In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Tom: Immanuel Can, I’m going to quote from my favourite source of lowest common denominator info, Wikipedia, to get us started.
Wikipedia calls the Social Gospel a “protestant Christian intellectual movement” that “applied Christian ethics to social problems, especially issues of social justice such as economic inequality, poverty, alcoholism, crime, racial tensions, slums, unclean environment, child labor, inadequate labor unions, poor schools, and the danger of war. Theologically, the Social Gospelers sought to operationalize the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:10): ‘Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ ”
You know how I love words like “operationalize”. But would you say that’s a reasonably accurate description?
Missed the Best Before Date
Immanuel Can: Yes. But something else needs to be said right at the start: namely, that the heyday of the Social Gospel was the end of the 19th century. While the movement did not entirely disappear afterward, it never held the same level of plausibility regarding the public agenda after that. So it’s old news, in a way. In contrast, social justice is a comparatively new ideology devoid of avowed religious content, much more popular today and still an issue.
The two are not identical, as I’m sure you realize.
Tom: Absolutely. The Social Gospel gang were Christians (or at least religious people), many of them with a particular view of prophecy that led them to feel their primary job was to improve this world. But their intentions were largely benevolent, whether or not they were right about their mission and whether or not they succeeded.
The modern “social justice” movement (and even the term is usually a pejorative) is largely secular and looks to address many of the same issues (poverty, racism, etc.) but with radically different methodology. However, there are many modern liberal Christians (like Howard Bess, for instance) who are philosophically aligned with these folks even if they would not use the name.
Christians of either stripe have this in common: their minds are occupied with and their lives devoted to the reshaping of society.
A Conception of Justice
IC: So how do we deal with the two at once? Let’s see …
Well, obviously they’re linked in this way: that each, for its own reasons, assumes that we have some sort of ultimate moral responsibility to establish a particular conception of justice. But the differences are also significant: the Social Gospel assumes some kind of “Kingdom of God” conception, and the social justice people … well, they shill for various other conceptions, really based on whatever they may personally prefer.
Tom: There are significant differences, as you say.
Firstly, the Social Gospel folks were content to see all races recognized as equal before God, whereas the social justice crowd are primarily exercised to see religious people who self-identify as homosexuals and transsexuals accepted into the church. It seems to me this is not motivated so much by a concern for the glory of God or the better understanding of the teaching of Christ as a desire to be able to pat people on the back and say, “You’re okay just the way you are” and to be able to say, “Look how reasonable and modern the church has become.”
Secondly, where the Social Gospel seems to have arisen out of belief, social justice arises out of the ideological conviction that certain sorts of sexual aberration are natural rather than a consequence of sin, and seeks to reinterpret scripture as needed to justify ideology.
IC: Well, to be fair, the social justice advocates include far wider ideological interests than merely the promotion of sexual license. They include such diverse things as feminism, neo-Marxism, economic redistributionism, multiculturalism, ecological concerns, animal rights, postcolonialism, and so on.
A Broader Range
Were you thinking of focusing specifically on the segment represented by the sexual libertines, Tom? Or should we be thinking of the broader range?
Tom: Well, I’m not so much concerned with the social justice agenda in the world as in the church. So let’s see: multiculturalism is all but universally accepted even among conservative Christians today; the sexual libertines are definitely here, and making their case for inclusion; and I’ve encountered Christians who are redistributionists and feminists as well. I suspect the animal rights folks and maybe the postcolonialists are under-represented in Christendom, but perhaps I don’t Google enough. Maybe we’d better consider the whole social justice agenda.
But let me ask you this first: Is it our job to fix the world?
IC: I think yes and no.
Yes, it is our job as humans created by God to take stewardship responsibility for our world; and to the extent that we can do so legitimately, we should. We should, for example, be concerned with things like poverty, fairness and human rights, and preeminently with the right of people to have the chance to consider the truth and to make rational commitments of faith and free choices, even if in so doing they do not make the choices we think they should make. But no, we should never think that by political action we will permanently remedy sin, heal the world of its evils, or bring about the conditions of the Kingdom of God. There can be no Kingdom without Messiah first.
So we should be active for the good of the world, but not think that our goodness is the answer for the world.
Is that about what you think?
Need and the Apostolic Pattern
Tom: I don’t think we’re wildly different on this. We look for “a city whose designer and maker is God”. Our priority is spiritual, always. But in service of the advancement of the Lord’s spiritual work, we cannot belie the truth by failing to address practical concerns that cross our path. We cannot say “keep warm and well fed” while ignoring physical need. That is the pattern of the apostles.
