are several other things Social Justice enthusiasts believe with equal fervency, and so we continue listing them this week.

Chapter 3: The “Nice” Lady (continued)

More Social Justice Beliefs

Praxis (action) is essential. This brings us to another characteristic of the “nice lady” types: a total inability to leave things alone. She cannot accept the status quo in any form for long. She is a natural meddler, an agitator, a troublemaker. Let one thing be “corrected” in the church according to her wishes, and she’ll find another soon. Social Justice cannot make do without agitation. It needs to upset and change things.

Now, she probably interprets this impulse in herself as good. She thinks of it as being a “change agent” or “making a difference”. But she’s actually channeling an old Marxist idea that has been refined and sharpened by modern Social Justice propaganda: there can never be just a social-change theory; there must be practice. Something that does not have praxis in it does not even count as Social Justice. As Marxist.org says, [praxis] “is really just another word for practice in the sense in which practice is understood by Marxists, in which neither theory nor practice are intelligible in isolation from the other.” Like the song says about love and marriage, “You can’t have one without the other.” No Social Justice advocate can fail to be an activist as well.

Now, there’s a sense in which a Christian also ought to be an activist. “Faith also, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself,” says James. But that is a different thing from being somebody who can never accept that anything good resides in the present state of affairs, and who can never leave well enough alone. The “nice lady” is a perpetual, restless stirrer-up of trouble. She’s bossy. She’s a busybody. She needs controversies in order to continue to be relevant and in order to continue to advance the things she believes in. So she’s a perpetual fault-finder; nothing is ever quite right, let alone good enough. She feels she has a perfect right to speak for others, advocating for what she sees to be their interests, even if they do not — and especially then, if she thinks they’re being “de-voiced” or “not heard”.

So look for trouble to come from her continually. Expect that no matter how many things you change in order to placate her, she will never be satisfied. She’s a hunter of discrimination; and if she can’t find some, she won’t hesitate to claim she perceives it there anyway.

Churches are hopelessly divided by identity groups with different privileges. Now we get to her effect on others. She believes that the church is divided up into identity groups, each with its own special interests, unique perspective and unique “voice”. (She alone, she thinks, has the proper sense of this, through her “critical consciousness”.) It’s not that all individuals are different or that each person has a unique voice, which would be true — instead, it’s that the groups do. These groups are factions that are inevitably at a kind of low-level war with each other, each vying for its piece of the political pie that’s to be had in any particular institution.

Even the peaceable members of these factions are not immune. They just don’t know they are estranged from the main body, because they have fallen prey to a “false consciousness”, where they no longer see their own “oppression” and maybe even “internalize” it and “collude” in it. But if they knew themselves as they should, they would wake up, identify with their group instead of the church, and start to campaign for their own best interests — as interpreted by Critical Theory.

Beneath this is a belief that what’s always going on is a struggle for power between these groups. (They get this from both Marx and Nietzsche, actually.) Only if all the interest groups struggle against one another will the status quo be properly smashed, and then good things will come out of that. That’s what she’s been taught to think, or at least to feel at a gut level, even if she doesn’t personally understand that.

Envy is a virtue. Now, the “nice lady” would never say that. It would be far too obvious that she was counseling sin. But it’s really true, even if she doesn’t realize it. You see, because the world is made up of these diverse groups who are inevitably divided as to their interests and in a low-level (or high-level) power battle with each other, they need to be taught by Social Justice that they are being mistreated.

How are they being mistreated? Because other people have more of something than they do. Inequality is proof positive, they believe, that somebody has been robbed or discriminated against. That realization justifies simmering resentment. Minority groups have every right to be mad, and every right to demand a bigger share of things. The engine of the whole program is resentment, bitterness, and envy; for them, these things are positive evidence of an awaking consciousness in minority groups. They’re waking up and realizing they’ve been ripped off.

