Whose vision of social justice?
By Colleen Carroll Campbell
Talk-show host Glenn Beck recently struck a nerve — and ratings gold —
when he
urged his audience to abandon any church that espouses social justice.
The term is "code" for extremist political ideas akin to those of Nazis and
Communists, Beck said, and churches that use it are promoting "a perversion
of
the Gospel" that privileges big government over individual charity.
Beck's controversial advice sparked a passionate backlash, particularly from
the political left. Leading the boycott-Beck brigade is liberal social
activist
the Rev. Jim Wallis, who says Christians now should consider Beck's show as
obscene and unworthy of their patronage as shock jock Howard Stern's.
"Social justice is an integral part of God's plan for humanity," Wallis
wrote
on his blog, after admitting that "Christians may disagree about what social
justice means in our current political context."
That caveat is crucial, and it's one that politicized pastors like Wallis
often
forget. A spiritual adviser to President Barack Obama and author of the
rather
presumptuously titled manifesto "God's Politics," Wallis is an intensely
partisan critic of those who reject his statist vision of social reform.
He's not the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — a preacher of ranting, anti-American
sermons whose Chicago church Obama attended for decades and whom Beck cited
as
an example of a pastor promoting extremism. But Wallis has his moments of
fire-breathing invective, directed almost always at Republican politicians
and
conservative Christians.
Beck makes his living by making provocative statements, so he probably was
not
displeased by the attention that Wallis' fury generated for his show. For
Wallis, the controversy has given him a bigger platform to plead his case
for
the inextricable link between a Christian social conscience and leftist
public
policy. Lost in the fray is an interesting question worth pondering: What's
the
meaning of social justice?
Anyone who has cracked open a Bible knows that justice is indeed a recurring
theme. Calls for a just social order hardly qualify as a "perversion" of a
Gospel that emphasizes, again and again, God's concern for the poor and
marginalized. A religion premised on the idea of original sin does not
promise
its adherents a pain-free existence this side of eternity, but neither does
it
exempt them from the duty to build a better society here and now.
Still, there's a reason that the term "social justice" provokes sighs and
rolled eyes among many Christians today. The promotion of leftist politics
as
infallible religious dogma by pastors such as Wright and, to a lesser
extent,
Wallis, goes a long way toward explaining public fatigue with the term. That
fatigue stretches beyond Protestant circles into Catholic ones, where the
phrase has its origins.
The Catholic Catechism defines social justice as a situation in which people
are able to "obtain what is their due" and says such justice "can be
obtained
only in respecting the transcendent dignity of man." The Church lays out a
few
non-negotiable principles when it comes to respecting this personal dignity
—
defense of the right to life is preeminent among them — while leaving many
public policy decisions subject to the prudential judgment of individual
Catholics.
Catholicism is not libertarianism by any stretch; government is expected to
have a role in protecting the poor and weak. Yet the Church also defends the
principle of subsidiarity in political life — the idea that the people
closest
to a problem should be the ones to solve it.
Despite these careful doctrinal distinctions, many Catholics — like many
mainline Protestants — assume that social justice demands their reflexive
support for unlimited expansion of the social welfare state, even when a new
government program may not be the most effective way to help the poor.
Meanwhile, many of these same Catholics ignore the Church's clear admonition
to
defend social justice by defending the right to life of the unborn from
abortion and the elderly from euthanasia.
The call for social justice is an outgrowth, not a perversion, of the
Gospel.
But the devil is in the definition. Christians concerned about mission creep
in
their churches should not abandon social justice. They should fight to
reclaim
a fuller understanding of it, one independent of any narrowly partisan
political agenda.
Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television and radio host and St.
Louis-based fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is
www.colleen-campbell.com.