Just Church (17)

We’re continuing our exploration of what Social Justice ideology does to the church. We began by looking at the scriptural pattern for fellowship, a higher vision for the church. We’ve now shifted to looking at the counter-offer, the kind of dynamic Social Justice produces.

It’s not a pretty picture. Instead of the “fruit of the Spirit” (love, joy, peace, self-control and such), we find that Social Justice thinking opens up a Pandora’s Box of nasty character qualities that issue in a suspicious, mutually-hostile and unloving environment. When we last left off, we’d just introduced the realization that advancing this program inevitably means resorting to the use of some sort of compulsion or force. Let’s build on that.

Chapter 5: A Higher Vision (continued)

Violence

When people don’t instinctively or voluntarily want to surrender their freedoms or privileges to you, you must make them do it. This requires always some form of violence. This violence, the leverage you employ, must be sufficient to bring this about, even against the stream of diversity you have previously been encouraging. It must be capable of force that can destroy all contrary thought.

There must no longer be any freethinking. There can be no longer be any questions, no dissent, not even any doubters among you: everybody must walk in lockstep with the dictates of the Social Justice elite from now on. Everybody must buy into the program. So you must bully, shut down, exclude, silence, defeat or expel every person, from any group, who expresses any doubt about the new unity. Everyone must kneel and salute the diversity flag together.

An Overused Word

Now, Social Justicers have made “violence” an overused word. They apply it to practically everything, from murder and rape to “microaggressions”, those tiny acts of violence so small that people (allegedly) don’t even know they’re doing them. They even insist that speech is often violence, and yet chant their regular slogan “silence is violence” too. Apparently, for them, “violence” can mean anything that offends or could offend anybody at all.

But I’m not using the word their way. I mean that when you can’t get people to do something of their own free will, the only route left is to compel them. That requires some kind of actual force. It can be physical (as when they raise mobs) or social (as when they dox, censor and harass), it can entail verbal bullying (like their stock insults), and even slanderous incitements (like raising public anger against a person by accusing him of being “racist” or “too white”). It can be all kinds of things: but it naturally requires some dirty trick to force the reluctant participant to shut up and get back into line. So it is really no surprise at all that Social Justice advocates are notorious for encouraging just these kinds of tactics. They’re the only strategy they have for making unity come out of the diversity they’ve ginned up in the first place.

When it comes, “unity” is defined as “being an anti-racist”, or “being a Social Justice advocate”, or “being woke”. That’s the only pinpoint of actual commonality left among the diverse groups now forced to endure each other’s company. Suspicion and ill will may still abound — and as a result of the emphasis on diversity, they’re bound to — but superficial unity is compelled by the terror of ending up on the outs with the Social Justice mob.

If this sounds tyrannical, lunatic and counterproductive to you — to say nothing of disastrous for the church — you can be forgiven. It is lunatic. One cannot create unity by maximizing diversity, nor protect diversity by enforcing unity. Nevertheless, that’s the constant pattern with Social Justicers: it’s the basic way they do business.

Equity

As they do their business, they need a tune to play to rally the troops; and the tune they play is called “equity”. Equity is the reason they give for why the status quo must be destroyed, and why things need to be reconstituted in a Social Justice way. In the absence of that, they insist, equity can never be achieved.

But what the heck is “equity”? It sounds like equality, but it’s not. Equality would be giving everybody the same thing. Equity is not that. It means giving oppressed and underprivileged people special privileges and pulling down those above them, until everybody ends up with the same level of advantages. That’s “equity”. It’s a project of leveling everything.

You’ll hear them use the words interchangeably — equity and equality — but they really always mean the former rather than the latter. Equality would leave the status quo uninterrupted, so long as everybody got the same share. Equity will not rest until there are no distinctions left, nobody who has any more advantages or assets than anybody else — and it often goes even beyond that, to the idea of “historical reparations”, which is the argument that since one people group had it bad in the past, they are owed advantages to counterbalance that. When and how these advantages would ever be paid out, they never say. They’re perpetual, apparently.

