This is no easy subject. The "social justice" throng will attempt to claim that anyone who doesn't accept their corporate goals is some how against individual justice and individual compassion. Rather than be distracted by that faulty generalization I will start with a story.
One time before the dawn of cell
phones there was a college student. He was making a fourteen hour
drive from his parents house to his college when he saw something on
the other side of the highway he couldn't believe. He saw a muscular
young man open the door of a parked car and assail the female driver
inside with a rapid and fierce barrage of punches.
The college student was almost a full
mile down the road when he finally convinced himself he actually saw
it happen. In his fantasy life he had always thought of himself as a
hero, and at that moment he was asking himself why he hadn't veered
his car across the median and over the opposing lane to that side of
the road to rescue the maiden in distress. The answer was reasonable
enough, though not enough to keep him from feeling ashamed. The
student was relatively scrawny, especially compared to the muscular
attacker. It probably would have been fullish for him to have
intervened, especially while trying to cross highway medians in a sedan poorly designed for any road hazard, let alone a full highway median.
The student passed an exit and the
thought occurred to him he could have stopped at a pay phone to
report the attack to the police. Unfortunately he had passed the
exit before he thought of it.
“Okay, the next exit then”, he
said to himself, “I'll report it then”.
The thought of what horrible things
may have yet transpired back there on that highway shoulder made him
wince. He didn't even want to think about the woman possibly being
killed.
He had convinced himself of the
urgency of informing the police as soon as possible, but then he
thought what it might mean to his school work. He was in a different
state, almost five hundred miles from his college, and his classes
were way too intense for him to be able to take time out to assist a
police investigation.
“How amazingly selfish of me”, he
scolded himself for even considering putting his schoolwork ahead of
protecting someone's life. He was definitely, in his mind, going to
inform the police at the next exit, but then another thought came to
him, one much more potent.
'The police patrol the highways.
There will be one along sooner or later. Probably one has already
gotten there considering all the time I've wasted struggling
over the issue. Anyways, we have police precisely for that sort of
thing. What do we pay them for right? College students returning to
school on fourteen hour drives ought to be able to do just that. College is all about the future after all. Let
the police handle this.'
And so the young student
returned to his college to attend his classes, making no report. The
future was supposedly served and who knows what happened to the woman on the
side of the highway, it wasn't his concern considering we have public
servants to take care of such things.
Awful story and awful ending, right?
Of course. This is the legacy of a culture that has decided to
delegate individual responsibility to the employees of the
collective. While to be fair one could argue the young student in
this story shirked even his corporate responsibilities to the
collective, it was precisely the collective that enabled his ultimate
excuse. If he had been centered in himself as an individual he would
have had no one and no thing to hide behind. He would have either
done something to help the poor woman or he would not have, and his
own self-assessment would have no other two choices but that he was
good or bad in it.
I used this story to encourage
thought. Those who already agree with me may see new reasons why
we're right, and those who don't agree with me are at this very
moment thinking of ways they think this story doesn't support my
point. Either way the pump on the well of thought has been primed.
Now's a good time for some strait logic and reasoning.
The term “social justice” was
coined by a Catholic priest named Luigi Taparelli in 1840. What he
did was take the compassion of Thomism, a religious philosophy
derived from the great saint Thomas Aquinas and try to apply it to
groups of people as if these groups were individuals. e.g. The Bible
teaches us to be compassionate to those less fortunate than
ourselves, therefore, according to Taparelli, communities and
societies as a whole should enact practices and policies to help the
less fortunate. The persuasive power of this reasoning is apparent
as we now see “social justice” preached, taught, and practiced
throughout modern Catholic and Protestant churches.
The problem with this is twofold.
First off there is no such thing as social justice. Justice cannot
be achieved by addressing people as groups instead of as individuals.
Secondly, taking Biblical teachings and instructions meant to apply
to individuals and applying them to collectives distorts the very
message of our Lord Jesus Christ. I will support this with reason,
logic, and scripture below.
No Such Thing
It is almost
damning to academia that this flaw in social justice is so
reflexively brushed aside. The logic is unavoidable. Any attempt
to achieve justice that demands something of one group of people in
order to give it to another cannot in any way be just, since the
individual members of the group effectively being punished are being
punished for no fault of their own. They didn't decide to be born
into a privileged ethnicity or gender, and in the case of those who
are rich, all of them didn't get there by making morally bad decisions.
While some may welcome the collective's efforts to help the less
fortunate by taking things from them, some may not and for good
reasons, demanding respect for individual human dignity not being the
least. Put simply social justice policies of forcing people to
share, especially through governmental actions, inevitably commit
injustices and since justice cannot be injustice, there is no such
thing as “social justice”.
The common
argument from academia against this clear logic is that people in
privileged groups benefit from injustices and thus are in fact
culpable. This is also the argument terrorists use to justify
blowing up civilians. Most civil societies do not however consider
the merchant who sold food to a criminal an accessory to whatever
crimes he committed. They usually don't even consider the criminal's
dependent children to be accessories. So how is the rich oriental
man culpable for the poor black woman's misfortune? Simple, he's
not, and to tax him more or to make it harder for his kids to get
into a college is plainly the opposite of justice. There is no such
thing as “social justice” since it is in fact unjust.
Distorts The
Christian Message Of Compassion
For this point I will lean heavily on the Christian message itself,
as I should, and I'll begin with what I call the key to it all. Our
Lord referred to it as the greatest two commandments.
Mark 12:30-31
~Jesus
"Love the
Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all
your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your
neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.”
These two
commandments are about three things, God, ourselves, and others.
