Just Church (11)

• Justice must be achieved in the present world.
• Racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, colonialism, ableism, and other such forms of prejudice are our real problem.
• It’s the whole social system at fault, but the church and you are guilty too.
• Guilt is collective, and you can’t escape your social location and your social guilt.
• Everybody’s guilty, and nobody can repent enough.
• To envy anybody who seems privileged is noble, and to resent their advantages is virtuous.

So the present system, whatever it is, and all authority must fall. You can only lift the burden of some of your guilt by joining in an unrelenting war against authority and the existing order — by becoming an “ally” of “the oppressed”.

Chapter 3: The “Nice” Lady (continued)

To Sum Up

These are the major beliefs of Social Justice, whether the “nice lady” is aware of all of them or not. Most Social Justice people, I think, have never thought deeply enough to understand the web of lies in which they are trapped, or to figure out how these things feed into one another in a way toxic to the church. They understand individual bits but not the whole.

Likewise, leaders, elders, teachers and mature Christians are ill prepared for the onslaught of Social Justice. Not surprisingly, it’s hard for them to imagine a false doctrine as comprehensive and conspiratorial as this one; and they tend to mistake it for some temporary fad of public thought, something that can be placated briefly and then will go away.

Moreover, even if the “nice lady” knows and believes all the things we have covered in the last two weeks, she is highly unlikely to manifest them all at once. More likely, she will hold or advocate for some of them, and hold others in a weaker way, or not be promoting them at the same time. But because these beliefs all shore each other up or require each other, if she stays with one part of the program she’s going to have to pick up the other parts as she goes along.

Un-Deprogrammable

Neo-Marxists, the theorists behind the “nice lady”, know this. They refer to the total package of such beliefs as “critical consciousness”. Critical consciousness means seeing the whole world through the lenses provided by Social Justice thinking, so that everything fits into a total pattern or worldview in which each part seems to make sense of the others. Because this false doctrine is a total package of self-reinforcing beliefs, somebody who has bought into it finds that they see the whole world differently. It’s a kind of mental conversion, in which the explanation for anything that is seen instantly starts to look like a confirmation of Social Justice. So everything becomes evidence of racism, or sexism, or discrimination of some kind; every “inequity” becomes evidence of prejudice and the abuse of power.

This is why the “nice lady” is so hard to deprogram. She has come to believe she’s seen through the delusions and distortions of facts to which her fellow believers are susceptible, and is uniquely able now to guide them to the basic problems they need to address. She’s “woke”. She has a “consciousness” they lack, a perspective they need, and a special moral task: to help them remedy the profound injustices they are perpetrating because of their unawareness. She’s doing them a favor by pointing out the areas in which they are guilty, and she’s making things better by resisting the existing order of the church in the sacred name of justice. She’s a heroine of righteous action; and if anybody doesn’t see that, then the fault is with them. They’re very likely just being stubbornly traditional, and maybe racist — at least by accident, if not by intent.

But the truth about the “nice lady” is this. She is educated beyond her intelligence, and immature as well.

Education With Insufficient Intelligence

Why do I say this? Because she has received enough education in Social Justice propaganda to be impressed by it and to start to model it; but she is unaware of the total package. It’s all too much for her. She hasn’t spent the time or exercised the critical faculties to understand it properly. So she’s pitching for a team she barely understands, all the while feeling she’s especially knowledgeable and aware, because the church people with whom she is dealing know even less about it than she does. She has education in the matter, but not enough intelligence to see through it.

She’s also spiritually immature. How can we tell? Because she doesn’t know scripture well, either. If she did, she’d be instantly alert to how vastly her beliefs as a Social Justice warrior differ from the scriptural patterns. She’d know what to do about guilt. She’d know what an evil thing resentment is. She’d know vengeance is the Lord’s, and justice is with him. She’d be aware of the Lord’s plans for his people, and understand that they have nothing at all to do with race.

But instead of remembering the kingdom, she’s absorbed with the politics of this world. She’s rebellious and an interferer. She’s pushed on by pride and the enjoyment of being thought to be an advocate for the good, a righter of wrongs, somebody important in the Christian world, and she believes herself to be that, but detects no pride in it. She’s oblivious to the damage she does by promoting factions, naïve and indifferent about church doctrine and history. She’s divisive, deluded and sinning. The truth is she’s also a racist, a sexist and a tolerator of wickedness.

But very likely, nobody will call her on any of that.

The Programmed

The word of God talks about such things. It speaks of false teachers who will “speak twisted things, to draw away disciples to themselves”. It even says that such people sometimes are willing to go so far as to shut people out of the gospel in order to get others to “seek them”. The goal in both cases is to unsettle the people of God, confuse their doctrine, so that they feel like they have to turn to some new expert to interpret what they should be doing; and their attention is drawn from scripture and from the plans of God to achieving some new plan for the church. This corrupting of doctrine is always going to be necessary if any man or woman is going to be able to use it to increase his or her own particular prestige. So the “nice” lady is really just being nice to herself.

But we should have this much sympathy for her, as well. Very likely she’s not only overeducated and immature: she’s programmed as well.

She genuinely thinks she’s “doing the right thing”. But she never stops to ask herself how she managed to get free of the hidden prejudices she’s always saying everybody else has, or how a wealthy, Western liberal woman ever got to be the best possible advocate for destitute refugees or misunderstood aboriginals or those caught in sexual sins. She doesn’t see racism and intersectional misunderstanding as anything she really has herself. Her own eyes are open — she is “woke” — and it’s everybody else who has their eyes closed. Sometimes, even those for whom she advocates don’t (in her view) see what’s in their own best interests. To use her phrase, they’ve “internalized their oppression” and are “participating in their own oppression”.

