The advent of “Social Justice” has troubled me for a number of years. Not because I despise society – sociology is one of my great interests. Nor do I have anything against justice – God demands it and all of us are called to practice it. But, as more than one astute commentator has noted, “Justice” is a word that needs no modifier.
Scripture never speaks of “social justice” or any other kind of justice for that matter. It only speaks of justice. So when Social Justice became a thing, I felt an increasing disquiet inside.
Perhaps recent discussions on the topic have given me impetus to put aside my fear of saying the wrong thing. Perhaps it is telling that less than a month after I wrote this post a statement appeared defining differences between the gospel and the current trajectory of Social Justice. I don’t know if those things are significant, but I do know that this is a dangerous topic to write about since people will automatically assume I care nothing for the poor or immigrants or those on the margins of society. That would be a wrong and prejudiced assumption.
There are many Christians involved in advocacy for the voiceless, offering microfinancing for the poor, standing against human trafficking, supporting rape and domestic violence victims, lobbying politicians to change harmful laws or make better ones, and countless other areas of justice that the Church should be involved in. I count many of these people among my friends. And I believe the Church is richer because of their work.
And this is where the difficulty in addressing Social Justice in the Church lies: it comes in the guise of true religion. And it often is true religion. God himself, through his prophets, calls us to release the defenceless from oppression, to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. And this is part of what it means to live righteously. Separating the truly biblical from the syncretistic or the purely moralistic is difficult because it requires measuring where individuals stand before God. And that’s something only God can do. I can only speak in general terms and from what I sense in the Spirit.
The problem occurs when ideologies that have the appearance of true godliness supplant Christ. No matter how noble the cause, no matter how seemingly right the motive, anything to which we yield our loyalty, other than God himself is idolatry.
“Thou shalt have no other gods besides me” is not some antiquated demand of a tyrant. It is a statement implicit in which is the understanding that having other gods will be destructive to us. And the more we yield ourselves to other gods, the greater our self-destruction.
Over the years I’ve watched people let tradition, family ties, pet doctrines, socialism, feminism, nationalism and a host of other -isms displace devotion to Jesus. The “cause” becomes more important than Christ. Or, alternatively, the cause gets conflated with Christ.
As the enthusiasm for Social Justice has grown among Christians, my feeling that something isn’t quite right has never gone away. I can’t evade the sense that we’re missing the target, getting distracted, that this is all going to end up somewhere we never intended – somewhere that looks a lot like the Kingdom but is just a clever knockoff.
The people who manned the Communist system around the world before the Soviet Union was established, didn’t devote themselves to this cause for the sake of creating gulags and secret police and territorial aggrandizement. They did it because they were seeking social justice.
-Thomas Sowell
Let me be clear, I believe it is the responsibility of Christians everywhere to feed the hungry, provide for widows and orphans, share their belongings with those in need, to set the oppressed free, and to stand against injustice. And Christians throughout the centuries have done that – sometimes badly and sometimes admirably.
The issue is not that we’re practicing Social Justice. The issue is what is meant by Social Justice. What is different now from previous centuries is that the definitions of oppression and injustice have changed, and are continually changing. In many cases they are being deliberately changed in order to align with a specific social agenda. And Christians en masse are signing on to the world’s new definitions.
Let me explain with a question about marriage. It’s not a new question; you might even think it’s passé, but how you answer will indicate how you define oppression and injustice.
If a socially accepted homosexual couple are legally entitled to all the benefits of a married heterosexual couple, including legal, financial, social, and material benefits, but are not permitted to call themselves “married”, are they the victims of injustice? Are they being oppressed?
If you believe they are not entitled to be recognized as “married” then you will probably not be waging any wars of social justice on their behalf.
But if you do believe they have been wronged you will take your sense of justice and your scriptures and you will defend their rights to everything everyone else can have and do.
And this is precisely what is happening where I live and in many churches and liberal democracies around the world.
As I indicated before, the problem with pursuing Social Justice instead of Justice is that it is morphing into something other than what we tell ourselves it is. And as it does, not only will Christian Social Justice Warriors be called upon to provide “justice” for ever-wackier practices and more dubious victimized groups, it will take us further away from the center.
And so, there are Christians now who vehemently champion equal pay but refuse to stand up on behalf of unborn children; who believe abortion is a woman’s right but animal testing is evil; or who want us to celebrate the rights of people to carry out this kind of craziness:
Transgender Man Gives Birth Five Years After having First Child as a Woman
They are standing up for the rights of the dispossessed and marginalized. And they do this on the grounds that they are practicing Social Justice exactly as Jesus would have done.
But since the dispossessed and marginalized now include crustaceans, endangered animals, pedophiles, polygamists, and perverts, where are they going to draw the line with their Social Justice?
Tragically they don’t understand that they are sawing off the branch they’re standing on. They are helping to dismantle the very beliefs that are the motivation for them to practice justice. In the case of marriage, they are undermining the foundations of their theology. And I say this because all of scriptural history is predicated on an understanding of the family that is One Man, and One Woman, being fruitful and multiplying. It is not Modern Family. It is not bisexual family. It is not a threesome. It is not perverse sexual practices family. It is not me marrying myself.
The smallest social unit God uses to weave societies together is the family as described by both Moses and Jesus. A man leaves his father and mother to be fused together with his wife. (And just so we’re clear, they’re biologically male and female). Only a man and a woman can become “one flesh”. Championing the rights of anything else, however noble it may seem to do so will find us, like Saul, working against the Holy Spirit. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to be at odds with God no matter how noble I might think my work.
On one hand, none of this matters. How a government defines marriage, for example, is immaterial except for legal purposes. What matters is how God defines marriage. So any changes to the legal status of individuals shouldn’t really bother Christians. This kind of thinking is fine insofar as we believe wholeheartedly in God’s definition of marriage.
But what I find is that an increasing number of Christians actually believe that if homosexual marriage is recognized by the State that couple is actually married. That is, they are equating the legal endowment of the State with the spiritual covenant of marriage. Such unbiblical thinking is not confined to the matter of marriage. They are doing this with a whole host of “rights” that are in conflict with true godliness. By aligning their beliefs with society’s rather than scripture they have willingly yielded themselves to the mindset of the world. By practicing Social Justice they have defrauded true Justice. And both the Church and the world are the lesser for it.
I’ve used the example of marriage to highlight my point that Social Justice is fast becoming something other than the justice of the Bible. There are others. And as the number of “oppressed groups” continues to multiply, still others will arise.
I’m afraid we’re getting sidetracked. Not because justice isn’t central to who God is, but because we’re allowing the world to dictate what it means. And as we do the world’s work, good and all as it may be, we’re telling ourselves that this is the Kingdom.
The gospel of Social Justice is not the gospel. It is one distributary of a much larger stream.
People involved in Social Justice are often focused on the moment; what is important here and now. Millennials, in particular, tend to have plenty of emotion but a cultivated disinterest in thinking things through. They pour boundless energy into the task at hand but have no inclination to consider the long-term dangers of their actions. I’m looking at the end game and I’m wondering what they’re going to do once they’ve sawn off all the branches; once they’ve finished deconstructing the foundations of their faith. For if the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do? (Ps 11:3)
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