Just Church (9)

Chapter 3: The “Nice” Lady

“… and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh, it is a very nice word, indeed! — it does for everything.”

(Henry Tilney, in Jane Austen’s novel,
Northanger Abbey, 1817)

The word “nice” is tricky. Like so many of our English words, it has had some different shades of meaning, which have switched as time passed. The quotation with which this chapter starts relates to this: through her character, Jane Austen is making fun of the different ways that single word can be taken.

In its present use, it most often means the sort of thing you probably thought of when I first talked about the nice lady — pleasant, friendly, kind, and so on. It will probably come as a real surprise to most people that when the word “nice” was originally coined, it meant “ignorant”.

We don’t use it that way today, of course: that definition has completely gone away. But it does still have a third use that’s at least somewhat current: and that is “picky”, “precise”, “fussy” or “fastidious”. A person who knows this might talk about something being a “nice distinction”, not meaning that it’s a pleasant one, but rather that it’s detailed or subtle — perhaps even too picky, too unobvious, too minute for most people to care about.

Nicey-Nice

The nice lady who comes into the church is “nice” in both the modern ways: she seems very pleasant, kind, morally-earnest, and so forth; but she’s also incredibly picky, and wants the church to start making distinctions it has never felt any need to make before. She wants sharp lines drawn between rich and poor, white and black, men and women, native and immigrant, past and present, leaders and non-leaders, the privileged and the underprivileged, those of one language or culture group and those in another, the political Left and the political Right, and so on. Often, she even wants multiple combinations, pointing out that these intersect … somebody can be white, male and conservative, for example, and another can be Hispanic, female and liberal. (Social Justice refers to this as “intersectionalism”.)

So the nice lady comes in behaving nicely, but then wants to make overly-nice distinctions between believers in the congregation. She wants “intersections” of grievance to dissect the congregation, because this gives her more people to pose as caring about, to advocate for, and to be a voice for. This increases her influence and prestige in the congregation. The more people are annoyed with each other, the more situations she has to arbitrate, the more people are applying for her support, and the greater her influence becomes.

That’s the first characteristic by which you can recognize the Social Justice advocate rising up in the congregation: she’s “nice” in both modern senses: she self-presents as a loving, kind, generous-spirited advocate for the downtrodden while also telling you she sees divisions and distinctions within your congregation that you have not thought about before, especially divisions of things like race, culture, language-group, sex, ability, and so on. Her apparent niceness, along with the differentness of her perspective from the norm, make her particularly hard to deal with. If she came in as an aggressive outsider or even as an angry congregant, it would be much easier to convince people she has a problem and needs to be reined in. But since she comes off as a well-meaning advocate for marginalized people, it feels mean, and it seems mean, to resist her program, even if — as is likely — you sense right away that something about her is not right.

Sincerely Nice

This “niceness” of hers may also be totally sincere. It is possible she’s a malicious and aware promoter of false doctrine. She may have read and understood Marx or Adorno or Gramsci and the other theorists from the Social Justice camp, but likely not. If she’s read them at all, it’s been with awe and confusion, and with little understanding. (Even trained academics find reading the dense jargon preferred by the Critical Theorists hard — and deliberately so, since they prefer to be obscure rather than plain in their statements, which are often actually quite ghastly if spelled out.) More likely, she’s just picked up a lot of the language and ideas of these people, through her workplace, education or the media, and started to mimic their style. The same is true of their tactics: she may not be fully aware of how subversive she’s being, because she’s simply mimicking ways of behaving she’s seen in others, ways that are admired and approved in the secular world.

Whether she’s intentional or not, her ideas are not her own. If she thinks they are, she’s wrong. She’s just oblivious to where she got them. She may even be shocked and horrified at some of them, and protest her innocence if you point them out specifically. But they are part of a package of attitudes, a whole worldview that has been sold to her, and which she has begun to mimic. Even if she doesn’t realize it, it’s to this new, unchristian worldview that she is inviting everyone.

