If you follow the evangelical blogosphere, you’re no doubt aware of the most recent dust-up over the Social Justice Statement. In what follows, I want to briefly explain (1) why I didn’t sign the statement and (2) defend the use of the phrase “social justice.”

Why I didn’t sign the statement:

If you actually read the document, it’s much more reserved than you might expect. This is also its weakness, however. Words go undefined and assumed, leaving the reader unsure as to who or what is actually being rebuked. And then there’s the generally condescending attitude toward any sort of activism:

“And we emphatically deny that lectures on social issues (or activism aimed at reshaping the wider culture) are as vital to the life and health of the church as the preaching of the gospel and the exposition of Scripture. Historically, such things tend to become distractions that inevitably lead to departures from the gospel.”

The statement is full of false dichotomies such as this. Because of the inherent nature of Scripture, the preacher doesn’t have to apply the text, per se; rather, he has to show the text’s applicability. Thus, the line between expositing the passage and exhorting the people is always blurred. Indeed, the book of James demolishes the sort of hermeneutic that siloes hearing from doing. I didn’t sign the document because I can’t tell women working at crisis pregnancy centers across the country that they’re distracted. I can’t tell them that they’re on a slippery slope to gospel-departure. I can’t tell them that they should believe what Psalm 139:13 says about babies, but not act upon it.

Of course, God holds us responsible in regards to the faithfulness which we show to our work, not our fruit, but is the preacher really being faithful to his calling if he isn’t hoping and praying that the Spirit, through the word, will reshape individuals, families, neighborhoods, indeed “wider cultures?” With Nicholas Wolterstorff, I want to insist, “The church is not merely to wait with grim patience for the new age when the Spirit will fully renew all existence. It must already, here and now, manifest signs of that renewing Spirit.”

In defense of social justice:

Having said that, however, my goal isn’t to attack those critical of social justice. With those critics, I think that the identity politics being practiced on the left and right is an acid that’s leaving the fabric of our culture threadbare. The longer we soak in it, the more the societal trust that’s required for a community to flourish disintegrates. Indeed, anyone who’s read Karl Marx knows his name isn’t being invoked in vain by those critical of our increasingly tribalistic politics.

So while I couldn’t in good conscience sign the statement, I don’t think those who did are bigoted or uninformed. As I said, my goal isn’t to attack the document or its signers. Rather, my goal is to defend the origin and use of the phrase social justice. As I understand the criticism, “social justice” language is problematic because (1) it has Marxist origins thus imports, at best, problematic categories, and (2) it assumes that’s there are multiple kinds of justice, whereas Scripture only speaks of one sort—God’s.

The first point will take the least amount of space to refute. As a point of historical fact, one of the first philosophers to use the expression was the Catholic priest Antonio Rosmini, writing in Italy in the 19^th century. At places, Rosmini sounds as if he could be responding directly to the recent critics of the phrase:

“Justice is not manufactured by human beings, nor can human hands dismantle it. It is prior to laws made by human beings; such laws can only be expressions of justice. Justice is the essence of all laws to such an extent that Saint Augustine had no hesitation in refusing to name as ‘law’ anything that lacked justice. Nor does authority exist except as a servant of justice.”

The Acton Institute is to be commended in their efforts to bring Rosmini’s writings back into relevance. While no doubt others use the phrase in a way incongruent with the originator’s intent, I seek to defend the sort of social justice about which Rosmini speaks and the Acton Institute, for example, embodies.

The second point will take a bit longer than the first. In an effort to be fair to those critical of the phrase, I’ll engage with one of the chief critics directly, Voddie Baucham. Dr. Baucham sums up his point powerfully:

“There’s no such thing as ‘social justice.’ In fact, in the Bible, justice never has an adjective. There’s justice and there’s injustice, but there’s not different kinds of justice.”

Perhaps a story will be of help here. I have a good friend who recently made a compelling case for Socialism using Scripture. Toward the end of our conversation, she asked how I could read the book of Acts—in which we see believers having all things in common—and not embrace a forced redistribution of wealth. Moments earlier, I had said that I believed the government was too far-reaching as it is, so it took her off guard when I conceded that wealth should indeed be redistributed. To not redistribute wealth, I said, would be a tremendous injustice.

