Just Church (21)

We pick up this week in the middle of a list of choices the church has to make today. On the one hand, there are the values scripture lays out for church life; on the other, the things Social Justice today instructs us to value instead. The goal is simply to see the alternatives before us.

We began with the choice between a heavenly and a worldly “kingdom”. Then there was the choice between advocating salvation or system-blaming. Whether we should live by contentment or resentment came next, and then the choice between having confident faith in God and taking self-willed, self-confident action against the world. Finally, we considered the tension between individual responsibility to God and the attraction of surrender to a thoughtless collective — a theme continued in our first item below.

We're going to complete that list of contrasts today, and then draw some conclusions.

Chapter 6: Two Directions (continued)

Unity or Solidarity? You might think these two are the same; but really, they’re quite different ideas about how people should relate to one another. As we saw just a minute ago, unity entails a combining of unique individuals into a common body or life. But it allows for diversity of preferences, opinions, roles, choices, and so on, even within groups of people who are similar in other ways.

For unity, Social Justice substitutes solidarity. What is “solidarity”? It’s the pragmatic getting-together of different political groups solely for the purpose of confronting a common enemy. People who have different cultural or “racial” backgrounds and histories, different sexes or even different sexual misbehaviors, each with their own unique gripe against the status quo get together temporarily, purely for the purpose of defeating the common “enemy”, whether that is the traditionalists, the conservatives, the “system”, Christian morality, or whatever. But their liking for each other is solely powered by their hatred for the common adversary: take that away, and they are warring factions that do not share basic interests at all.

Can a church subsist on disparate interest groups that don’t really like each other? Can unity be achieved by mere solidarity against an enemy, or does something more positive, tolerant and Spirit-led have to create Christian unity? It’s something we have to decide.

Guilt or Forgiveness? The use of moral language and moral claims is something that Social Justice has in common with Christianity, for sure. Christians want to be better people; and they are rightly concerned with any areas in which the fallen nature has been allowed to persist in them, that might cause them to fall short of all that God has designed for them, or that would cause harm to a brother or sister. If a Christian is not morally concerned in this sort of way, then it is very unhealthy.

Still, the overriding fact is that Christians have an answer for the recognition that sin is still in us. It’s called repentance, and if we keep our heads on straight, we will also believe it issues in a thing called forgiveness. That is, there is no longer any shame in admitting that one has failed or sinned in some way, in returning to any offended party to make restitution and apology, and thereafter to be free in conscience before God. Sins are no longer to have dominion over the Christian, and he is not to live wracked by guilt. Rather, he is to live humbly and thankfully in the grace of Christ’s forgiveness. Can there be any doubt of that?

But Social Justice has other plans. For them, the “oppressor” must be made to feel guilty. Shame and fear of being accused of racism or discrimination or even Nazism must be used to bludgeon the people on top of things into line behind the Social Justice warriors. Thereafter, even “allies of the cause” must be kept in a permanent state of humiliation, and reminded of their “white guilt” or their “collusion with oppression”, even if they’ve forsaken it long ago, or never had it in the first place. There is no forgiveness in Social Justice, because forgiveness ends guilt; and guilt is their chief moral driver. Can a church thrive on shame, on recriminations and reminders of alleged “historical guilt” or “complicity with oppression”, many of which are mounted on nothing more than the accused’s superficial resemblance to some alleged “oppressor” of old?

Again, we have Grievance or Gratitude? Should Christians perpetually hold a grudge against those they perceive to have done them wrong? Or is the Christian disposition one of forgiveness? I guess it depends on how much one thinks one has been forgiven oneself, doesn’t it?