They pretty effectively show the emphasis of Christ's message and
ministry as well as what our own ministries should be. First we are
told to love God with our all, and what is entailed and detailed out
as that tells us something, your heart, your soul, your
mind, your strength. None of those things are properties or
responsibilities of any collective. Of the four, three are only
aspects of individuals. Only strength could also be something beyond our
immediate self. The other three are so clearly individual that they
are often seen as synonymous with singularity.
The second
commandment then ties our love for others inseparably with our love
for ourselves. The absence of the collective in this becomes almost
obvious if one asks one of the most obvious questions. That is, 'how
do I love myself?'. Do I give control of my resources to someone
else so they can look after me when I'm fully capable of doing it
myself? No. I want my dignity. Therefore if I am to love others as
myself I must do it, whenever possible with the utmost respect for
them and myself. I should whenever possible and/or practical do it
personally, directly, as one individual to another. And when I can't
do it directly and instead make use of some in-between service, I should do
it of my own volition, not through force of law or even in response
to some community born sense of oughtness. It should always be my
choice, a moral obligation perhaps, but never a legal or in any way a
coerced one.
Now the
implications I draw here from just two verses, as important and key
as they may be to the entirety of the Christian message, may be
countered by the throngs of Christian leaders and teachers who insist
that “social justice” can be found all over the scriptures. So
much so that some have claimed if we cut out all support for “social
justice” from the Bible we wouldn't have very much left. But not
to worry. I can brush this throng aside with reason easily enough.
I don't even have to use the trump card I established earlier, that
there logically is no such thing as “social justice”. I can use
the very scriptures they claim support it.
One of the
favorites of these areas of scriptures they claim support “social
justice” is the Beatitudes, found in Matthew 5:3-10. They are as
follows (NIV translation). There are eight of them so I numbered
them accordingly.
(1) “Blessed
are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is
the kingdom of heaven.
(2) Blessed are
they who mourn,
for they shall
be comforted.
(3) Blessed are
the meek,
for they shall
inherit the earth.
(4) Blessed are
they who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they shall
be satisfied.
(5) Blessed are
the merciful,
for they shall
obtain mercy.
(6) Blessed are
the pure of heart,
for they shall
see God.
(7) Blessed are
the peacemakers,
for they shall
be called children of God.
(8) Blessed are
they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness,
for theirs is
the kingdom of heaven.”
There is little
if any serious scholarly claim that “the poor in spirit”mentioned in the first beatitude are
anything other than the humble. Humility, I should add, is an
extremely important goal set in Christian teaching and should always
be pursued, as difficult as that may be. “Humility, like a rose,
once grasped ...” I was taught while getting my masters. So in my
humble yet educated opinion (oops there goes the rose) the only
beatitude here that could have anything directly to do with what the
throng would call “social justice” is the third one.
This however is
very problematic for them because that part about “they shall
inherit the earth” seems a bit more grand than receiving
unemployment compensation. I suppose they could argue I'm just being
difficult in interpreting it as quite so grand, but look at it in the
context of the first and second beatitudes. " The kingdom of heaven"?
And those who mourn "will be comforted"? What will comfort those who
mourn short of God fixing the problem of death itself? All of the
remedies seem pretty clearly to be of a divine source, not a human
one and certainly not a collective or social source.
As for the
other verses the throng may point to, I have read them and I could
fill a book explaining each away, but I would just be wasting space
and time re-hashing the same few effective refutations of their
interpretations. They all come down to this.
All of these
verses that they say refer to groups and communities either refer to
God, as in the beatitudes, or to individual moral obligations to
other individuals as they encounter them, not the actions or policies of communities or governments. The strongest support the
“social justice” throng has is from the prophets where God
chastises Israel for its treatment of the poor and needy, but if one
reads on in each case God blesses individuals who made the right
choices. If the principle of “social justice” were applied, no
one would have been spared His wrath. Instead in each case it is
individual responsibility and God's power and intent to bless that
comes out as the true theme, not something called “social justice”.
God deserves
our all and we are instructed to give Him that. In all that He has
done and tells us through the scriptures He will do, He is ultimately
and primarily concerned with individual relationships with him and
others. Yes, He did work out part of His plan through a nation,
Israel, but Israel failed because of the inability of humanity to
obey the law even through a national effort and ultimately, both as
evidenced in the prophets and in the New Testament, God holds
individuals responsible for their decisions. In all of His
punishments towards Israel He always either spared certain
individuals or spared larger groups for the sake of individuals, and
it was because of the choices they made, not the groups they were a
member of.
Jesus came to
make it possible for individuals to have personal relationships with
God and this good god commands us to love others as we love
ourselves. We are therefore called to empower others as
individuals to be able to choose what the nature of their relationships
with God will be. There can be no coercion of any kind, no legal or
social pressure in this. Only persuasion in an atmosphere of respect
for individual dignity and free will. If at any point we drop the
element of individual choice from this we become disobedient to His
commandment to love others as ourselves and in turn to love God with
our entire being.
This is not
just true in bringing people to Christ. The Church universal is not
one thing on the outside and the opposite on the inside.
Christian character continues to be a matter of individual and not
corporate decisions. It is individual Christians' relationships with
God and other individuals that are most important, not their
commitments to communities.
Social justice
is worse than heresy, for unlike heresies that distort our perception
of the nature of God, social justice diminishes our roles as
individuals both in helping and receiving help, and worst of all
causes us to be disobedient to God's commandments, most notably the
two Jesus told us were the greatest. Our brothers and sisters in Christ who teach
social justice need interventions where we take them aside in a
loving manner and show them the errors of their ways. If they reject
our correction and insist on continuing to teach social justice we
should send them on their way without us. Tough medicine, I know,
but in these critical days where the church universal is so infected,
it's high time we took it.