“Finally, you #FeelTheBern!” she shouted with joy! Not quite. You see, if a mother and father don’t redistribute their income to their children, they’re derelict. If they don’t freely feed, cloth, and house their toddler, they’re unjust. Scripture commands as much, to not obey would be sin. Likewise, giving to your church, as we see in more places than just Acts, is a divine directive. God doesn’t suggest we redistribute our income, he insists. Yet in these instances, it’s the family and the church that are the instruments of redistribution. So, to say something is demanded of a person isn’t the same thing as saying it’s the State’s prerogative to enforce said demand.

But more to the point, surely there’s a difference between how we share our money with our immediate family and how we share our money with our church community. Our kids will likely require much more than a tenth of our income, after all! Now, if you’re familiar with the Neo-Calvinistic tradition out of which I come, you’ve already anticipated the two points I was trying to make with my friend: (1) the State isn’t the only vehicle for the distribution of justice and (2) we ought not ham-fistedly apply directives given to one institution to another.

There are myriad different spheres of life—schools, cities, clubs, churches, families—each with their own system of governance, their own sovereign, their own code. Indeed, I don’t think it would be an equivocation to say each sphere has its own justice, if by that we mean that a just way to behave in one sphere might be unjust in another. For example, we should have compassion on anyone living in poverty, but our responsibility for the impoverished person correlates to how closely the person is related to us, a point Paul makes in 1 Tim 5:8:

“If anyone doesn’t take care of his own relatives, especially his immediate family, he has denied the Christian faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”

A man might be justified in passing a homeless man on the street without stopping, but if the same man were to pass by his mother begging on the street without stopping, he’d no doubt be unjust in doing so. One action can be just in one context or sphere but unjust in another. The sphere, not only the action, matters.

A pastor ought not imprison a criminal in his vestry—that’s the role of the State. A mayor ought not baptize the police chief—that’s the role of the church. Likewise, while the description of believers living a life of shared resources in Acts is no doubt prescriptive today, it must be prescribed within the appropriate sphere, namely the church.

None of this is to say that Scripture has nothing to say regarding the State. To the contrary, kings and all civil rulers are beckoned therein to rule justly and govern under the ultimate Lordship of Christ. The Bible speaks to every sphere of life, as Abraham Kuyper taught so many of us. A well-ordered society is one in which each sphere is in tune with God’s revelation, both special (i.e. Scripture) and general (i.e. Natural Law).

A just society requires more than just one sphere functioning appropriately, it requires all of them working in harmony with one another and the divine order of reality. One can be born into a healthy family that worships in an unhealthy church, just as one can go to a healthy school in an unhealthy city. Speaking of social justice, then, allows us to speak about the society on a macro level—evaluating more than just the State or the church or the family or the prison system or the school—but analyzing the economy of institutions as a whole, with God’s special and general revelation as the grid.

In conclusion, I understand that I’m not likely to convince my friends who are critical of social justice to adopt the phrase. But my hope is more modest than that. My hope is that in showing that the (1) origin and (2) usage of social justice aren’t as nefarious as is often claimed, the critics can at least allow for the possibility that not everyone is using the word to smuggle in a Marxist agenda.

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Earlier this week Donald Trump called a group of immigrants animals—“You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals.” The comment was broadcast far and wide with universal condemnation. A tweet from The New York Times was typical,

“Trump lashed out at undocumented immigrants during a White House meeting, calling those trying to breach the country’s borders ‘animals.'”

The statement, it turns out, came on the heels of a comment by Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims who was talking about the notorious gang MS-13. In context, it’s clear that the President wasn’t speaking of immigrants generally, but of one of the most brutal, vicious gangs in North America particularly.

Perhaps it’s still morally questionable to refer to even the most hardened of criminals in such a way, but It’s at least not a given. Indeed, it was one of President Obama’s great weaknesses that his moral imagination couldn’t—or wouldn’t—account for violent actors in such stark terms, preferring instead to qualify ostensibly evil acts with the language of mental illness, situational contextualization, etc.

