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

by Scott David Allen

It took many years, with the help of some wonderful, godly mentors, before I fully realized my assumptions about wealth and poverty were rooted more in the Communist Manifesto than the Bible.

Looking back on history, and our own Christian heritage, I discovered times when God worked through the church to lift entire nations out of poverty. Before the Reformation, for example, the nations of northern Europe were as impoverished as the nations of Africa are today. After the Reformation, they began to prosper. This transformation didn’t come about because of wealth redistribution, enlightened human wisdom, or scientific or technical know-how. It happened because people began to open the Bible, and to understand reality, including their own identity and purpose, in new and life-changing ways. It was the power of biblical truth—of the biblical worldview—that lifted people out of poverty and built free, prosperous nations.

If you truly want to empower the impoverished to rise, the most potent tool at your disposal is biblical truth and compassion.5 Poverty isn’t ultimately rooted in unjust systems but in satanic deception at the level of culture.

The notion of “personal bodily autonomy” flows out of postmodernism, which holds that ultimate authority is not vested in God, or in science, but in the autonomous, sovereign individual.

The irony here is painful. In the days of slavery, the moral reasoning went something like this: Black slaves are not fully human but are the powerless, voiceless property of powerful slave owners to dispose of as they choose. Call it “property justice,” if you will. The moral reasoning for abortion is identical. In “reproductive justice,” the unborn are not fully human but rather are the powerless, voiceless property of mothers.

In an appalling irony, this moral reasoning has made abortion the leading cause of death for black lives in America today.

In New York City, more black babies are aborted than are born alive.6 This is justice?

Instead of relying on a sure and unchanging standard for justice, we are constantly changing standards. What was considered moral five years ago is not only called immoral today but is increasingly ruled illegal.

Black Lives Matter was founded by three women steeped in neo-Marxist social justice ideology.

In my thirty-five years of working with church leaders around the world, from over seventy-five nations, I’ve never met anyone who endorsed in any way the idea that “white people were created to rule everyone else.” Yet according to this statement, this is the “central lie at work in the church.”

the law reveals God’s character.

He is the moral plumb line who determines what is good and right for all peoples, for all eras.

righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne.

Paul makes the audacious claim that all people—not only the Jews—know tacitly what God’s eternal moral standard is, because they “do by nature things required by the law.” They show that God has written it “on their hearts” because their consciences convict them of wrongdoing.

This is why the image of the stone tablets is engraved at the apex of the United States Supreme Court building.

This kind of everyday justice was the central message that John the Baptist preached to the crowds on the banks of the Jordan River. He warned the people of God’s coming judgment. In response, the people asked what they could do to avoid God’s wrath. John replied this way: “Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same” (Luke 3:11). When tax collectors asked the same question, John responded: “Don’t collect any more [tax] than you are required to” (Luke 3:13). When soldiers inquired of him, he replied: “Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely—be content with your pay” (Luke 3:14). In short, justice is living out the Ten Commandments in our everyday relationships.

Justice requires recognizing what it means to be human—that we all possess inherent dignity and worth, with (in the Declaration’s immortal phrasing) “unalienable rights.”

Those who commit injustice incur a debt against their victims, and the scale is out of balance. That debt may be stolen property, or freedom, or innocence, or reputation, or even life. Justice demands that balance be restored—the debt has to be paid.

“Justice is the handmaiden of truth, and when truth dies, justice is buried with it.”

God’s mercy and justice meet at the cross.

One way or the other, a price has to be paid, for in the end, perfect justice will prevail.

The cross is God’s ultimate solution for dealing with the evil and injustice in this world.

We are to give our neighbors a foretaste of the coming kingdom by modeling justice in our relationships and in fighting injustice wherever it appears.

“I pray you experience the soul crushing weight of guilt, so you may someday experience true repentance and true forgiveness from God, which you need far more than forgiveness from me—though I extend that to you as well.”

atheism has no basis for human dignity, and without human dignity and equality, there is no justice. This is why just societies maintain a high view of all human life.

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.

Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index7 reveals that, with few exceptions, the countries with the lowest levels of corruption were born out of a Judeo-Christian framework.

Societies are built in the image of the God, or gods, that they collectively worship. If the gods are selfish, capricious, and unpredictable—if they can be bribed for special treatment—then the culture will follow along with high levels of bribery and corruption.

Due process is another fruit of Judeo-Christian civilization.

If we abandon a transcendent plumb line to distinguish between good and evil, our only alternative is to accept a man-made standard. Of course, any such standard will be changeable, arbitrary, and beholden to the whims of those who wield power.

This hugely influential ideology is deadly serious. It is nothing less than a kind of cultural acid, eating away at the central pillars of a free, just, and open society.

At the core of any culture is a “cult,” a deeply held religious belief system.

Modernism, however, dispensed with God and the spiritual realm, defining reality in material terms alone. For modern man, science is the final arbiter of truth.

Where modernism left us with a purposeless world of matter in motion, the postmodern prophet Friedrich Nietzsche posited the Übermensch, the super man, who would courageously impose his will on reality.

Because postmodernism sees all reality as subjective, we no longer have a basis for human rights.

If each person is a law unto himself or herself, on what basis can a society be ordered? Who has ultimate authority when we are our own little gods? Postmodernism’s grounding of reality in the autonomous, sovereign individual turns out to be unworkable. It leads to social chaos—with

For millennia, the Judeo-Christian worldview gave the West an overarching narrative, a framework and basis for justice, and sufficient grounding for human dignity.

Throughout the twentieth century, Marx’s religious metanarrative was put to the test, first in Russia under Lenin and Stalin, then in China under Mao, and later in North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Cuba. These vast social experiments were unmitigated disasters, producing prison states, gulags, and genocides that killed hundreds of millions.

And yet despite this miserable track record, Marxism remains with us.

Although in a different guise, Marx’s deadly theory, incredibly, has become the most influen...

Today, ideological social justice dominates the commanding heights of Western culture, and has even made significant inroads into mainstream evangelicalism.

Because worldviews are comprised of background assumptions, many of which we are not consciously aware of, it is sometimes tricky to know what our worldview is. However, worldviews are discerned, over time, by our actions, the choices we make, and how we live. Our worldviews are proven by our actions more than our words.

The fact that so many evangelicals have absorbed so many of the presuppositions of ideological social justice is a huge problem for the church.

Mike Nayna, in their article “Postmodern Religion and the Faith of Social Justice,”1describe ideological social justice as “applied postmodernism.”

Ideological social justice, by contrast, views human beings as creatures whose identity is wholly determined by group affiliations, particularly those based on race, sex, and so-called “gender identity” (LGBTQ+). There is no shared “human nature.” Even more radical, there is no such thing as “the individual.” Rather, our identity is entirely socially constructed.

“Everyone’s ideas are . . . merely social constructions stitched together by cultural forces. Individuals are little more than mouthpieces for communities based on race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexual identity.”

ideological social justice “denies the existence of the individual . . . [it claims that] all you are is an avatar of your group interests.”

The ramifications of this idea are profound. Practically, it reduces “individuals to puppets of social forces . . . powerless to rise above the communities to which they belong.”

There is probably no more far-reaching belief in ideological social justice than its denial of the individual. Based on this radical presupposition, your personal history, life experiences, choices, and deeply held beliefs don’t matter. The only things that matter in defining who you are, are your group affiliations.

At the final judgment, we won’t be excused because we were members of a so-called victim group.