That’s a sign of progress. That’s a sign of realism. That’s the thing we need if there’s to be disruption of the system, and change for the better. It justifies all the vengeful attitudes and actions that are to follow. So Social Justice has to encourage resentment.

Of course, this will produce a chemical change in your whole church. Even if they’ve gotten along fine before, different groups will begin to become suspicious and resentful of one another, and will be tempted to start to vie for power. The “nice lady” will preside over the whole scene, acting as mediator and spokesperson for an ongoing unpleasant spirit she will also nurture.

Authority is bad, rebellion is good. Social Justice is an ideology of rebellion. As we noticed earlier, it cannot stand the status quo. It also cannot accept existing authority and authority structures. It believes they are part of the poisonous status quo, the skeleton that holds up the discrimination and racism. Marxism believes in leveling things. Even in its old form, it held that the hierarchy between the worker, the capitalist and the aristocrat was the problem; but neo-Marxism regards all hierarchy as bad. If somebody is somehow “above” another in authority, that is tyranny, and it must be fought.

Of course, that means several bad things. Firstly, though scripture tells us the church should be governed by the mature (which it calls “elders”), and taught by its gifted teachers, the Social Justice person thinks any such difference is a case of exclusion, of “silencing” or of “marginalizing” somebody. The only explanation for authority is exploitation, oppression, arbitrariness, power politics, tyranny. All must be leveled.

Social Justice advocates hate hierarchies of all kinds, they say. They’re all cases of “oppression.” But their goal in leveling is not that things will stay leveled, but that a new hierarchy will be established. On the top will be Social Justicers themselves, and under them the “oppressed” minorities (each above the other), and men, conservatives, heterosexuals, capitalists and other “oppressors” on the dead bottom, paying the price of their crimes indefinitely. All are to be ruled by a single, centralized, all-powerful government that is presumed to be the incorruptible “democratic” voice of the people. Ironically, they don’t perceive this as a hierarchy at all.

But there is an important secondary effect of their nominal hatred of all hierarchies. It brings in the idea that quality in anything doesn’t matter. You see, as Jordan Peterson has astutely pointed out, hierarchies and ranks of things are only sometimes tyrannical; but they’re not primarily that; most of them are of quality. Because we have goals, purposes and standards, some things are better than others, and wherever we have those, hierarchies are naturally going to form. The only alternative is to have universally low quality in everything, a race to the lowest common denominator. So their new hierarchy is based on irrelevancies like the amount of melanin in a person’s skin, his or her sexual appetites, or the ability to repeat Social Justice doctrines, but not at all on things like intelligence, competence, education, achievements in the past, moral uprightness, experience or good character. Such obvious insights inevitably seem to escape Social Justice advocates.

So in the church, your people are going to begin to rebel. Never mind that the Lord says that rebellion is “as the sin of witchcraft”, it’s going to happen because the interpretation of inequality that the “nice lady” promotes invites everybody to believe they’re being ripped off and bullied if anybody is doing better in any way than they are. Authority and differences of quality are no longer to be trusted.

Justice means equity, not equality. The spirit of envy and the rebellion against existing hierarchies also explain another key Social Justice belief: that what is required in order to create justice is not that everybody gets an equal share, but that the privileged people, whoever they are, should be hated and caused to suffer and be made to pay tribute to those whom they have “oppressed” in the past.

Here, the wording is tricky. That’s typical of Social Justice language: they tend to mix up words you think you know with special words you don’t know, so you’ll buy in without understanding what they’re selling. As James Lindsay has so pithily put it, “They share your vocabulary, but not your dictionary.” They use words in very tricky ways. “Equity” is a case in point. It doesn’t mean “everybody gets the same”. They just want you to think it does. But they do not want equality.