Then again, we could ask whether Man’s Demands or the God-Given ought to be our focus. Should Christians be satisfied to say, “God has made me who and what I am; and my role is to thank him for that, and to learn to play the hand he has dealt me in a way that brings honor to him”, or should they rise up and demand something different? Should they resent that they have been created as a woman, or as a participant in a particular culture, or without athletic or artistic skills, or too short or too tall or too fat, or that they are handicapped, or that they struggle with sexual or other sins with which they do not see others as struggling? Is life about what God has given us, or is it about the things we can demand from it by strength of our will? Who is running this show anyway?

Equity or Equality? Remember this? Social Justicers want “equity”, which means “forcing equal outcomes to happen by dragging any ‘privileged’ people down to the same level as everyone else”. That’s quite a different proposition from actual equality, isn’t it?

Social Justice thrives on these language games. The literature actually celebrates this sort of trickery as a good thing, a fair strategy: they call it things like “alchemy of the word”, “co-opting language” or “rewriting the narrative”. They sell you on a word for which they have a special, hidden meaning; then, after you buy in, they spring the new meaning on you, and say you’re now committed to backing their play. So when you see or hear the word “equity”, be on your guard: it almost always means “let’s drag everybody down to the lowest common denominator” or “let’s eliminate any quality, any achievement, any distinction of hierarchy or authority”. It doesn’t mean “Let’s give everybody a fair chance.”

So we have to ask, can a church ever be “equitable” in the SJ sense? It can certainly have equality of access, equality of salvation in Christ, or equal respect for being saints, and equality of opportunities for all in it. It can (and should) value all gifts and raise up the lowly, so much as that can be done. But do we have an equivalent calling to hate anybody who does something to raise his or her head above the masses, or to pull them down? Is that what God would want of us? From whence comes such a spirit?

Force or Spirit? On that topic, what is the agent of change in the Christian life, or in service? Is it the resentment and aggressiveness of protest? Is it the force of overthrowing one secular political or authoritarian order, only to replace it with a new one?

No, surely the agency of regeneration, whether we think of social or personal regeneration, is the Spirit of God. Christians have no calling to rage against the existing order, even in the case of a very unjust one; rather, we should work humbly and submissively to produce changes for the better in our congregations or society. Force cannot achieve what the Spirit does not.

Leadership by Maturity or by Petulance? Unmistakably, there’s an infantile, demanding tone in all Social Justice advocacy. It wants its share, and it wants it now; and it cannot stand anything being higher, better, more accomplished, more moral or more spiritual than it is. Naturally, it resents that the church has been organized by God to be led by those who are more spiritually mature, and that the less mature are to learn from them. Older women are to teach younger women. Elders are to be chosen from those of better character and reputation than those they serve.

Social Justice has a different view: the existing elders and authorities are pillars of the status quo, and so they are the problem. It aims to replace such leadership with the immature and angry. But we do well to think of the wisdom of God in placing the more mature and proven in charge of the church, and to consider the consequences of replacing them with the immature, the less-knowledgeable and the unproven.

Hope of Heaven or Hope of History? The Bible says that our present situation in this world, with all of its problems, is temporary. It is not unimportant, as this world is the stage upon which the drama that prepares for eternity is staged; but this stage is not determinative of the end of the story. The right will prevail. Justice will be done. Righteousness will rule. The Prince of Peace will come, and this world will thereafter be a very different place. The Christian rightly lives with the perpetual realization of the ultimate importance of eternity. It is why we preach the gospel, why we live as we do, and the blessed hope to which we forever look.

“Imagine there’s no heaven”, sang John Lennon, in what must surely be the most dismal and stupid anthem he ever penned; and Social Justice follows him all the way on that. They imagine no heaven, but also cannot imagine any comparable situation on Earth either. The final state for which they long they simply call “The Just Society”. But none of them can tell you what this state is supposed to look like, when it is to happen, and how it will come about. They just hope that if they make enough “critically conscious” Social Justice warriors, and convert every institution, business, government and church to their ideology, then the great god “History” will take care of the rest. Whatever utopia is supposed to happen will happen; and when you ask them about it, they insist it simply cannot be specified in advance at all. As Theodore Adorno, one of the fathers of Social Justice has put it, “One may not cast a picture of utopia in a positive manner … which is why [Max] Horkheimer warned that Theorists shouldn’t try and should, instead, just point out the aspects of this society that they want to change.” Likewise, they have no idea what the future of the church should look like: only that if it serves the purposes of their Social Justice program, it will be “on the right side of History”.

