Just Church (20)

Last week, we left off with these questions: if the morals of a social justice advocate seem to us, at first inspection, to be good, well-intended and earnest, can there still be a serious problem with her methods? And to follow this up, is it possible that by allying ourselves with her, could we be opening the door to something that should make us, as Christians, rightly hesitant?

Chapter 6: Two Directions (continued)

Those are good questions. They deserve an answer. So what I propose to do here is to speak to how the fundamental values of Social Justice ideology are different from the values the Bible lays out for the church. To make the contrast perfectly clear, I have chosen to put the values in pairs. In each case, there’s a choice to be made about what kind of church we may think we should have.

A Worldly Kingdom or a Heavenly One? This is a starting point. There is no doubt that Christianity is a massive benefit to the world. But is that its primary focus? Or is its primary focus to be on eternity? Karl Marx himself recognized the problem here: if Christianity is true, then it might make people content, peaceful and focused on things to come; it would certainly make them lousy revolutionaries. This is why he called the critique of religion the first critique, “the premise of all criticism”, and why he famously accused it of being “the opium of the masses”. He believed that heavenly values would deprive people of the worldly focus required to get them to buy into his revolutionary plans with the necessary zeal.

What Marx was not concerned about was any good Christians might do that would not lead to revolution. So he gave no thought to their work in charities, missions, medical work, education, public welfare, political reform, emancipation, and so on. If he was aware of how much good Christians would do and were already doing, that would only have interfered with his plans. He wanted bloody revolt and overthrow of all the existing institutions; and the kind of peaceful reforms Christians were carrying out would only interfere with that.

Like Marx, modern Social Justice advocates reject peaceful, gradual reform as a method. Like Marx, they believe that only overthrow, destruction and revolt against everything in the status quo can defeat “the system” and bring utopia forth.(1)

Salvation versus System-Blaming. From a biblical perspective, the main problem of humanity is a thing called “sin”. Sin involves many things, as you know: but all of them are attitudes, dispositions and actions that are not compatible with the character of God and which therefore produce a rift between man and God. Responsibility for sins is personal and individual — just like conscience is, and just like final judgment is, as well. God holds each of us responsible for what we are and do — and as John Locke famously noted, does so on an individual basis. There are no groups at the judgement. Your sin is your fault. Nobody else gets to make excuses for you, and you cannot hide in the herd. Your parents, grandparents and other relatives are in no way responsible for what you have done and been. You answer for yourself. Knowing that is a first step toward salvation: you have to take responsibility for yourself.

The great message of the gospel is that when you do, this situation is fixable. Salvation is possible. God has offered complete forgiveness for all the things for which you are responsible through his Son; and more, he offers you regeneration through his indwelling Holy Spirit, so that the very character, the sin nature that produced the rupture between you and God, is curable, healable and eternally securable in him. You may not be what you ought to be right now; but you are forgiven, cleansed, and put in right relationship to God, sealed forever by his love. There could be no more complete answer to sin than that. Only the Bible has it.

In contrast, it is because Social Justice ideology has absolutely no answer for sin that it is forced to deny the existence of personal sin altogether. It has no cure for the person who struggles with sexual deviancy, the gender-confused individual, for the sin of abortion or adultery, or even for the sins of lying, stealing, slandering, hating and tyrannizing. It cannot fix anybody. Since there is no cure for these things, it is forced to normalize them, instead — to pretend they’re not sins at all, but “alternate lifestyle choices” that have to be accepted, included and constantly affirmed by society. It cannot fix anything; therefore, it has to make everything out to be “normal”. What this means, then, is that it traps its believers in sin, and offers them no way out at all.

This is even true in the case of the only “sin” Social Justice really recognizes — “racism”.

Now, it needs to be pointed out here that racism is an invented “sin”. The discrimination of one “race” against the other on the basis of skin color or other physiological traits, or national origin or language or culture — Social Justice usage employs the word “racism” for all of these, and often for no reason at all, except to tenderize a listener’s conscience and bully him or her into going along with its program. Meanwhile, it will carry on using the term “white” as an enemy-of-convenience, even though that clearly racist term defines nothing ultimately deeper than skin color.(2) Such convoluted rationalizations and inauthentic uses of language, which are so much the stock-in-trade of the Social Justice set, serve only to muddy the waters, which is exactly what they want: to be able to claim that anything is “racism” so as to condemn anything they don’t like until they can control it. We should not imagine they point to special fact of injustice hitherto unrecognized but now finally discovered by the wisdom of Critical Theorists.

The literal concept of “racism” is historically a relatively recent invention. Before that, tribes hated other tribes, regardless of skin color, or culture and language groups suspected each other because of mutual incomprehension, incompatible social goals or differences of habit or religion. But the idea that some people are better than others by way of skin tone is not something one comes up with naturally, but something that happens when one already wants to mistreat another group of people, and needs a reason for doing so. That is exactly what happened in the case of the rationalizations for slavery in North America, for example: blackness was made into a criterion of suitability for enslavement, because people (in bad conscience, of course) needed an explanation for why they were choosing to do an evil thing they were already doing and desiring to continue to do. In the biblical account of things, however, there are no “races”. There are tribes, nations and tongues, but no characterizations based on either skin color or genetics. As Paul says, in Acts 17:26, “[God] made from one man every nation of mankind.” The word “man” is even absent from the original: the implication is that all men are made of “one stuff”, one kind of being, one species, as is also confirmed by the scientific fact of their complete and unproblematic interfertility. God made men “of one”: man himself invented “racism”. But from the way Social Justice advocates talk about it, you would think “racism” should have been included in the Ten Commandments — and probably no lower than slot number three.