To be sure, if President Obama erred in being too soft in his rhetoric, Trump has no doubt erred in being too hard. The truth is, one could imagine President Trump saying what he did about M-13 about undocumented immigrants carte blanche. He didn’t, thankfully, but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility, which is why so many were quick to believe it happened.

Of course, defenders of the President weren’t surprised by the day’s coverage—just another instance of the lamestream media spouting fake news in an effort to undermine the 2016 election. Yet, despite what Sean Hannity may insist, the problem is not, in fact, a unified, faceless conglomerate—“the media”—seeking to take down the President. Were that the case—were there really two actors, the POTUS and the media, competing against one another in a battle for the public’s trust—then the faux reporting wouldn’t have happened. There’s no doubt that this week was a net loss for the proverbial media. There is even less confidence in journalism this week than there was last week. John Wilson, former editor of Books and Culture, was right when he tweeted about the incident,

“What makes it even worse is that it is CALCULATED (calculated in part to provoke critics to say he’s contemplating genocide, etc., which hyperbole then generates more support from his base).”

So while the coverage turned out to be a win for the President, it was nevertheless a net gain for those individual journalists and bloggers who got the clicks and eyeballs they were aiming for in the first place. And that’s the rub: the problem is less nefarious and more dangerous than the current narrative grants. So long as we exclusively look for those news sources that confirm what we already believe, there will be willing and able writers to whet our appetites with half-true stories (and as our grandmothers taught us, half-truths are just whole-lies in disguise).

Take an example less infused with political heat. Shortly after the infamous Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 required an emergency landing, the front page of various news sources was striking. The top story at CNN read, “Hero pilot is a woman–of course.” Compare that with the headline at FOX, “Hero in a Cowboy hat.” Both stories were true, but both appealed to the sensibilities of their readership. In other words, the desire wasn’t to inform but to draw in readers by reaffirming biases.

This is a good example of the real problem with modern journalism, and “fake news” isn’t a helpful description—that shifts the blame to them when it belongs to us.  We’re eager to see heroes that share our sensibilities, and news agencies deliver. This can seem fairly benign, like in this case. But the converse is also true: we’re hungry to see the other villainized and demeaned, and news agencies deliver on that too, which really is corrosive to our social fabric.

You may not think Donald Trump is morally fit to be President. That’s a perfectly acceptable position to hold; it’s one I happen to hold myself, in fact. We err when we only look at news which caters to that narrative, refusing to accept troublesome data or twisting the data to fit the conclusions we already hold, which is what happened with the “animals” story. There will always be a supply for that which we demand.

It’s true, journalists indeed need more integrity, but so too do we need more empathy. Until we’re able to see the villain in our tribe (and, indeed, ourselves) and the hero in the other tribe, we’ll keep getting half the story.

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“Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down.” -Malcolm Muggeridge

If you could be dictator of America for one day, what would be the first thing you’d do to fix the country? In a recent interview, George Will gave a surprising response to this question, which I’ll paraphrase:

“I’d make every college student change their major to History and their minor to Contingency Studies.”

His point: America did not have to turn out the way it did. The Republic we inhabit is the result of bravery and revolutionary ideas, to be sure, but it’s also the result of an often under-appreciated element; namely, chance. In his new book, Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy, Jonah Goldberg takes this observation a step further. Not only is the freedom we enjoy a historical anomaly, it’s unnatural:

“Capitalism is unnatural. Democracy is unnatural. Human rights are unnatural. God didn’t give us these things, or anything else. We stumbled into modernity accidentally, not by any divine plan.”

If those of us who believe in providence dismiss his argument out of hand, we do so at our own peril. As Goldberg chronicles, for most of mankind’s history, we’ve lived a tribal, violent existence. That we now view the proverbial “other” with as little skepticism as we do is a feat of monumental proportion. A feat accomplished by what, you ask? Goldberg answers: money. Money made it possible for a person of one tribe to have an exchange with a person of another tribe that was mutually beneficial. The “other” in a free market isn’t just a competitor, he’s a customer.