That said, there is a distinction to be made between displaying Christlikeness in my life and in my church — through generosity, through refusing to use race, income or sex as excuses to belittle or reject my fellow human beings, through showing compassion and care for those who are damaged, even if they have damaged themselves, and so on — and, in the alternative, maneuvering politically to get the government to impose my view of justice on others.
Those two things are worlds apart.
IC: Yet that’s the great concern about the social justice types. They see government as the means to impose their personal conception of fairness on other people, no matter what that involves. And sometimes it even involves such things as “redistributive justice”, by which money or other things are stolen from one group condemned as privileged and arbitrarily transferred to another group designated as victims. Sometimes it involves discriminatory quotas to rebalance perceived “historical inequities” or “systemic injustices” at the cost of creating new ones, and so on. Their axiom seems to be, “Speak loudly and carry a big stick”, and that big stick is the government.
God Rather Than Men
Tom: And this brand of government-regulated conformity to the preferred social agenda du jour is having a major impact on the church. We’re already seeing it the form of pastors being required to officiate homosexual unions if they officiate marriages. There’s a great deal more where that came from, because the SJWs of the world have an agenda as long as your arm and new items are going on their wish list almost daily as society capitulates to their previous set of demands. Once gay unions have universal acceptance, expect polygamy to be the next item on the agenda.
But that’s neither here nor there where the church is concerned; we ought to obey God rather than men whatever the consequences may be. What IS interesting to me is that there are these liberal voices in Christendom clamoring to open the church door to the invaders from the inside, if possible — alleged “Christians” who will happily sell out real believers in the interests of their idea of justice.
IC: And that’s interesting, because they must have in mind a sense of justice they regard as higher than the biblical one.
Tom: That’s another way to distinguish between the Social Gospel promoters and social justice advocates. Social justice attempts to impose modern social “norms” and their own peculiar sense of justice on Christians and read them into scripture, where they are manifestly nowhere to be found. Even Christian gay rights advocates admit there are “no examples in scripture ... explicitly supporting same sex relationships”, but they’ll then argue that because loving homosexual relationships and orientations are not expressly condemned, they must then be acceptable to God.
The Social Gospel at least pretended to derives its authority from an interpretation of scripture. One might question that interpretation, but those who held it seemed to genuinely want to help people.
Real-World Outcomes
You’re familiar with the Social Gospel. What did it produce historically?
IC: It produced a major pseudo-missionary movement on several fronts, incorporating such diverse concerns as alcoholism, poverty, foreign aid, medical missions, educational progressivism and prison reform. But being post-millennial in their theology, the Social Gospel advocates essentially held in common that by improving such social institutions we would usher in the Kingdom of God ourselves.
Then WW1 hit … and all the plausibility of increasing human goodness in a sort of automatic, evolutionary and progressive way went out the window. Most experts regard that as the end of its general credibility.
Tom: Leading someone to Christ looks easier than getting them off the street, curing their alcoholism, solving problems created by their perception of sexual identity, eliminating poverty or preventing others from judging them on the basis of the way they were born. Some might actually say getting saved doesn’t address what they perceive to be the real problem. But in fact it’s the much harder and much more important task.
I’m reminded of the Lord’s statement, “For which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven you,’ or to say, ‘Rise and walk’?” Of course it sounds easier to say “Your sins are forgiven.” But when he heals the man, he says it’s for this reason: “that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”. That spiritual need was his priority and the physical need was addressed because it stood in the way of dealing with the spiritual. But in a fallen world, not all physical need can be addressed completely or permanently.
And if we spend most or all of our energy and resources fixing the world around us, we’re leaving the biggest job undone.
The Perfect Society
IC: There’s really nothing new in social justice. Since Babel, mankind has been looking for arrangements through which the perfect society can be realized. But society has never been the answer to our need for justice … and you would imagine we would learn from our mistakes on that one.
It’s an oxymoron, really: “justice” is the idea of people individually getting what each deserves, whether of praise or blame, of poverty or riches, of liberty or constraint, of reward or of punishment. But when the instrument said to produce that “justice” is “society”, then the “social” part submerges all that into the collective, as if some single arrangement were able to produce “justice” for all.
There’s just no reasonable prospect it ever will.
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