The upshot is that even the Social Justicers don’t know what they’re doing, where they’re going with their program, or what will get them there. As Lindsay puts it, “It’s always the same with Hegelian-Marxism theories. Complain and seize power so that they can establish a (cultural) dictatorship … Then have that dictatorship until everything turns perfect, details to be determined. It isn’t going to work this time either.”

Summing Up

We could go on at considerable length here. We could talk about how Social Justice makes rebellion a virtue and peace a crime. We could talk about how it hates both hierarchy (including leadership) and democracy, and opts instead for leveling, then mob rule combined with its own totalitarian elite (usually the Social Justice people themselves).

We could talk — and maybe should — about its rejection of morality and its attraction to immorality, that arises from the fact that it advocates for any “oppressed” and “marginalized” communities, on the basis that their unequal status at present makes them automatically morally worthy. Thus it is continually drawn to more and more perverse exceptions to every moral rule. The rationales it uses to justify advocating for one form of perversion keep working equally well for the next, so it is not at all surprising that, for example, in terms of sexual morals, Social Justice has moved from advocating “free (heterosexual) love”, to advocating homosexuality, to trans-ism, and recently to pedophilia. All the old excuses always work for the next stage down on the slippery slope of “tolerance” and “advocacy”.

We could also talk about the permanent legacy of Social Justice in any institution. As it has done with politics, media and public education today, it works itself into a system in a virus-like way. It always begins by carving out a little space in some minimally-offensive way, under a banner like “Let’s just be nicer to people”, but gradually worms its way along, talking over more and more aspects of any institution by replacing its functionaries and leaders with its own people, trained in Social Justice thinking. Eventually, any institution it infects becomes completely taken over for the purposes of promoting a neo-Marxist vision of the social good. All its money and energy starts to flow toward that goal.

What happens next? The institution dies; or else it only survives in a form so corrupt and dysfunctional that it cannot serve any of the goals for which it was originally designed. We see this so clearly now in our democratic politics and institutions, now dominated by Leftist ideologues to such an extent that democratic values like “freedom of speech” or “freedom of association” and even “the right to life” are severely undermined. Likewise, we see our education system turned from the goal of educating students for liberal citizenship to turning them against the status quo (including parental authority), and making them into little activists for Marxists values. We see the creep of what’s called “sex-ed” turning into the widespread grooming of children, and we rightly wonder whether good old “reading, writing and ’rithmetic” even have a place anymore. We see the media ceasing to be an information source, let alone a watchdog against politicians, and losing even its function as an entertaining storyteller, and instead being converted into a mechanism of Leftist propaganda and continual sexual libertinism.

None of these institutions is any longer what it once was. May I suggest the same will happen to the church — if we allow it. Of course, the final say is always the Lord’s; he is the protector of the church. But under his authority and leading, what is our role in making sure our church stands for true justice, true equality, principled tolerance, righteousness and truth?

We stand at a crossroads. The world is now rife with the propaganda of the Left, with angry mobs aiming to pull down the status quo in every part of Western life. It’s not just the riots, the burnings, the bludgeoning of elderly shopkeepers in the streets, the cries to tear down the justice system or even the creeping corruption in politics, education and the mass media. It’s much more than that. It’s an unprecedented spirit of self-righteous meanness that is quickly taking over our public life, a spirit of simmering resentment, deception, manipulation, suspicion, hatred and stridency. Social Justice advocates, even the well-meaning ones, are holding the door of the local church open, inviting that spirit into the congregation of the Lord’s people.

Who now has the nerve to close the door?