Because the peace we have with one another now is incomplete and imperfect, it’s easy to view the current state of affairs with contempt. In the age of Trump, with identity politics being practiced by the Left and the Right, Goldberg sees the natural human propensity toward tribalism “coming back with a pitchfork.” We’re renovating the Republic with the sledgehammer of populism, knocking down institutions and norms at will, unmindful of which artifacts are structural and which are superficial, which are negotiable and which are load-bearing. Thus, the structural-integrity of the West has been compromised, perhaps irreparably, by those seeking to improve it. No, the current system isn’t perfect, but it’s better than an infinite number of alternatives that seemed inevitable a relatively short time ago.

There’s a famous story in which Benjamin Franklin is asked what sort of government the delegates at the Constitutional Convention are attempting to create, to which he responds, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Goldberg’s proposal for keeping the Republic lies not in specific policy proposals—he offers relatively few in the book—but in a disposition: gratitude.

Illustratively, two accounts of Aesop’s “golden goose” story are given in the book. In the first, the goose is killed out of rage because he wouldn’t—or couldn’t—lay more eggs for his owner. In the second, he’s killed by the owner so as to remove whatever mechanism is inside him that creates the gold. On a surface reading, the first telling blames passion while the second blames reason. The real culprit, however, is ingratitude, which can as easily corrupt the head as the heart.

The goose-killers weren’t grateful for the miracle of a golden egg laying goose—what an unlikely event! It’s simply not natural for a goose to lay golden eggs, and it’s simply not natural for man to live in the free, prosperous, peaceful society in which we find ourselves. No, we must not stagnate in the status quo, but neither must we take for granted the value of our free society. There has never been a better time to be alive—we’ve won the historical lottery, we should be grateful.

Another Form of Suicide

This brings me to my main problem with the book. Goldberg says on the first page that there is no God in his argument. He makes clear that he’s not an atheist, but neither does his reasoning depend on the existence of a deity. In a sense, I appreciate what he’s trying to do. He’s making a limited case for Classical Liberalism and wants the opportunity to persuade people of that argument without being tangled up in more thorny metaphysical debates.

By and large, I think his description of the situation in which we find ourselves will be compelling to those who don’t believe in a higher power. The historical, sociological, and psychological data backs up Goldberg’s argument that we’re prone toward tribalism and violence. Yet, the prescriptive portion of the book, built as it is on the notion of gratitude, is unintelligible in a godless universe. Yes, it’s good and right to be grateful for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but to whom are we grateful? Who receives our thanks? Does not gratitude imply a personal, transcendent “Other?”

Without such a being, our gratitude for the events of the past that brought us to the present becomes neutered into something like nostalgia. In Scripture, God’s covenant people are often called to look back, but they do so with their feet in the present and their eye toward the future. Looking to God’s actions in the past will encourage and ennoble his people toward steadfastness and faithfulness in those things God is calling them to do in the moment and in the moments to come.

Nostalgia, on the other hand, is an indulgent retreat to yesteryear; leaving the real present for a glossy, sentimentalized version of a past that likely never was. Nostalgia is an existential form of suicide. Gratitude leads to good works, bravery, and life. If liberalism is the result of chance, nostalgia is the best we can hope for. If it’s the result of divine providence, the gratitude for which Goldberg calls is not only possible, it’s necessary.

Likewise, belief in God will keep us from being paralyzed with fear. It would be easy to walk away from Goldberg’s book suspicious of any talk of “progress.” But Christians live under the rule of a city that is to come. In Scripture, we find the words of that city’s King, and in those words, we find the recipe for human flourishing in the here and now. Thus we can amend and tweak the structures of the West responsibly, as happened with women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery. We look back with thanks, but we also march forward with hope.

The quote often attributed to Tocqueville is apropos, “America is great because America is good.” Goldberg is surely correct in his claim that man’s sinful nature is always ready to reappear. He’s also right to suggest that the “Lockean Revolution” has birthed the freest, most prosperous civilization in history. He’s wrong to think, however, that the free market and all that comes with it is enough to keep our nature at bay. Our liberal democracy is dependent upon a virtuous citizenry, a virtuous citizenry is depended upon gratitude, and gratitude is dependent upon one to receive our thanks, a Giver of all gifts, a King above all kings. If the West is to be saved, she’ll need a Savior.

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