Let’s talk about that worldview. Let’s list some of its most important features, so you can recognize it when you hear it. Social Justice ideology has a certain set of fundamental suppositions that are quite odd, and don’t at all square with historical Christian theology. Getting a handle on these can help us detect the ideology early, and alert us to specific points when we should simply refuse to go along, no matter how “nicely” the whole thing is presented.

The Program

Here are some of the things Social Justice people tend to believe and teach.

Justice in this world, not the next, is our focus. They may not know they think this one, especially if they are Christians. But they do. Because of their programming, they’ve come to think of achieving justice in this world as all-important, and justice-to-come as an afterthought. They’re irritated when people don’t immediately see the Christian task as relating to practical unfairness in this world, or when the church doesn’t take a public, political stance on such things. They’re ardently committed to action here and now, and rarely speak of Divine justice or the world to come. For them, these things are distractions from the main business of life. Justice has to come now, fast, and in the prescribed forms. So the advocate of Social Justice finds it necessary to redirect church attention away from spiritual values, spiritual morals and future justice toward self-righteous indignation and immediate political action.

Discrimination, not sin, is the basic human problem. This is another one a “nice lady” will be unlikely to say aloud, because it’s so obviously contrary to scripture. But it’s true: they think this. It’s more a matter of focus than a matter of alternatives: personal sin is still a thing, but it’s not the thing for us to be focusing on at the moment. Or if sin is an issue, it’s “sin” as interpreted to mean “discrimination”. Discrimination is the evidence of sin, the first sin, the most pressing sin.

So the spiritual condition of individuals is never so urgent to them as is the fact of inequalities existing among the believers, which they interpret as proof positive that prejudice and injustice are involved, and these are the particular sins Social Justice sets out to indict. About the other sins, it simply has very little to say, or nothing at all.

You can see this most clearly in their advocacy for sexual deviant causes. The problem of homosexuality, for example, is not one of sin; it is of our refusal to accept these people as they are. Transsexuality is neither perversion nor mental illness; it’s discrimination again, not that the sexual deviants are caught in a sin that severs them from God. About that, Social Justice has no concern at all, and offers no remedy.

People are predetermined by their social locations. Group-think is core to all forms of Marxism. People are not said to be individuals, but rather members-of-a-group. The social group into which one was born, the economic location, the culture, the skin color, the level of ability, and so on, are all determinative of the person one now is, and the person one can become. Each social location has its unique “perspective” that has be given “voice”, except perhaps the “white” one, which is cursed for having been dominant in this society for so long. But people are always representatives of their social location and groups, not truly individuals. They cannot shed their pasts, their colors or even their basic beliefs, because these have been programmed into them from birth, and lacking “critical consciousness” these people cannot even seen how much a product of their group identity they are.

Being “white” or being “black”, in particular, are unitary identities, and all people who have these qualities have a sameness of perspective and value that they cannot alter. Trying to take a perspective or even to have an opinion that is different from the one Social Justice ascribes to a particular racial class is called “inauthentic”. So there are no legitimate conservative blacks or non-racist whites, and anybody who speaks an opinion not fitting the approved Social Justice beliefs about these categories is instantly accused of “Uncle Tomming” or “having internalized his oppression” (i.e. being so fooled by his oppressors that he has come to believe their lies). Like the racial identities, being gay or trans or “differently abled” (their word for “disabled”) is born-in, and cannot be overcome or shed. Nobody can speak about trans issues if they are not trans. A man cannot speak for a woman. All the ingenuity of imagination cannot enable a white person to fathom a black person’s experiences, or enable a black man who fails to repeat the SJW view of things to speak with an “authentic black voice”. Everybody needs to own up to their particular social location, and feel either good or bad about it, however Social Justice theory tells them they should feel.

