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Christopher Neiswonger from Apologetics.com scores a direct hit in this analysis of the recent debate stirred up by Glenn Beck’s comments with regard to left-leaning churches using the “social justice” moniker as a euphemism for their liberal political action. Looking forward to this Friday night’s podcast!

What Evangelicals can learn from the Glenn Beck/Jim Wallis Debate

There has never been a more important time for Social Justice and political engagement. Unfortunately for Christians the terms have been largely co-opted by Left wing fanatics intent upon using the good intentions of the Church as the ground for their Statist pretensions. That doesn’t mean God doesn’t want justice; it just means they have no idea what it is.

Take the recent battles between Glenn Beck and his archenemy Jim Wallis as an example. Certainly, no one is going to argue that Glenn Beck has any amount of Christian pedigree. His theology is deplorable even if his understanding of history and political science is much better than what one would expect from someone that has a light grasp of theological dogma. Still, Jim Wallis continually claiming to be an Evangelical is at least as bizarre as Glenn Beck being held out as the answer from orthodoxy. Wallis’ theology is only a bit better than his economic thought. Neither has much business speaking to the important issues involved in a specifically “Christian” interpretation of Social Justice. What stands at the center of Wallis’ reconstruction of Evangelical faith and practice in “Social Injustice”. The motivation is greed, the source is envy, the means is institutionalized theft and the force of the state, and the end is the accumulation of wealth and control over the freedom of others.

There is perhaps no greater provocateur of injustice in American theological culture than Wallis.

The first response will be “How can you say that? Jim Wallace has dedicated his life to Social Justice?” The obvious response being, “No, he has not.” It seems that he has dedicated his life to the subversion of the Evangelical churches traditional understanding of Social Justice through the promotion of merely pagan economic and political thought.

What is Social Justice?

First, social justice is a Christian idea. The terms are not traditional terms but the idea is Christian constant. Any law against theft or murder is a rule of social justice in it’s most basic form. Social justice is not a peculiar kind of justice the way ice cream and pie are different kinds of desserts. Justice is just justice, whole and unalterable. There are some things that are just and some things that are unjust. Those can be personal or social. Institutional injustices are usually social and tend to be functions of the State. The State is another word in Christian theology for any governing authority and the Bible is replete with both advice and criticism of states, statesmen, and statecraft. Still, the church can just as easily be the source of institutional injustice and this happens all through the Bible also.

Second, for the most part, social justice through the Bible and through the entire history of Christian thought has largely meant the exact opposite of what Jim Wallis, the religious left wing, the theological liberals, the political liberals, and the Sojourners establishment say that it means. Today, Social Justice is taken to mean the platform of the Democratic National Convention and the basic principles of atheistic Communism applied as a Theonomic mandate by God, either implicitly or explicitly. This means that the State is supposedly God’s chosen means toward the dissolution of oppression and injustice.

There might be some truth in that the State is God’s means to answering injustice but it is by no means clear who the unjust ones are. People are not right because they are poor; neither are they right because they are rich; people are right when their cause is just. Some people are rich because they abused the poor, which is another way of saying they stole their money. Some people are rich because they suffered and postponed trivial and fleshly indulgence for the betterment of their families and community, and when the leftists steal their money they are certainly the oppressor. The rich are not as easy to oppress as the poor but they are the more attractive target.

Most that are poor bear their poverty as marks of oppression in the form of abuse by their respective States; the State is the primary aggressor against the peace of the people. The most common targets of oppression are children, because oppressing them costs the least in terms of investment and exertion of raw power. After the State, it would be the leftist, socialist, and communists economic schemes forced upon them from without; unjust wars; disease; flood, famine, and fire; and the economic collapses related to those uncontrollable causes that have unprecipitated effects. Still, one would need to be almost completely confused about the human condition to not accept that vanity, sloth, self indulgence, irresponsibility, and the refusal to do in the short term what is necessary for long term benefits is not a very common and much more direct cause of poverty. There are different causes of poverty and wealth, neither is value neutral, and so Justice or Injustice is something to be measured by human action in accord with sound reason and virtue.

Exodus 23:3 says, “Do not show favoritism to a poor man in his lawsuit.” Exodus 23:6 says, “Do not deny justice to your poor people in their lawsuits.” Leviticus 19:15 says, “Do not pervert justice; do not show favoritism to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly.”

Christopher Neiswonger