Just Church (14)

Last week we were working our way through the topic of guilt. In relation to the church and Social Justice today, it’s a very important topic. Social Justice advocates weaponize it against sincere and well-meaning people in order to get their way. This is quite demonic: taking character dispositions that are perfectly Christian (humility, longing for justice, willingness to accept responsibility for sin and desire to make things right) and turning them into a miserable, guilt-ridden self-reproachment. Rather than expressing a healthy conscience that induces righteous behavior, such false self-reproach is today used by Social Justice advocates to inject into us an unrealistic sense of personal responsibility for all the world’s ills, present and historical, and a misguided desire to alleviate false guilt.

Let it be said that sensitivity to sin, injustice and abuses of power and privilege is very Christian, of course. But this is quite a different thing from accusing people, even oneself, of committing sins in which one has truly had no role at all. That is quite unchristian. Not for nothing is Satan called the “accuser of the brethren”. It is, in fact, to lie and to deceive both oneself and others. This is why distinguishing between legitimate responsibility and illegitimate accusations is today more necessary than ever: we must not fall prey to a strategy that dishonestly leverages our hypersensitivity toward sin and injustice against us.

There are significant consequences to not getting this right. It’s devastating to the peace, harmony, unity and effectiveness of any local congregation. Yet Christians of all people remain quite vulnerable to this sort of tactic since, because of our salvation experience, we tend to be most acutely aware of human nature and most highly sensitive to the human inclination to sin and then deny it. We don’t want to do that, so we take any accusations against ourselves seriously; but we must not be so unwise as to imagine this willingness to hold ourselves to a higher standard cannot be abused.

Let’s analyze all this carefully.

Chapter 4: What Social Justice Does to the Fellowship (continued)

Godly Guilt

Now, this heightened sensitivity is a good thing; it produces good fruit in the Christian life.

Because he is more alert than most people to occasions of genuine guilt, a Christian may be more proactive in service than other people are inclined to be. When we consider the range of social improvement projects that have owed their genesis and still owe most of their vitality to Christian activism, the results are truly staggering. Evangelicals have been leaders in almost every such area: from poor relief to orphanages and widow’s programs, to government relief policy, to medical and economic-relief missions abroad, to prison reform and campaigns for the rights of women and subjugated populations, to immigration and integration programs, to public health and educational initiatives, and literacy and law and the arts. In just about every moral area of human activity, Christians have ended up on the front lines. It’s not by accident: the remediation of social injustices is something about which Christians have been passionate and active for a long, long time, and with unparalleled effects. A fair recounting of the history of social welfare and betterment cannot possibly overlook the massive and ongoing contributions of Christians.

However, Christianity’s detractors will insist — if they are willing to recognize this history at all (and most are not) — that the only reason Christians are enthusiastic about redressing issues of social justice is because they want to preen themselves as moral, righteous or especially charitable, or else that they have a bad conscience. Perhaps Christians are merely the same as the rest of the world, only more deluded by religion and more irrationally nervous and self-loathing than most; and they do their works of righteousness to offset these personal defects, not because they are reflecting the righteousness they have from God.

Such a slander the Lord will have to judge. He alone knows the hearts of men and why they do what they do. A Christian, if he’s thinking like a Christian, still knows that his own motives are mixed at times. Sometimes he may genuinely act out of care and concern for others, or out of a desire to obey the Lord; at other times he may lapse into more selfish motives, and have to pull himself out again by his bootstraps. We’re all human, even the saved among us. So long as we live in this fallen realm, motives will never be pure even at the best of times.

This too is a final good effect of guilt in the life of the Christian. Remembering that he is a sinner keeps him from thinking too highly of his own motives, and reminds him again and again that Christ is the true source of any goodness that may flow from his activities. This remembrance is a corrective to pride, to self-sufficiency and to vainglory, and the Christian who has no present awareness of the realities of his own nature is in imminent danger of arrogance and of behaving like a Pharisee.