All that the Social Justice advocate wants to do, everything she or he has to do in order to make things right, is elevated to giddy heights by the claim to be serving equity. Of course, neither equity nor even equality are concepts taught in the Bible. Nothing in the world around us gives us any reason to believe in them either. People differ as to height, weight, age, sex, intelligence, athleticism, artistic ability, musical talent, level of ability, temperament, sensitivity, strength, and so on. There is no metric at all in which it is evident that equality is promised, let alone guaranteed. In eternity, we know people are not equal either. Some are “good and faithful servants” and some are “saved so as by fire”. Rank is eternally distributed by a just God, not parceled out indifferently. Differences aren’t evidence of prejudice — they can be, but in most cases, they’re not. They’re features of individuality. They’re the terms assigned by God as our starting place, from which we can make any advances which by God’s grace we can manage. They are the opening terms by which God introduces us into the business of living for him. They are to be received with gratitude, and made to yield maximum benefit for his kingdom.

But unless a lack of equity automatically signals a problem, the Social Justice advocate is in trouble: for he or she depends on us interpreting differences as problematic. If we don’t, there is no further basis of appeal.

Envy

For this reason, the Social Justicer must work to maximize envy as well. People, particularly the SJ-favored minorities, must be induced to feel they are being slighted, insulted, pushed to the margins and denied what is their due. They must be encouraged to resent that, and to speak against those the Social Justice warrior tells them are responsible.

Further, they must be taught to resent God as well. Who else has positioned them as they are, where they are, or as who they are? They must not receive those things as a divine calling, but see them as the occasion of their oppression. They must be green-eyed for those above them, whom they have to see as those God has privileged above them. In some cases, they must even long to be what they cannot be, as when a male desires to be made into a female, or a person with sexual temptations is invited to see sin as “normalized”. So God’s instructions for men and women or for sexual purity must be resented as well.

Comparing Offers

So, let’s sum up the offers on the table.

On the one hand, we have the kind of life and future that God has promised to us in scripture. We have unity with diversity, gratitude for everything God has made each of us to be, willingness to serve, charity, an essential role for everybody, edification and growth, grateful living, and a future in which all differences will amount to glory to God through Christ Jesus, and joy for all the saints forever. That’s one offer.

On the other hand, we have the Social Justice offer. Starting with a serious bout of inflicted guilt, we must bow to all sorts of insults and slander, and be sorry, even for things in which we had no part and things we couldn’t have changed, or that really were never wrong in the first place. We can expect increasing clamor about diversity, divisions, historic injustices, and so on. Then we can look forward to ongoing strife within the congregation, including accusations, slander, resentment, bitterness, fighting, complaining and other forms of general misery, in a pointless and selfish search for a mythical “equity” that neither God nor the facts of life have ever promised anyone. Then we can expect Social Justice to clamp down on all the diversity, to force it to become what it wants it to be.

If we do that long enough, we can expect to have … well, the Social Justicers don’t really know, and admit they can’t say; but they assure us it will be good: some utopia on Earth, one would have to think.

Now, which sounds like the right offer to you?

Communal Life

But the siren call of Social Justice lingers in the air. For the foreseeable future, the church has to expect to hear its appeals daily, though the media, the workplace, the school, and even rising up from among its own members who have been infected by the propaganda. The fact remains that there are injustices and unfair things that go on in this world, and Christians cannot be deaf to those concerns. If we cannot yield control to the Social Justice warriors, then how are we to respond?

Be the Church

The most important thing the church can do is to continue to be the church.

That is because the church is the most powerful counter-cultural entity in the world. Every other institution is merely human; and because of that, they are all bound to operate according to the same set of failed, worldly values that have produces situations of injustice in the first place. The church, by contrast, is a thoroughly subversive organization. It doesn’t just deny the wickedness of the world, it refuses even the world’s methods. Its whole orientation is heavenward; and for that reason, it is also the most practical organization for changing hopeless situations on earth. But the church is not alone; it is the Body of Christ, the real agency through which God works out his purposes for the redemption of the world. Nothing other than the church being-itself-more stands to improve the human situation in this world.

I’m not saying we can’t do it better than we have: we can, and we should. But the right response to the whole challenge of Social Justice is not to reconstruct our congregations in their model, but to rededicate ourselves to being the kind of church we ought to have been being all along. Modeling what it means to know God and to walk with him in companionship with his people is both the best thing it can do, and the most powerful indictment on a world gone wrong.