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

by Scott David Allen

Where the Bible says, “My God will meet all your needs according to the riches of his glory” (Philippians 4:19), Marxist social justice ideology counters: ...

In the classical Marxist worldview, however, equality means equality of outcome

Ironically, despite its proclaimed commitment to “diversity,” the actual outworking of ideological social justice is to make diverse people the same.

This was the goal of the communist states in the Soviet Union and China, and of all utopian experiments.

People were forced to dress the same, act the same, and most importantly, think the same—under penalty of death if they didn’t.

For example, if 80 percent of Google’s software engineers are male and 20 percent are female, the disparity, ipso facto, proves systemic male privilege and sexism.

“If the family is the source of unfairness [inequality] in society, then it looks plausible to think that if we abolished the family there would be a more level playing field.”7 This illogic is the beating heart of ideological social justice.

The phrase “equity, diversity, and inclusion” has become a kind of mantra of the social justice movement.

Countless schools, organizations, and institutions loudly champion their core commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion.

God created a world of tremendous diversity. There is not one kind of flower or tree or insect or person but a great diversity of each. Of the billions of people to have walked this earth, no two are the same. God clearly loves diversity. He also loves unity.

America’s founding fathers reflected this vital unity-diversity balance in choosing our nation’s motto: E pluribus unum, Latin for “out of many, one.”

Diversity without unity is not a strength. It leads to chaos and conflict. Unity without diversity is also negative. It leads to stifling, totalitarian conformity. Human flourishing requires both, which is why the Bible affirms both. God’s own triune nature affirms both. God is one, yet three distinct “persons”—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Ideological social justice actually values uniformity, paradoxically, in the name of diversity.

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.

There is no room to celebrate individual differences of belief inside these groups.

Her point was clear. If you are brown, black, Muslim, or “queer” and you don’t think or speak like your group, you are not needed. Conform to the group, or get out!

Is this a celebration of diversity? No, it is oppressive conformity.

“What these activists want is to make it impossible for any physician—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or otherwise—who have any moral qualms whatsoever about anything to do with LGBT, to be driven out of the profession.”

So much for a celebration of equality, diversity, and inclusion. This is a push to get in line with the new orthodoxy or else! It is rank intolerance masquerading as tolerance. It is uniformity disguised as “diversity.”

All the energy of the movement focuses around overthrowing the systems and structures that privilege and empower straight, white males. Certainly, concern for the poor hasn’t vanished entirely in Marxism 2.0, but it is far less of a concern than during the heyday of Marxism 1.0.

In Marxism 1.0, capitalism was the enemy. How different from today, where wealthy capitalists are often some of the greatest advocates and champions of ideological social justice.

It draws most of its energy and support from Western cultural elites in politics, academia, big business, and the media. Some of the most ardent backers of ideological social justice—people such as George Soros and Tim Gill—are among the wealthiest people in the world. Ideol...

the poor are not a class of helpless victims, but people made in God’s image, with creativity, freedom, dignity, and responsibility.

People need to be taught to see and appreciate the resources they have and their immense creative potential.

“victim.” This word can describe circumstances, but it must never describe identity.

The biblical worldview also asserts that the primary job of government is to uphold the rule of law, to restrain human evil by punishing lawbreakers, and to encourage virtue.15 It is not to equalize wealth.

True happiness is found in taking responsibility for my life and providing for the needs of others. This action affirms my human nature and dignity and leads to deep contentment.

Regardless of our motives, treating the poor as helpless victims and taking away their agency and personal responsibility—essentially treating them as livestock—is one of the most destructive and dehumanizing things that we could ever do.

For the many who think like Coates, America is “an awful, no-good, very-bad, racist country that we ought to despise, tear down, and remake.”

if you claim to be a conservative, social justice advocates will assume that what you want to “conserve” are the very oppressive systems that have advantaged white, straight males at the expense of everyone else. In short, to be a conservative is to be a patriarchal, homophobic, white supremacist. No wonder politics in America has become so toxic and divisive as ideological social justice has expanded its influence.

whatever its flaws, it has raised more people out of indigence, misery, superstition, and intolerance than any other civilization in history.

For all its flaws, Western civilization offers so much that is good—freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, respect for the individual, due process, relative peace and prosperity, and so on. These goods arose from an understanding of biblical truth lived out imperfectly, but faithfully, over many generations.

Those attacking the West are doing so, largely, with the tools provided by the civilization itself.

Following the lead of Enlightenment rationalists and atheistic philosophers, one stream abandoned God and gave rise to the secularization of society. Among its fruits were the French and Russian revolutions. Today, this stream underpins postmodernism, Marxism (old and new), and ideological social justice.

The other stream emerged from the German Reformation. It affirmed the Judeo-Christian roots of the West and asserted the authority of God over all of life and all of society. This stream fed into the English and American revolutions.

It was this stream that supplied the nutrients that gave rise to the freedoms, tolerance, respect for the individual, the rule of law, due process, and prosperity that the West has enjoyed.

A secularized capitalism devoid of Christian virtue and objective morality is rapacious, greed-centered, and an engine for the spread of all kinds of evil, including pornography, abortion, and prostitution. But the capitalism that continues to be influenced by the Reformation—and the authority of God, objective morality, and virtue—is an engine of godly stewardship, generosity, prosperity, and blessing.

The West is now, essentially, two separate cultures at war with one another.

As Christians, our problem isn’t with “Western civilization” but with the secularization of Western civilization.

The many good things that we too easily take for granted have come to us over the course of Western and American history, through people who labored to preserve and pass along powerful, biblical ideas that are good, true, and beautiful, often at great personal cost.

Their memory deserves to be honored. Not because they were perfect, but because they gave us a great gift of a relatively free, just society. We should never cease to be grateful for what they entrusted to us.

Abortion plays a central role in this moral system. For its adherents, abortion isn’t a necessary evil that should be “safe, legal, and rare,” but a positive moral good and a fundamental human right.

Try and speak out for the victims of black-on-black crime, and you’ll find yourself quickly called out, corrected, or shamed.

Around the world, girls and women face gendercide, rape, trafficking, acid thrown in their faces, and murder simply because of their sex.30 Yet their plight is mostly ignored by social justice activists in the West and by a compliant media. Why? Because the perpetrators have victim group status as Muslims or other non-Western, former colonies.

Here’s a cardinal rule of social justice morality: Victim group members can never be portrayed as perpetrators of injustice. They...

Even as social justice ideology elevates “micro” injustices beyond all sense of proportion, it ignores or downplays major injustices.

Will all lives matter or only those from self-defined victim groups?

Such people apparently fail to see how social justice is the accepted label for a fully formed worldview—one utterly opposed to the biblical worldview and its conception of justice. The fact that “social justice” is now the brand associated with a virulently anti-Christian worldview must be seen for what it is: a form of satanic deception.

I’m not advocating that we abandon the word “justice.” That is ground we can never cede; it is indeed our “home turf.”

This is typically motivated out of a desire for self-preservation.