Christians and Social Justice

Matthew Yglesias has two good posts that should both please and challenge Christians.

First:

Mark Schmitt is bored of all the Jesusland business and wants to ask the right question about religion, namely “why it is that the current flourishing of religious faith has, for the first time ever, virtually no element of social justice?”

I think the answer is that it does have a strong element of social justice. Who’s working to halt the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa? Who’s trying to help refugees in Darfur? Who’s trying to stop global trafficking in women? Why, that would be socially conservative religious movements. For that matter, who’s charged off on a neo-Wilsonian quest to spread democracy at gunpoint. The efficacy of the religious right’s preferred means of spreading liberty around the world can and should be questioned, as should the sincerity of at least some of the architects of the strategy, but there’s every reason to think that many — if not most — of the people who vote for George W. Bush and his forward strategy of freedom are perfectly sincere in their belief that this is what’s happening and that it’s a good idea.

Again, in response to comments from philosopher T. M. Scanlon:

The distinction between charity and social justice is important, and I shouldn’t have overlooked it. But the question of requiring “sacrifice” isn’t especially relevant to the distinction (though it is important in understanding the popularity of moral concern about gay rights and so forth, which amounts to self-righteousness rather than a requirement that anyone actually do anything) since charity and justice alike demand sacrifice from their adherent. The point about legitimacy, however, is spot-on. A true demand for social justice necessarily calls into question the legitimacy of the social order, the legitimacy of my having what I have, and does not just ask me to sacrifice some of my property and my position, but admit to myself that my possession of my property and position is, to some extent, unjustifiable and unjust. This is a hard thing to admit, and while it’s possible to conceptualize efforts to admit it and change the world as part of doing God’s will, I think it’s equally easy to reason that it can’t have been God’s will to erect an unjust system.

The point here is well-taken. The distinction between charity and justice is not just that the former depends primarily on private efforts while the latter is the result of government action. Justice, as Yglesias rightly points out, can require systematic changes to the social order. This is something that some conservative Christians, for all their admirable humanitarianism, have been reluctant to engage in.

This may be a legacy, at least as far as Protestants are concerned, of Luther’s “two-kingdom” schema which tended to see social structures as providentially ordered. The family, the state, the economy, etc. were the means through which God cared for his Creation and created a space for the Church to go about the business of spreading the Gospel. But this perspective tended to see those social structures as given and not amenable to substantial change.