This is a chaotic time. The Christian has been forced to think and rethink his or her deeply held beliefs and presuppositions regarding the many claims of systemic social injustice, sparked by the death of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer.
Let’s get one thing straight: any clearly identifiable act of injustice is rightly opposed and condemned by the Christian, regardless of whether it was motivated by race, sex, religion, or other social background. The details of George Floyd’s death appear to indicate an act of cruel injustice.
But opposing individual acts of injustice is a different task than that of the Social Justice movement.
The Social Justice movement — that is, the academia and activist backed social and political movement that makes most of the noise — are the folks that have rewritten the playbook on civil rights and are using more radical definitions of racism to move the hearts and minds of the American public to specific ends.
It may surprise some Americans that the Social Justice cause is so widely accepted in media, schools, businesses, and much of the public square. It may also surprise Christians to learn that Social Justice is accepted in many churches and Christian institutions.
What I wish for you, dear brother or sister in Christ, is to see the Social Justice movement as more than a group of angry young people or a grassroots campaign that has emerged recently. It is more than a political movement wishing to change a few policies.
It is more than a call for people of different races and backgrounds to treat each other with the same love and respect that we treat our family and expect in return. It is a movement that no longer works at the micro or individual level, but has demands at the macro or institutional level because it sees race as the primary force driving the world’s problems.
Moreover, the Social Justice movement has become a religion that is thoroughly in opposition to basic tenets of the Christian faith. And Social Justice is not only a religion, it is the civic religion of our day.
The Religion of Social Justice
I feel the need to say again; there are well meaning individuals that have taken up the cause to bring peace among social classes and provide aide to those in need. These are not necessarily practitioners of the Religion of Social Justice.
Movements like Black Lives Matter, corporations like the New York Times, academic institutions like the Smithsonian Institute, and many prestigious universities are the ardent evangelists of the Religion of Social Justice.
Just turn on the news and you will see religious acts every night.
You will see the mass proselytizing on the streets of major cities in the United States.
You will see the iconoclasm of the Religion of Social Justice urging the removal of competing symbols.
You will see the raising of new icons of martyrs and symbols of the religion
You will see religious rites; symbolic or real gestures of religious significance.
More importantly, the Religion of Social Justice promotes an ideology. The ideology speaks to the minds and hearts of followers in religious and anthropological terms. The fact that dissenters of the ideology are punished so extremely turns the ideology into religious dogma.
First, the religion provides a framework for seeing the world, which traditional religions have always done for their adherents. In the case of Social Justice, it portrays the force driving the plight of humanity as class struggle; and the salvation from that plight as a dismantling of classes so that humanity can flourish. For example, in this view, the reason why there is poverty and crime is because one group (whites, males, etc.) have more power than others. Salvation would be to ensure that all races have the same amount of power,