Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism's Looming Catastrophe

by Voddie T. Baucham Jr.

Growing ethnic tension is a problem—but it is not the main problem. While troubling, it is no match for the truth of the Gospel and the unity it creates among those who embrace it. In fact, such tensions represent an opportunity for Christ’s followers to demonstrate the truth of Paul’s words: For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. (Ephesians 2:13–16) Ethnic tensions are only a problem for Christians who forget this truth or subordinate it to a competing ideology (whether that be on the left or the right). When that happens, a fault line appears: those on one side “press the text” of the Bible, while those on the other see that approach as short-sighted and insensitive. The problem is not ethnic tension, but the fundamental assumptions that drive our assessment of and subsequent approaches to it. Our Problem Is Not Political Divisions Friends in the U.S. have half-jokingly asked if I moved my family to Zambia in 2015 to escape “Trump’s America.” I may not have been present for the 2016 election, but I was definitely connected and aware. I started writing and speaking on political issues in 2008, during Barack Obama’s first run for the White House. At that tim...