The upshot: people are not actually free-will agents. They only think they are, especially if they lack “critical consciousness”. In truth, they are products of their social environment, and are morally rankable according to the value Social Justice assigns to them.

Discrimination is systemic, not personal. This is a hard one. It’s really crucial for them, and goes to the heart of everything. But it’s so twisted, so perverse that even the majority of Social Justice advocates barely understand it. Yet it is at the core of Social Justice dogma. So pardon me if I take a little time to develop this one carefully.

You may have noticed that Social Justice advocates throw around the word “systemic” a lot. It occurs most often in phrases like “systemic injustice” or “systemic discrimination” or “systemic racism”. You may not even have wondered what “systemic” meant — probably you just buzzed by that word, and concluded they were talking about “injustice” or “racism” of the kind you’re used to thinking about. But the added word makes a huge difference to how Social Justice thinks.

Do you remember the difference between “justice” and “social justice”? The former is just the word we’re used to, right? But “social justice” means that justice will only be achieved by society. By altering society. By changing social arrangements. It won’t be changed by changing individuals. This is why Social Justice is so political: it has to change society, change the system.

Are you beginning to get what “systemic” means? It means that the racism or the discrimination are not primarily located in individuals — it’s the whole system that’s racist.

Did you ever feel annoyed or disgusted when their rhetoric on the internet or something in a newscast, or somebody in a business seminar hinted you might be racist, maybe especially if you were white or male? Did you wonder how they could say such insulting things with so much confidence since, as you look on your own heart, you know you don’t personally have those attitudes, and would be ashamed if you did? Well, the reason they’re so sure you’re racist is that they see you as dwelling inside a racist system. Don’t you live in America, or Canada, or somewhere else in the developed West? Sure. Don’t you know that that whole system is racist? Aren’t you benefitting by being in that system and participating in sustaining it? Don’t you maybe have “white privilege”, and isn’t the wealth of your country from “colonialism” or slavery? So then, you are a racist. You’re racist not by choice or belief, but by “complicity” (their word). If you’re in the West and participate in that society, then you’re a racist.

Now, obviously, that perspective is so extreme and prejudicial it’s hard to grasp that they think that way, but they do. Racism is “systemic”, not merely personal. Even if you were the most open-minded, kind person on earth, you would still be “racist” by way of your association with “the system”. So extreme is their belief that even if you were Chinese or East Indian or Jewish, you could be a “white supremacist” merely by way of getting ahead in an allegedly “white” and “racist” system. You can even do it while being black.

Yes, you heard that right. If you wondered why Jewish author Ben Shapiro gets called a “white supremacist”, or BLM doesn’t care when a black police officer is shot or beaten to death, it’s because (to paraphrase Joe Biden) “He ain’t black.” He’s an honorary “white” for being an agent of the status quo, of the “racist system” of North American culture.

As lunatic as all that seems, it’s the deep belief of Social Justice. Their worldview requires it. If discrimination is the big sin, and every person predetermined by their membership in a social group, and the system or culture in which they are located is inherently “racist”, then everybody in that culture (at least all who do not fight vigorously to destroy it) are also racist artefacts in a racist machine. They’re all racists, whether they know it or not.

Now, that’s extreme. But it’s also as plain as day if you look at how Social Justice rhetoric frames things. However, Social Justice propaganda almost never puts things that bluntly, except for those deeply in-the-know. In the context of a local church, the “nice lady” is unlikely to put into words anything so hostile and abusive as that. But the gravity of that central belief of Social Justice is going to affect her thinking, and pull it powerfully off-center. She’s going to believe that the main problem in your congregation is systemic. What the believers need to address is not so much their personal sin of being unloving (although that’s likely implied as well), nor even just their conscious racism, if they have it; it’s going to be the whole system of operation of the church, which is going to be indicted as “too white”, “too Western”, “too colonialist”, or at least too conservative and unaccepting, and thus discriminatory. Changing the way things are done in practice is going to become her main mission.