What is the Social Justice Movement?

The Social Justice movement has become kind of a thing over the last several years as a moral expression for creating fairness and justice in society. Social Justice, however, is not built upon total impartiality or on equal justice under the law. Rather, those who promote this approach to defining morality have their own specific criteria for determining what is just and unjust. In modern society it typically relates to wealth distribution, personal activity, and social privileges.

The concept of Social Justice hasn’t always had the meaning we see promoted in modern society. In previous time periods, it was simply a way of referring to an emphasis on taking care of the physical needs of those who were down and out. This notion has been prominent throughout the history of the Christian church as Christians have felt a particular calling to help the poor, the widowed, those in prison, and the like. The use of the term itself dates back to the eighteenth century, though it wasn’t until the middle of the nineteenth century that it began to be used in the way we see it in modern times.

Whereas the sense of the concept of Social Justice would seem to be a natural fit as an expression of the Christian faith, in our day the term has been coopted, primarily by people who hold a naturalistic worldview. With that, it has lost its genuinely biblical emphasis. What has happened is that the meaning of the term has been changed to reflect a Socialist or Communist ideology. This can sometimes be quite confusing since most of the people who promote this kind of ideology, and who use the term most often, generally claim to be Christians. However, the Christians who advocate for Social Justice in this way are primarily members of groups that use an approach to interpreting the Bible that does not reflect traditional biblical theology.

The confusion many people have in understanding why the modern Social Justice movement is not a biblical approach arises primarily because those who promote it generally use Christian vocabulary to express their views on Social Justice, but redefine the words using naturalistic worldview concepts. Rather than basing their moral foundation on the absolute foundation of biblical theology, they base it on the relativism of Naturalism.

A great case in point is the sermon the American Episcopal bishop preached at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in England. He spoke of Jesus, but his view of Jesus is that he was only a man, not the incarnate God spoken of in the Bible. And though he spoke much of “love,” his meaning did not relate to the sacrificial love of God in Christ who died as an atoning sacrifice for the sins of mankind, but the preferential love God has for the physically down and out. His sermon simply did not express the biblical concepts about God and love that it probably appeared to do to the uninitiated.

Whereas biblical Theism looks at rights and duties from the perspective of the individual, Social Justice thinking considers rights and duties to be derived from the collective – the institutions of society. Rather than expecting individuals to take responsibility for their own lives, with society picking up some of the slack when they fall short, Social Justice ideology looks to societal institutions to be the primary source for taking care of people. This is generally expressed concretely in society by promoting a system where the government provides benefits and services to the citizenry, as opposed to expecting people to take individual responsibility for their own lives. To pull this off, they advocate that those who are the productive in society should be forced to support “the downtrodden” by paying higher taxes. They also advocate for manipulating and regulating markets to ensure “fair distribution of wealth,” and “equal opportunity.”

One of the biggest problems, though, as it relates to promoting Social Justice, relates to its moral relativism. Social Justice advocates are not really advocates of equal justice, as truly equal justice cannot exist in their philosophy. Rather, they pick and choose the ones they consider to be on the receiving end of unjust treatment based on their own arbitrary preferences. Adding the word “Social” to the word justice clearly demonstrates that the objective of these advocates is not justice for all, but to provide certain social advantages to those they deem to have received injustice. As such, people in society are not looked at as individuals, but as a collection of various groups that are either advantaged or disadvantaged. The advantaged groups must be taken down a notch by taking their privilege from them (money, power, prestige, etc.), while the disadvantaged must be helped by using the privilege taken from the “advantaged” and giving it to the “disadvantaged.” Some of the groups various Social Justice advocates advocate for include migrants, prisoners, the physically and developmentally disabled, various racial and ethnic groups, and so on.

As for the promotion of this movement within certain Christian denominations, the root of that is primarily found in various strains of liberal theology. While liberal theology tries to use the Bible to proof text its beliefs, the theology itself is not based on the teachings of the Bible at all. Rather, the worldview foundation of these beliefs is right out of Naturalism.

One of the more recent incarnations of liberal theology is Liberation Theology. Liberation theology is a movement that believes that the teachings of Jesus Christ do not promote eternal truths. Rather, they advocate for the elimination of unjust economic, political, or social conditions. It teaches that the essence of salvation (the purpose of the Christian faith) is to help the poor in their suffering by helping them overcome the oppression of a society that keeps them down. Essentially, it is Marxist Communism dressed up in biblical vocabulary using redefined biblical words. Additionally, Liberation Theology comes in different strains: There is Black Liberation Theology, Asian Liberation Theology, Feminist Liberation Theology, Native American Liberation Theology, and on and on. In each of these, the disadvantaged group is specifically defined, and the oppressors of these individual groups are considered to be responsible for “giving up their advantage” by transferring it to the “oppressed.” Obviously, the Social Justice movement is not based on biblical beliefs. Biblical beliefs define salvation as the forgiveness of sin provided by the sacrificial death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It has an eternal focus as opposed to the temporal focus of Social Justice thinking.

There is no doubt that Christians should help the down and out and advocate for justice and equality. Those are decidedly Christian values. And the truth is, Christians, as a community, have done a better job of promoting that than any other group in the history of the world. That said, the concepts of justice and equality cannot be allowed to be coopted and the meanings of the words changed into something else.

Social Justice, based on the modern usage of the term, does not promote justice at all. It promotes injustice. It promotes advantage toward a preferred group to the disadvantage of another. Christians should, in fact, be very concerned that true justice prevail in society. When we see injustice, we should point it out and make whatever changes need to be made to eliminate it.

It is, of course, very possible that when a particular injustice appears, it affects an identifiable group of people. But providing justice does not come from transferring advantage from one group to another. It comes when the system itself is changed in a way that provides true justice to every individual, no matter what group they belong to. Based on a biblical worldview, the bottom line is the individual. That is the only point of view that can ever provide true justice.

© 2018 Freddy Davis