Just Church (16)

When we left off last week, I was laying out for you the plan for fellowship that we find in the Bible. Our purpose was to get a clear sense of what God is aiming at in creating the church, and how we are to respond to that vision. A key element of this was the Christian response to guilt. We noted that Christians are uniquely vulnerable to the recognition of sin in human nature, including their own, but they aren’t to wallow in misery and self-abasement as a result, but rather to use their realization of their own fallibility as an incentive for humility, obedience, compassion, restoration, gratitude and new unity — a “repentance without regret”, remember?

Chapter 5: A Higher Vision (continued)

A Healthy Reminder

Am I only telling you what you already know? Surely you’ve read these passages, no? But it’s still good for us to remind ourselves of who we are and what we’re aiming for, because we can forget; especially since the world is so busy trying to produce its own kind of unity, but without Christ. The calls for unity from the world cannot fail to penetrate the ears of the church; and if we are going to be fortified against those false doctrines, as Paul hoped, then we are going to have to keep the biblical pattern before us with perfect clarity. As we wade into some of the more sordid details of the world’s errors and illusions (as we shall do later in this chapter), it is going to prove positive, encouraging and healthy for us to take a firm mental grip on God’s pattern for unity.

The contrasts will prove stark.

The Other Alternative

Now that we have a clear picture of what God intends for his people, and for how he can create unity and diversity together, let us ask what Social Justice thinking has in its place.

Social Justicers recognize the problem, the old tension between unity and diversity. They desire unity too, but for their own reasons. Their vision is not of a united church, moving in diverse ways but coordinated together by its preeminent commitment to Christ, but rather a secular march toward collective oneness. Obviously, lacking the power of Christ, they have to rely on human alternatives to produce the outcome they desire; but what sort of tools could possibly be adequate to the task?

Guilt, Secular Style

They have adopted several. One of them, guilt, I have explained thoroughly in the last chapter, because it’s such a susceptibility of the church. Church folks as a whole tend to be more self-deprecating, willing to serve, and concerned about others than regular folks: and that’s no surprise — look at whom they serve. But the world also has its ability to feel guilty; and it comes from the fact that without forgiveness and salvation, they are guilty. But it also comes from the fact that many of them have grown up in a culture that was heavily influenced by Jewish and Christian moral values; so their senses of right and wrong are not totally dull. They can be encouraged to feel guilt, even if it takes a bit more energy for the Social Justice advocate to induce it.

So guilt works on Christians and to some extent on non-Christians as well. But it’s not as strong a weapon in the non-Christian world, where consciences are more mixed, so it’s not an effective enough tool to induce unification.

Insults

Still, there are other tools available. James Lindsay has summed up the whole Social Justice strategy well when he said they “call everything ‘racist’ until they control it”. That is an invocation of guilt, to be sure, but it’s more. The allegation that the system is racist becomes the excuse for destroying it rather than, say, trying to reform it. “Race” is not at all a biblical term. The Bible speaks of “nations” and “peoples”, or “tribes” and “tongues”, but always with the understanding that human beings are all of one kind, ultimately. It is devoid of protests against things like intermarriage, except between the pagan and God’s people. It makes no case for using physical features as excuses for privilege or abuse. “Race” isn’t even a category in biblical thought.

But in secular thought, “racism” has become a kind of n-word: it’s something so offensive you could slap on anyone and expect them to jump. It’s one of the few real evils the modern, Western world will recognize almost universally. It mobilizes nervous people to immediate, desperate action to prove they are not guilty of it; and this sudden burst of irrational moral enthusiasm becomes very useful to Social Justice advocates. That’s why they use it all the time.

They don’t get quite the bang out of other insults like “sexism”, “supremacy”, “exclusion” or “discrimination”, less from “whiteness”, “homophobia” or “transphobia”, and even less from “Islamophobia”, “fat phobia” and “disablism”. They get almost none from allegations of “ageism”. But in general, the use of such insulting terms, and “racism” in particular, is a crucial initial strategy for them. It gets the guilt going.

