The Heresy Of Social Justice

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.