Their theory is that if we make everything equal, we won’t atone for the sins of the past, and the people disadvantaged thereby will still be at a disadvantage; so we must actively suppress those who have been advantaged before, and squeeze them until all their advantages are gone and everybody ends up at the same level. Here’s the irony: for a time, we will have to discriminate against “whites” or men, or anybody who’s had the upper hand, and treat them badly, and take away their privileges, so that we can equalize the pack: and we (the Social Justice advocates) will tell them when that time comes. It’s not yet.

It’s quite explicit. Ibram Kendi, one of the key people in Social Justice theory today, has written:

“The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, ‘You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “You are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.’ As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in 1978, ‘In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.’ ”

So Social Justice turns out to be totally racist and discriminatory, not merely because it divides people up into warring camps, but because it punishes, disadvantages and actively abuses everyone it regards as privileged, making them do penance until Social Justice is satisfied. One might even say that affirmative action is an example of this. In the church, Social Justice becomes a kind of affirmative action program that pushes the white, male, traditional and conservative — and the older people — to the back, in order to pull new others to the front. In the process, not just authority but maturity and quality are sacrificed for the goal of “equity”. Merit, maturity, scriptural wisdom, proven quality — these things mean nothing anymore.

Guilt is historical, racial and permanent. We should stay with that thought for a minute, because there’s a connected piece of the puzzle. It’s okay to discriminate against “whites” or men, or conservatives or the status quo, on the following rationale: that they have benefited from a system that was oppressive. Even if the church is full of equality-loving, fair-minded, non-racist people today, the fact remains (as the quote above from Johnson in Kendi implies) that the existing system was forged by discrimination, and now still encodes that discrimination in its DNA.

So even if you never owned a slave, insulted a minority, or discriminated against anyone, you are still guilty for what happened. Haven’t you benefited from it? Now it’s time to atone. So you must own up to the sins of your fathers. It doesn’t matter, even, if your forefathers were never in this country when there was any slavery and never oppressed anyone, or came from a place where slavery and oppression were never practiced. It doesn’t matter if you just stepped off the immigration boat or airplane, or just walked across the border yesterday. Are you white, or maybe one of those (what they call) “white adjacent” populations, like Jews or the Chinese, who do well in the existing system? Are you male, heterosexual or fully-abled? Are you non-aboriginal? Well, then: you’re guilty anyway … guilty of colluding with the racist system, and accepting privileges. Do not even bother to protest.

You see, just as Social Justice propaganda uses resentment to mobilize minorities, it employs guilt to subdue the majority or the authorities. It relies on ginning up an abiding sense of shame, as if we all had personally failed in regard to discrimination, regardless of whether or not we personally have. Our group membership makes us guilty, as does our race, gender and genetic past. There is no appeal against this that they will allow: any protest signals lack of repentance and nervousness, or what they call “white fragility”.

In the church, this means that guilt starts to become a big issue with people. Nobody feels good about what they’ve done or who they are anymore. But it’s a kind of miserable, free-floating guilt, all the worse because it can’t be identified with anything specific and dealt with, as the Lord has taught us to do.

Reparations are necessary, repentance is impossible. This is a natural consequence of the kind of guilt and resentment that Social Justice needs in order to operate. It calls on people to continually make an increasing set of gestures of penance, such as giving up authority and control, signaling regret, promoting people based on their skin color, culture or sexual habits instead of merit, and so on. More and more of the church has to be given over to ever-more-elaborate gestures of acknowledgement of guilt, a desperate attempt to shed the perception of association with racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. Everybody turns to the business of trying to prove that they aren’t the evil person they’ve now been cast to be.

But it can never be allowed to work. If guilt and resentment abate, then the incentive for change, for revolution will be gone. So Social Justice advocates can never allow that the problem has, to any great degree, been solved. The war against conscience, against discrimination and against the past must be perpetual. The thing that scripture requires of the guilty — repentance and reparation — and the thing scripture requires from the aggrieved — forgiveness and restoration — can never be allowed to happen. If they did, Social Justice itself would become irrelevant.

So it must hold the church in perpetual misery.