Theft for All
The Fallacy of Social Justice
By Carl Teichrib
This essay, detailing the history of Social Justice as a means to implement socialist change via two parallel lines – through a Jesuit and Marxist context – was originally penned in 2010 [some edits have been made to this re-release].
Author’s Note: Volumes could be written on the different applications of social justice, and we could easily find ourselves lost in a tangled maze of ideologies and nuances. Hence, this article seeks to examine the core element of social justice as a recent social-economical-political movement: An emotional appeal to Collectivism.
…we must understand that the only road to peace and social justice is socialism… With the exploiting classes there will never be social justice; without social justice there will never be peace. — Celia Hart.1
…it is necessary to understand that every modern theory of social justice is ideological. No matter how reasonable or rational it may be, every modern theory of social justice is the rationalization of the interests of a particular group or class. — William E. Murnion.2
…all modern trends point to the specter of a terrifying, bigger and more pitiless conformity. — Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn.3
A boiling, seething emotion rose from my chest into my throat. An avalanche of angry words tumbled from my small mouth; this was an indignation that could not be quenched. A final declaration sounded with thick certainty.
“When I’m older, I’m going to do something about this.”
How old was I? Ten, maybe younger? But I had seen enough to know. Gross injustices had been observed.
I well remember the bitter experience. Me, a sensible farm boy – and my grandparents, owners of a small fabric shop in a sleepy prairie town – had traveled to the claustrophobic city of Winnipeg. The purpose was to visit textile outlets and make purchases of cloth. After two days of warehouses and shop floors, I knew this was the end of the world. Working conditions were deplorable: Too little sunshine, poorly chosen paint colors, smelly old merchantmen.
“Here’s some candy, kid.” It tasted stale.
At one critical point Grandma had to shush me. Didn’t she know? Didn’t anybody care? The lone Pepsi machine we had passed in the darkened hall wore a sign of prophetic importance: “Out of Order.” And I was dying of thirst.
Yes, the textile industry – indeed, the entire business world – was out of order. How could anybody work in these depressing places? Boredom alone had to be killing people; it was killing me!
As we loaded up with fabric and left this urban wasteland, I caught a glimpse of something else. A brick-lined smokestack was silhouetted against the evening sky, and smoke – or steam, it didn’t matter – was belching forth to choke out nature’s life.
That’s when I lost it. Didn’t those people know what they were doing? Didn’t anybody in the government have a brain? Not only was the city a depressing place and the warehouses terrible for workers, but the factories were going to kill everything! When I grew-up, I was going to put a stop to this madness. Others would join in this desire to change the world. We would save the worker from his intolerable slavery and rescue the environment from the hands of greedy merchantmen. Justice, or vengeance, would be served – whether at home or abroad.
Grandma soothingly patronized me. Grandpa, lips tights, said nothing. He just drove faster.
Bending Minds
Looking back I marvel. As a young boy I had a keen sense of social rights and justice, and I was a prime candidate to have swung to the more extreme side of the leftist camp. In fact, my impressionable mind was already moving in that direction. Unaware I was mimicking a Marxist approach – social revolution through mass action – I was emotionally convinced that radical surgery was the only recourse.
Where had this come from?
My parents and grandparents were no-nonsense farmers and business owners. They worked hard at their respective livelihoods, were quick to help anyone who needed assistance, and contributed to the local community in different ways – including, on my Mother’s part, teaching English to Laotian immigrants (those were the days of the Boat People). Both parents and grandparents emphasized Christian ethics and values, to stand up for the underdog, and to remain independent in the face of peer pressure. “You were born an original, don’t die a copy,” my mother used to say.
The church I attended had Mennonite roots, but didn’t cater to leftist ideologies. In fact, it had separated itself from a Mennonite denomination in part because of a growing socialist-slant in the larger body. At heart we were probably the only non-pacifist Mennonite church in the district.
Television? At that time TV consisted of Bugs Bunny on Saturday evenings, and afterwards Dad trying to watch The Lawrence Welk Show while we kids faithfully re-enacted Wile-E Coyote cliff-falls from the top of the couch. So… no.
