Why Social Justice Is Not Biblical Justice: An Urgent Appeal to Fellow Christians in a Time of Social Crisis

by Scott David Allen

“It’s no good having the same vocabulary if we’re using different dictionaries.”1

According to the theory of intersectionality: Victimhood is the highest virtue. Victims and members of oppressed identity groups are elevated to a kind of sainthood. . . . This is in fact exactly what intersectionality teaches, complete with a hierarchy of victimhood for comparing everyone’s relative righteousness.

The false system of moral guilt and innocence at the heart of social justice morality makes it incompatible with the gospel. In fact, it is a false gospel. The Bible teaches that every human being, regardless of sex, gender, or skin color, is a sinner who needs God’s forgiveness (Romans 3:23; 6:23). While the consequences of sin may be passed down from one generation to another (Jeremiah 32:18), the guilt of sin is earned individually (Ezekiel 18:20). Though God loves people of every ethnic group (Revelation 7:9), He is no respecter of persons (Acts 10:34), and no one will get a pass from Him based upon membership in any particular group (Galatians 3:28). Salvation is by grace through faith (Ephesians 2:8–9).

We are morally obligated to care for truly oppressed and victimized people.

The Bible has a radically different understanding of power and authority than does ideological social justice. Power and authority exist to maintain order, a necessary precondition for human flourishing, and to serve those under authority for their own benefit. God, the most powerful of all—the King of Kings and Lord of Lords—amazingly serves us by exercising His power for our good, even going so far as to die on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins—while we were His enemies!

As Christians, we can agree that there are many victims of injustice and oppression in our fallen world, and they deserve justice and compassion. However, we disagree that we must confer moral authority on people who claim victim status, allowing them to define what is real, based on their subjective “lived experience.”

Ultimately, Marxism and social justice are totalitarian, for only one human institution is seen as powerful enough to purge the world of evil and lead to utopia: an all-powerful state.

The job of executing perfect justice on earth is too difficult for fallen humans to undertake. In our efforts to rid the world of evil, we would destroy what is good as well. Only a perfect, holy, and righteous God is able to do this task. Only He can build the better world that all of us, in our best moments, desire. He will have the final say, but ultimate justice will have to await His return.

C. S. Lewis captures this redefinition of equality powerfully in The Screwtape Letters: “Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, and all nobodies. All equals.”1 This was the goal of the communist states in the Soviet Union and China, and of all utopian experiments.

Ideological social justice actually values uniformity, paradoxically, in the name of diversity. There is no unity-diversity balance in this worldview. The affirmation and value of “diversity” is actually strictly limited to only a few select categories. Beyond these, there is stifling pressure to conform. The diversity that is affirmed is group difference, not individual difference, and even among groups, not all group differences are equally celebrated—or even tolerated.