She does not have before her eyes a vision of a unified church with no distinctions made among believers; her vision is the opposite — a congregation subdivided along as many lines as possible so that a maximum number of cases of grievance and redress are created. She does this because she feels her importance in the role of an advocate for such “injustices”. She may even be telling herself that unity is her ultimate goal, that by eliminating “inequities” she’s creating conditions for everybody to feel loved. She may be unaware that her mental lens, her “wokeness” is the real problem, and that she’s actually seeing maliciousness and unfairness where they do not, in fact, exist at all.

The Programmers

Not all SJers are so naïve, of course. In academia, where I spent many years, things are a bit different. There, the ideological program of Social Justice is much more explicit. But even there, many people who are part of the movement are only half aware of what they are involved in. They are merely unconscious participants in it, believing themselves to be good people acting in the interest of vulnerable minorities and other “marginalized” or “oppressed” people, for the greater good of all, and in a spirit of fairness and equality. Many neither know nor care about the movement’s roots in Karl Marx or a group called the Frankfurt School, and most have never even read a single essay from the key movers and shakers in the current movement.

But I even think the theorists at the highest levels of the Social Justice pyramid are only semi-aware of what they’re doing. If there is a conspiracy afoot, it’s being driven by something even larger than the top level theorists — the Kimberlé Crenshaws and Ibram X. Kendis, the Klaus Schwabs and George Soroses, the Joe Bidens and Justin Trudeaus — all of whom imagine themselves to be on top of what’s going on, but are actually being played by forces I suspect of ultimately being quite beyond them. We were told long ago in scripture that the days would come when such people would be around, and that spiritual forces, not mere human ones, would be in the driver’s seat when they appear.

In contrast to such, the “nice lady” may simply be naïve. Let’s take that as the most charitable way to view her. She could be full of sincerity and goodwill. For her, “the long march” has been indeed a long march … so long, that she’s unaware she’s part of it at all. It just became part of the way things were for her, her social background noise, her conditioning. But now she believes it, and the eyeglasses ground for her by the Frankfurt boys are squarely fixed on her nose.

Either way, though, she won’t be happy when you try to take them off.

Alliances

The “nice lady” is what the Social Justice set calls an “ally”. An ally is somebody who is not herself or himself from a particular favored minority, but has declared allegiance to the cause of Social Justice on behalf of such. An ally is most often white, somewhat educated, heterosexual herself, liberal and female, though they can be of other types. These become the most useful foot soldiers of Social Justice penetration into the church, because they are so morally earnest but only semi-aware.

Such “allies” are now in the church. They may not be in your church — yet — but they are certainly around and active; and already, some of them hold places of high esteem in the evangelical fold. Meanwhile, most Christians are blissfully unaware there is a major attack of bad doctrine looming on the horizon, and already I see it making inroads. Influential preachers like David Platt and Tim Keller have begun to parrot Social Justice propaganda, couching it in terms of Christian concern. Major denominational forums like the Southern Baptist Convention are being manipulated into formally approving Social Justice as an alternative theology.

In some ways, then, the enemy is in the door already, and already beginning to spread throughout the church, mostly by apparently well-meaning people who have little sense of what it is they’re actually participating in.

I could list many more names. It will surprise many readers to see even these here. I heartily encourage you to check the evidence I’ve provided before agreeing to believe anything of a brother or sister. But when you do, and if you understand what you’re seeing, you’re very likely to feel a bit dismayed. Social Justice is making deep inroads now.

Storm Warnings

Fortunately, the Lord has already warned us it would be like this. Jude tells us that when, in the last days, trouble is coming into the church it’s coming in “unnoticed” or “stealthily”, but literally “entering alongside”. These are people who will seem to rise up as helpers and allies of good things, in some cases even arising from among the existing congregation. These will be friendly people, pleasant people, well-intentioned people, nice people — but nonetheless, poisonous in the doctrines they bring with them. Some may not even really know what they are doing; but without anybody saying something, they will simply slide in unnoticed alongside the believers, and start to do their work.

As a final encouragement in a rather negative chapter, let me just add here that the chances are good that nobody in your congregation is actually a racist or sexist or anything of the sort. Chances are that at worst you’ve got a new opportunity to develop an understanding. Churches exist in a fallen and divided world; people groups don’t always understand one another instantly, especially when they’ve only recently been an issue to one another. That they don’t immediately snap the practices of the status quo into a new form to accommodate each other is not surprising, anymore than the slowness of new folks to become involved in the status quo is surprising. These are just human situations. There’s nothing “unjust” or malevolent involved, actually; just the challenges of different people learning to adapt to one another and live together.

Unwarranted Guilt

There’s always a need for some adaptation when these new situations are discovered; and adaptation is painful. It requires change, and people are slow to change. So it’s possible to misinterpret this slowness as malevolence or discrimination. Often it’s not; but interpreting it that way opens up space for the creation of guilt. Kind people, fair people, Christian people don’t feel happy when they discover some group has been made uncomfortable or excluded in some way. They want to see themselves as welcoming, unprejudiced, open-minded, flexible and generous of spirit … which is, of course, exactly what they should want to be. But the realization they may have failed to be as welcoming, unprejudiced, and so on as they want to be can upset them and induce guilt.

Try to become suspicious of invitations to unwarranted feelings of guilt. It is really important now. False, unchristian guilt is the stock-in-trade of the Social Justice warrior.

How she uses it and why it’s effective we shall see in more detail in the next chapter.