The Goal

But that’s just the start. The point of unsettling people is to get them to do something you want them to do. Social Justicers have a sort of idea of what that might be, although it’s always hopelessly vague. They all want some kind of a profound change to society and all its institutions. As Lindsay says, they want “control” of things, for the purpose of producing some conception of the future that they have.

This conception is certainly not the unity of the blessed in heaven. So what is it? They’re very vague on the answers. For old Marxists, it was “the classless society”. For neo-Marxists, it’s some sort of utopia of unspecifiable kind. When pressed on this, they will say that the future cannot be talked about in advance of its arrival, but must be worked out dynamically and pragmatically or “dialectically” as we go. In simpler terms, they launch out in totally blind faith that (because history itself is progressive or evolutionary) what will come out of all the disruption and destruction they demand is going to be something good. Very good. Something so great that nobody should fail to want it. Some prefer to speak of “the Just Society” and others in more specific and negative terms, such as of a society without racism, sexism or homophobia. But the common truth is that they don’t agree on what they’re aiming for, or even know what it will look like: they’re all just overwhelmingly confident it will be amazing when we get there.

The Means

But how do we get there? It’s hard enough to get people to buy into a utopian project you can describe, let alone one you leave so vague. Buy-in is going to be problematic. But even supposing you can get buy-in, how are you going to arrive at that unified vision of greatness you have only partially imagined?

The answer turns out, ironically, to be this: use diversity against unity, and unity against diversity.

Let me explain this carefully.

Diversity Against Unity

First, what this means is you begin with an appeal to people’s sense of individualism. You tell them people are legitimately “diverse”, and the existing order is forcing them to be the same. It’s homogenizing them. It’s tyrannizing them. It’s oppressing them. This is not right.

To make this case stronger, you emphasize differences, the unique features of a particular community or group within the whole. You make your claims of “injustice” or “oppression” as usual, and drive them very hard. You push this to the point where extraordinary privileges and accommodations are justified for the group. You emphasize that they have unique needs, unique challenges, unique historical disadvantages, and especially, a unique minority perspective so special that ordinary people who are not members of the group could never really enter into it, no matter how hard they tried. You drive that story hard; because every gain for the underprivileged group is an increase in prestige for Social Justice advocates as well.

This “righteous” appeal to justice for the individual, the unique culture, the special group and so forth, gives you the reasons you need to destabilize the existing order, and then to justify its total destruction.

When it starts to crumble, then, you are left with a problem. You’ve maximized diversity and destroyed unity. You’ve even denied that a deep, spiritual unity is even possible with people outside the group. However, diverse groups are unmanageable. In any case, they’re useless for Social Justice purposes after they’ve helped destroy the status quo. You don’t know what to do with all the diversity.

Unity Against Diversity

So what you must then do is reverse the pressure. Instead of pushing diversity, you need to push unity. You need everybody to line up under your new order. So you drive belonging as a value. What people now belong to is the Social Justice society itself.

Still, you’re swimming upstream against a current you created in the “diversity” phase of your program. You encouraged people to prize their individuality and specialness. You roused their tribalism, their affinity with their own culture or group. You told them they had their own unique perspective and “voice.” You trained them to campaign militantly for their own freedoms and clan advancement, and to be cynical and rebellious to the authorities. Now, how do you beat that? How do you prevent the diversity you’ve been so earnestly maximizing from undercutting your plans for future unity? That’s a problem. You can’t very easily start denying the fact of diversity now, can you?

Fortunately for you, there will still be many ways in which you can allow diversity to continue — cultural practices, sexual deviations, tastes in cooking or styles of dancing — these sorts of superficial differences can go on so long as they don’t hinder the program. Let them persist.

Still, there is one way in which you can no longer endure diversity — and that is, diversity of thought.

That is the one way in which diversity must now be eliminated. Ruthlessly. Absolutely.

And there is but one tool you can use to do that: you must use force.