So a Christian knows what guilt is. He knows how much he owes. All this is good. But, as Aristotle observed so long ago, virtues have their counterparts in vice. This radar for guilt that the Christian has is no exception. It can be marvelously sensitive in recognizing where genuine guilt exists; but if not managed very carefully, can be induced to tip over into unhealthy preoccupation with former sins and present failures, even to the eclipsing of the liberating message of the gospel. In realizing we are sinners, we can easily forget we are forgiven sinners, and lapse into a spiral of self-recrimination and spiritual defeat.

Ungodly Guilt

That’s a peculiarly Christian struggle: but it’s also a peculiarly Christian vulnerability, one that must be watched carefully. One forum in which it must be particularly watched today is in regard to the larger state of society. This is because guilt is being weaponized today in deliberate ways in aid of social projects that have no whiff of godliness in them at all. Christians, even more than the public generally, are highly susceptible to the propagandistic terms in which an inauthentic sense of guilt is being cultivated.

A very important starting point is this: not all guilt is good. Not all guilt is based in truth. Not all guilt is Christian. Hyper-sensitivity to guilt is not only excessive but indicates a state of spiritual and psychological ill-health. What it indicates is that the person experiencing it has failed to grasp the implications of the gospel, and thus is suffering a kind of guilt that serves only the world’s purposes, and none of God’s.

This point is nicely made by Paul in 2 Corinthians 7. To the guilt-ridden church, he writes, “For the sorrow that is according to the will of God produces a repentance without regret, leading to salvation, but the sorrow of the world produces death.”

Do you get that? There are two types of guilt. One is a God-given kind that immediately leads the sinner to repentance, and yet relieves him of any feelings of regret. We realize that we are saved and forgiven, and rather than mourning and groveling, we rise thankfully and bless the Lord for his grace and goodness to us. We are delivered from guilt, and never need return to the matter again. We are free.

But the second kind of guilt is not like that. It is the world’s kind of guilt, which can recognize the fault but has no remedy. No matter how long one mourns and abuses oneself, secular guilt never finds relief. It cannot let go. It recycles the past, obsesses over failures, beats itself up, but never leads to peace. It has no atonement, no forgiveness, no appeasement and no end.

This is why the world hates guilt, and must always refuse it or escape it in some dishonest way: it cannot make guilt productive. It cannot free the sinner, and cannot offer any road of hope forward. So it must deny, deny, deny instead, or strive bitterly to eliminate feelings of guilt or even to sear the conscience that continually reminds the worldling of his wickedness.

Telling the Difference

A Christian counselor, a personal friend (for personal and client confidentiality, I am electing not to include his name here), summarizes this very well, in two simple points we do well to keep in mind:

“Firstly, if guilt is legitimate, it will have a specific source. We will attribute it to specific, measurable, real wrongdoing. It will not be a sort of free-floating, untethered, general guilt; we will know what we’ve done. If we know of no specific cause, then we can be certain the guilt has not been properly understood.

Secondly, if it’s legitimate guilt, it will resolve once we genuinely we repent, change and act according to specific, measurable, real wrongdoing. We will recompense those we have hurt, to the extent we can, accept the full forgiveness we have in Jesus Christ, forgive ourselves, and move forward.”

That’s useful. Legitimate guilt will not persist as vague, anxious feelings or self-recrimination, when the causes of the guilt have already been addressed. But bad guilt, tied to feelings with no specific cause and devoid of any means of resolution, is also a powerful source of motivation. As my friend adds, “guilty feelings are so unpleasant that people will try whatever solution is presented to them, and will hesitate to say that the solution isn’t resolving the guilt at all”.

This means that illegitimate guilt can be weaponized very easily. Not being tied to specific actions and incidents associated with the guilty person, the feelings can be launched under all kinds of pretexts. Not being tied to specific causes, the feelings can be made both indefinite and incurable. Lastly, because people will do almost anything to escape feeling guilty, it is possible to induce them to accept all kinds of “solutions” as genuine, even when those “solutions” do not actually address any specific causes in any kind of realistic way, and do not cure the guilt.

In fact, untethered guilt of this kind is a most useful tool in manipulating people into a continuous pattern of attempts to pacify conscience. That is why, as we see today, the world uses that sort of guilt whenever ginning it up can serve its purposes; and especially when it can be used to bully and mobilize people in its projects. In that way, guilt becomes the world’s weapon to master the public and to subdue the morally earnest person.