The proper name for the sin in question is “hatred” or “oppressing”. The skin stuff is just an excuse. But Social Justice has no remedy even for this invented sin. It teaches that people are divided permanently into special interest groups that cannot possibly ever actually understand one another, and cannot ultimately be reconciled at all. Rather, each group (women, blacks, homosexuals, the transgendered, and so on) has its own unique “positionality”, “experience”, “perspective” and “voice” (all their words). This “perspective” cannot be experienced or understood, let alone questioned or criticized from outside the particular group: it cannot even legitimately be denied or doubted by anybody (except critical theorists themselves, who alone are reserved the right to say when each such voice is “authentic” and when it’s not). Because nobody understands or can understand anybody else’s “authentic positionality”, there can never be reconciliation between groups of people. So the fact of racism, and other forms of discrimination, is permanent and incurable — until the day when history itself will take care of this all, and produce the Just Society: though when this will be and what it will look like, they are completely incapable of saying. They even insist it would be wrong for them to try, because history has to work this out as history will work this out. It cannot even be known by them in advance, they say.

So Social Justice has no cure for any sin, even the one it most claims to hate. Instead, it institutionalizes and continues sin, by “normalizing” or “including” it as a permanent and intractable feature of reality.

The next dilemma is this: Contentment or Resentment? Christ counsels us to learn to be content with what we have. Jesus told us that not even when we have an abundance of possessions does life consist in those. We are warned very sternly and repeatedly against envy and covetousness, most memorably in the Tenth Commandment. It is enough to have enough: as Paul reminds Timothy, “For we have brought nothing into the world, so we cannot take anything out of it, either. If we have food and covering, with these we shall be content”. The Christian attitude, then, is one of grateful rest in what God has provided for us.

This is anathema to Social Justice. Social Justice absolutely requires a spirit of bitterness and resentment against those deemed “privileged” by those said to be “oppressed” by them. Each group of people with the church must be looking out for its own interests, absorbed with whether or not each is getting a fair share, and actively rebellious whenever they decide they are not. Hostile suspicion of those who may be doing better, or who may have more status or influence than my group is getting is the ongoing state of mind Social Justice cultivates. Can such a disposition be helpful to a church of different people in really coming to love and understand one another? Does it lead to peace, or to conflict?

Faith or Action? Related to this is the question of the right motivation for the church. Does the church exist on its faithful relation to God and proceed to address injustice by things like prayer, service, evangelism and charity, or does it owe the world to pitch in and add its strength and rage to political action?

Actions that defy authority, overthrow order and smash the system, or preliminary steps that tend toward those aims, are absolutely required by Social Justice theory. There can be no such theory without practice. So Social Justice transforms the church’s attitude to the world from one respectful of God-given authorities and cautious about running ahead of the plans of God to one of burning, self-confident fervor and vigorous action to bring human “goods” about.

The Individual or the Collective? One of the great features of the church is that though it is a body of believers brought together and made one in Christ, the identity and importance of the individual is never lost to God. Never is the individual merely submerged in the collective: instead, he is both a true member of the body but also uniquely gifted and endowed with his own personal identity, which God loves and cherishes.

Too many passages to list here can be summoned to show this. Paul could speak so personally of “the Son of God who loved me, and gave himself up for me”. “For me.” It’s so personal, so individual, even though Paul was an apostle and pillar of the church. Or we could consider Christ standing at the church door in Laodicea and knocking; then promising fellowship with “anyone” who will hear his voice, whether the church would or not. But maybe the most telling are those that reveal people in glory who retain their personal identities. On the mount of transfiguration, the Lord was accompanied not merely by two men in glowing clothes personally identified as Moses and Elijah. When Christ rose from the dead, he rose not as an unidentifiable angel but as a living person different but still recognizable as the Jesus his disciples knew … and so he is, for all eternity. Nothing could more graphically illustrate the eternal value of individuality. Every person counts, and counts personally.

Not so in the thinking of Social Justice. According to that, a person is absolutely nothing but the product of his environment and his collective identity. That is why “fixing” the environment and changing the status position of groups of people is so exclusively their concern. In fact, they believe that individuals who step out of their Social Justice-approved lines of thought stop being genuinely members of their own community, and become “inauthentic”, and no longer have a “voice” for their group.

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(1) Two of its key theorists have written, “Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order...” Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic in Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, (New York: NYU), p. 2-3.

(2) This is why they’ve had to invent a condition known as “whiteness”, which they say that people of any skin color can have. Basically, it means anybody who seems to be doing okay within a system Social Justice advocates have arbitrarily condemned as too “white”. So they condemn successful Jews, Asians, South Americans and even blacks as guilty of “whiteness”. Again, the ridiculousness, manipulation and dishonesty of this cannot be parodied adequately. See Lindsay, in “Whiteness”, New Discourses.