Public school? This was the late 1970s, and an environmental curriculum was already in play. In the local high school The Environmental Handbook was used as a text, complete with overtly anti-Christian, anti-family, and anti-capitalist rhetoric. The Environmental Handbook, for all practical purposes, was a Marxist/Trotskyite call to radical green action: “nothing short of total transformation will do much good” (The Environmental Handbook, 1970, p.330). Other school texts, such as the Prose of Relevance and Worlds in the Making, shaped minds to accept cultural transformation, including the acceptance of socialist and technocratic ideals.4
Elementary school and Junior High also witnessed a steady stream of transforming curriculum. I remember hearing about the growing problems of over-population and the destruction of the ecosystem caused by human greed and pollution. Injustice was occurring. Nuclear annihilation was around the corner.
Whether overt or subtle, the message was clear: The old ways of how society functioned could no longer be tolerated. Too much was at stake, and it was up to my generation to fix the world’s problems. Whether the teachers knew it or not, we were being shaped to change the system. Thus, a variety of cultural and social alternatives entered the classroom – including Marxism. The mood of my childhood education was shaped by what had occurred less than a decade earlier.
The late 1960’s and early 70’s was pivotal for Western society, with ripples spreading far and wide. This was the era of the New Left, with its vanguard techniques and its challenge to cultural norms. Radicalism clashed with conventionalism, the drug culture blossomed, and Eastern forms of spirituality entered the mainstream. It was an era that witnessed the expansion of the welfare state, including experiments in community housing. All of this was coupled with the Vietnam War, which first demoralized France and then the United States. During that time, peace groups parroted Soviet propaganda: capitalism was equated with “war mongering” while socialism reflected equality and peace. The liberal-mined West embraced this trend, even though Frederick C. Barghoorn — a Yale professor who had been interned by the Soviet government in 1963 — had warned America about the use of “peace” as a method in furthering Marxist ideology. Published one year after his arrest and release, his book Soviet Foreign Propaganda provided an important warning,
It should be emphasized that all of the Soviet leaders, from Lenin and Trotski through Stalin and Khrushchev, strove in their peace propaganda to appeal both to revolutionaries seeking the overthrow of constitutional democracy and to western businessmen, liberals, pacifists, and the general public whose non-dialectic conception of peace was limited to the simple absence of armed conflict.5
Liberals and pacifists of Western nations were viewed as deliberate players in the cause of Internationalism. Their importance came not from an understanding of the Moscow-Hegelian-Marxist program, but in their emotional buy-in. Convinced of holding the moral high ground and bolstered by a sense of enlightenment, an emotional connection would thus fuel their fight for social justice; upholding the “plight of the worker,” overturning economic inequalities, engaging in class-struggle and battling for world peace. These individuals, unceremoniously dubbed “useful idiots,” would become the cultural/social vanguards of anti-capitalist transformation.
The only way of “assuring last peace in the world” from the Marxist perspective, explained Barghoorn, is the “elimination of capitalism.”6 Peace, solidarity, and justice throbbed with a Leninist heartbeat throughout this turbulent period. Capitalism, with its emphasis on private property and free enterprise, was considered the prime cause of social strife. Socialism, with its emphasis on community and social order, was the path to progress.
This ideology was embedded in Canadian education during the 1970s and 1980s.
Retna Ghosh and Douglas Ray, in the preface to their 1987-book Social Change and Education in Canada, provided a short outline of base theories that shaped modern education: Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism, Marxist struggle, pressures of modernity, and the concept of human capital with its emphasis on workforce development. Each was infused within the Canadian school system, shaping student’s worldviews. But rarely did the student understand the ideal behind the curriculum. As Ghosh and Ray explained,
Social change, whether gradual or revolutionary, is inevitable and brings with it new patterns of social interaction. The place of education in this process is both complex and critical. (Social Change and Education in Canada, p.vii).
For a young mind in the late 1970s, the emotional pull attached to exploited social issues was subtle yet powerful. No wonder my trip to Winnipeg ended with a Trotskyite call for revolution.
What has any of this to do with “social justice”? Everything.
Looking to Rome
The label and rhetoric of “Social Justice” is certainly adopted by many in the broader Christian community. Jim Wallis of Sojourners uses this term repeatedly. Brain McLaren’s book Everything Must Change seeks to re-frame Christianity in a social justice context. The Christian Reformed Church has a social justice office, as does the Salvation Army, the Mennonite Church USA, the United Methodist Church, and the United Church of Canada. A seemingly endless list of other denominations and church bodies speak of “social justice.” Christian universities and Bible colleges have likewise adopted this language.
