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

by Scott David Allen

John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, is fond of saying, “It’s no good having the same vocabulary if we’re using different dictionaries.”

All cultural change begins with language change. Changes in language—new words, new definitions—can usually be traced to powerful thought leaders who may have lived hundreds of years before.

The Bible is far more than a message of salvation, as absolutely vital as that is. It is a comprehensive worldview that defines and shapes all aspects of reality and human existence.

Ideas have consequences, but as Os Guinness reminds us, they also have antecedents—that is, they come from somewhere.

ideological social justice can be recognized by its bitter fruit. The lives and cultures shaped by it are marked by enmity, hostility, suspicion, entitlement, and grievance.

Over time I came to see that Marxist worldview assumptions do far more to harm the poor than to help them. It did not see the poor as fully human, created in the image of God, with dignity, responsibility, and the capacity to create new wealth and new opportunities. My former Marxist-influenced worldview saw them largely as helpless victims, dependent upon the actions of beneficent Westerners to overcome poverty. This fostered a destructive sense of paternalism and guilt on one side, and a damaging sense of dependency and entitlement on the other.

Poverty isn’t ultimately rooted in unjust systems but in satanic deception at the level of culture.

justice means treating others in conformity with God’s perfect moral standard,

By the only standard that ultimately matters, we are all guilty of injustice.

To sin is to violate God’s law.

Ideological social justice is based on the belief that evil and injustice are the products of dominant groups who create systems and structures which marginalize others and promote their own interests. Ironically, this belief can be used to marginalized and dehumanize people who find themselves in a dominant cultural group, such as men, whites, and heterosexuals.

One of the greatest blights on any nation is corruption—the abuse of power for personal (usually financial) gain.

By utilizing a cultural strategy that some have called “the long march through the institutions,”8 the Frankfurt School social theorists and their allies achieved stunning success at embedding their presuppositions into Western public education, academia, the media, entertainment, big business, and politics.

Ideological social justice is perhaps best understood as a postmodern religious alternative (a “successor ideology”) to Christianity.

Objective truth, eyewitness testimony, investigation, evidence, and legal verdicts are of little importance when one operates in the worldview of ideological social justice.

What is called social justice is too often actually a perversion of justice.

People are treated differently based on the groups to which they are assigned. Verdicts of guilt or innocence are largely based not on individual behavior, but on group affiliation.

And we must not forget that the perpetuation of distorted narratives by treating them as “truth,” is just another form of lying.

In the worldview of ideological social justice, authority is conferred, not by wisdom, age, position, or experience—but by victim status.

Some have called it a veritable victimhood Olympics.

Our task, as Christians, shouldn’t be to tear down the West, but to reform it to better reflect the truth of God’s kingdom.

The attitude that only criticizes the past reveals a haughty pride that essentially says, “We would have been more virtuous and courageous if we had lived in their times and in their circumstances.”

We should also be aware of and grateful for our inheritance.

Here’s a cardinal rule of social justice morality: Victim group members can never be portrayed as perpetrators of injustice. They are and must always remain victims.