Particularly lately.

The Second Danger

Guilt is the driver Social Justice advocates use to get at Christians: to tweak their tender consciences, make them act, and pull them into their plans. But guilt is not nearly so effective a tool in the secular world, so the propagandists of social justice use a different weapon there: resentment.

You may recall that Social Justice sees the world as divided into the “privileged” and the “underprivileged”, or the “oppressed” and the “oppressors”. The mere fact that you have had some advantage, some success or exceptional achievement is proof positive you have cheated and stolen. How could it be otherwise, they reason: if the system itself is rigged against some and in favor of others, any advantage by one person is a right stolen from another, and any success is proof you have colluded with the corrupt, racist status quo.

Moreover, they believe the only “just” state of affairs would be one where everybody’s outcomes are equal. Interestingly, this drive for “equality” never begins with them. They do not lead by example, giving up their own possessions or surrendering their own power before instructing others; they keep their own privileges, which they take as their right because they are “advocating for the oppressed”. They do not fight against “inequality” when it comes to their own advantages. Not their opportunities, but their outcomes. Regardless of one’s starting point in life, and regardless even of one’s own actions (which are all blameable on “the system” anyway), all people, by rights, should end up equal in every possible way, they think. Of course, this is not at all biblical, but that doesn’t concern the world.

This justifies a spirit of resentment. Social Justice says that some people are stealing from you and oppressing you, and you have every right to be angry with them, and this includes any person who seems to be doing better than you in any dimension. They are the sinners, and you are the sinned-against. Righteous wrath is justly warranted against them.

So everyone is invited to see themselves as somehow “oppressed”, and to look at those who enjoy some privilege they themselves would want, and to regard themselves as virtuous for hating those people. Of course, the Bible identifies this position as “covetousness”, and forbids it; but again, the world does not particularly care. Envy is perfectly understandable in its terms.

Just as guilt is used to provoke the consciences of grateful Christians, resentment can be used to provoke the flesh in anybody who is less than grateful for their lot in the church status quo. In fact, Social Justice will help awaken them to grievances and “injustices” they’ve never even thought of before. They may have hitherto thought that never having occupied a leadership role in church was their own choice. Perhaps they had family or work responsibilities, and were only too happy not to be asked to join service teams at church as well. Now, the Social Justice advocates will help them to understand that all along this was not their choice. They were being deliberately excluded from such roles by racist plotting within the church itself, or being excluded by its structures and organization, and that it is now their moral duty as well as their personal right to be angry and aggressive in eliminating such prejudicial arrangements.

The New Atmosphere

What the church can expect, therefore, when it gives a hearing to Social Justice, is a massive increase in both feelings of guilt among the more involved members of the church, and increasing resentment from those outside its formal structure. Leadership, instead of being a special burden of service, will be viewed as a position of privilege for which various members and communities are competing. A spirit of suspicion and a hostile watchfulness will also rise among the members: who knows when the next evidence of prejudice and injustice will appear? The congregation will become riven along many different lines, and new voices will be raised in irritation against the patterns, institutions and authorities in the church.

Even if the fellowship has been peaceful and happy so far, it will not long stay so, for Social Justice teaches that contentment is nothing other than evidence of complacency, of carelessness, of collusion with the status quo, and ultimately, of concealed discrimination. It is the positive duty of any morally earnest person to dig such hypocrisy out, expose it and destroy it.

The mark of Social Justice advocacy is unremitting hostility. The war against racism and discrimination, it holds, must be perpetual. Racism will never go away. Discrimination will always be embedded somehow in the status quo, even in the secret hearts of individuals who have always believed themselves to be fair and accepting of others.

Especially them.

To admit Social Justice advocacy to the local church, then, is simply to tear down the house. The proposed “equitable church” will never come — and even if it did come, the Social Justice warriors will instantly deny that it has come at all. Until “equity” is achieved, there will be guilt, strife, accusations, wrangling, politics, rage and turmoil in any institution Social Justice is suffered to reshape.

We must ask, is that what we want?

Is that what we should want?

Is that what the Lord wants?