But where does the term come from, and what is the dominant history?
Social justice appears to have been first employed in the early 1840s by an Italian Catholic theologian and Jesuit, Luigi Taparelli D’Azeglio.7 As Daniel M. Bell points out in his book, Liberation Theology After the End of History, d’Azeglio’s concept was “justice as a general virtue that coordinated all activity with the common good.8
The notion of virtue is important, for it brings a flavor of charity. Taparelli’s vision circled around justice as a system of moral norms that included individual rights and the freedom to associate. The greater whole of the community, the “sum total of individual goods,”9 would apparently benefit. This form of justice was also known as economic justice, which viewed wealth redistribution as a coordination of rights. Direct government administration should be avoided wherever possible, for Taparelli recognized the danger of centralization.10
In 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued his encyclical, Rerum Novarum, which dealt with the conditions of the working class, the right to private property, and workplace relationships. Leo XIII rejected Communism and the greed that arises from an amoral application of Capitalism, instead advocating that worker and employer should come to an honest agreement regarding labor and wages. At this point Catholicism rejected Marxist based socialism.
Decades later, Pope Pius XI penned his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno. In it he denounced Communism and at the same time embraced wealth redistribution — the sharing of benefits — as a function of social justice (§57): “By this law of social justice, one class is forbidden to exclude the other from sharing in the benefits.” While this idea started to stretch the earlier limits of Catholic social justice, he did recognize that all sides of the class divide could hold a negative position: the rich withholding the wages due the worker, and the worker demanding all from the rich. That aside, the free market system wasn’t an acceptable means to build a civilization on social justice,
Just as the unity of human society cannot be founded on an opposition of classes, so also the right ordering of economic life cannot be left to a free competition of forces. For from this source, as from a poisoned spring, have originated and spread all the errors of individualist economic teaching… free competition, while justified and certainly useful provided it is kept within certain limits, clearly cannot direct economic life – a truth which the outcome of the application in practice of the tenets of this evil individualistic spirit has more than sufficiently demonstrated. Therefore, it is most necessary that economic life be again subjected to and governed by a true and effective directing principle. (§88)
In reading through the encyclical an unsettling doublespeak emerges. Communism is chastised, yet the free market is evil. In this dialectic the end result is that “certain kinds of property… ought to be reserved to the State.” The “public authority,” according to Pius XI, should maintain ownership of enterprises that advance the “general welfare.” (§114-115). A slide down the slippery slope had now begun in earnest; “social justice” would become the excuse par-excellence in calling for a collectivist system, for the greater good.
Speaking on Pius XI’s views regarding economic justice, Pope John XXIII pointed out that “man’s aim must be to achieve in social justice a national and international juridical order, with its network of public and private institutions, in which all economic activity can be conducted not merely for private gain but also in the interests of the common good.”11 Furthermore, in 1963 John XXIII advocated a “universal authority” to ensure this “common good.”12
Writing on the changes that occurred during this period, Professor Philip C. Bom tells us, “It could be characterized as a shift from anti-Communism toward pro-commonism of a new world order.”13 [italics added].
In 1965 Pope Paul VI made similar comments at the United Nations, openly suggesting “the establishment of a world authority.”14 Why? Because a world authority is needed to establish and maintain an international “common good.” That same year, Paul VI’s document Gaudium et Spes — Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World — recognized that the Catholic church had an important role to play in constructing “a peaceful and fraternal community of nations.” (§90) In that vein, he recommended in Section II, titled “Setting Up An International Community,” the creation of a Catholic organ designed to promote “international social justice.” (§90). Individualism was upheld in the document, but it must support the greater good. Collectivism in production was considered erroneous, yet a form of social collectivism was deemed necessary. An excerpt from paragraph 65 demonstrates this relationship,
Citizens, on the other hand, should remember that it is their right and duty, which is also recognized by the civil authority, to contribute to the true progress of their own community according to their ability… those who hold back their unproductive resources or who deprive their community of the material or spiritual aid that it needs — save the right of migration — gravely endanger the common good.
Here we see a swing far past the earlier idea of a charitable virtue. The implication is forthright; you will participate, and participation includes the demands of a global community and world civil authority.
Although Pope John Paul II was perceived as more conservative, he too espoused a globally-minded social justice agenda. This was evident in his endorsement of the UN Millennium Development Goals, which gravitate around ideas connected to wealth redistribution. As the most notable geo-political pope of the Twentieth Century, John Paul envisioned “a globalization of solidarity.”15 In discussing globalization as a unifying factor, he said,
For all its risks it offers exceptional and promising opportunities, precisely with a view to enabling humanity to become a single family, build on the values of justice, equity and solidarity.16
Furthermore, the US Catholic Bishops, operating under John Paul’s reign, were open regarding social justice — “the common good” — in their 1986 letter, Economic Justice For All,
The common good may sometimes demand that the right to own be limited by public involvement in the planning or ownership of certain sectors of the economy. Support of private ownership does not mean that anyone has the right to unlimited accumulation of wealth. (§115)
Interestingly, Catholic commentators from all sides of the political spectrum described the Bishops’ document as “pro-capitalist.” However, a cursory read demonstrates that Economic Justice For All is pro-socialist. Yes, the responsibility of the individual is highlighted and private property is validated. However, it’s the Bishops’ economic justice that displays a different set of cards, with its call for collective, government-directed programs aimed at curing social ills. Individuals, therefore, are obligated to participate.
Writing for the Journal of Business Ethics, William E. Murnion gives a straightforward assessment of the Bishop’s text; “…the conception of justice it espouses is… clearly socialist, and communist at that.” Murnion conceded that the Bishops were not “crypto-communists,” just that their “conception of social justice is indeed identical with the communist principle of justice even though the bishops have arrived at it from a route entirely opposed to Marx’s.”17
Remember, too, that the 1980s was the era of Liberation Theology in Latin America, which combined revolutionary forms of Marxism with Catholic social teachings. And although the Vatican denounced certain aspects of Liberation Theology, this Roman Marxism was nevertheless a logical extension of social justice.
Finally, from the Catholic perspective, Pope Benedict XVI amply demonstrated his affinity to social justice through his encyclical Caritas In Veritate. Here, social justice is recognized as an issue of prime economic and political importance, one that goes beyond the free market approach. Like a broken record, the market system must be directed “towards the pursuit of the common good.” (§36) “The political community,” so explained Benedict XVI, “must also take responsibility.”
Economic redistribution, according to this encyclical, is justice. The Pope also recommended that the United Nations be reformed, along with the global economy, so that that a “true world political authority” would emerge “with teeth.” (§67) Why? To “seek to establish the common good.” (§67).
Concluding this section: Although some older Papal teachings uphold private property and reject Marxist socialism, such as Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum, the Roman Catholic hierarchy over the past century has increasingly bridged social justice with economic and political collectivism. In this sense, the Holy See became a cheer-leading squad for the United Nations’ system of socialist management. As Professor Bom explains in his book, The Coming Century of Commonism, “Slowly, step-by-step, stage-by-stage, the Catholic church-state champions the U.N.’s agenda for a New International Economic Order.”18
But another historical movement arose in parallel to the modern Catholic version of social justice.
Revolutionary Justice
For generations there has been an activist side to the revolutionary cry for wealth redistribution; the followers of Karl Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro and other Communist leaders, have vigorously used the social justice banner as a rallying point for radical cultural transformation — class struggle framed through the lens of oppression/oppressor. The Socialist International uses this same term, as does Trotskyite organizations and other socialist political parties. It’s a favorite of the Green Party, effectively equating the environment as oppressed by capitalism.
The use of social justice as a socio-political term goes back a long way. In 1848 the Society of Fraternal Democrats, a movement that rubbed shoulders with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, published a veiled threat against the British system,
Let the privileged classes renounce their unjust usurpations and establish political equality and social justice, and England will have nothing to fear against a world in arms.19
Marx and Engels fleshed out their science-of-socialism during the same time frame as Luigi Taparelli D’Azeglio’s theorizing of social justice, and the duo published The Communist Manifesto the same year that the Society of Fraternal Democrats called for social justice. Under Communism, private property for personal gain was viewed as the cornerstone of the class system, the cause of injustice and strife. Wealth redistribution, therefore, was aimed at producing a society wherein all people would be equal. Hence, the abolition of bourgeois property (that of the capitalist class) was the key component of the Communist narrative. To this end Marx and Engels believed that the road to victory was democracy. Once the proletariat (working class) had attained political power, a more just social system could be birthed,
…the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property…20
This concept of social justice, the raising of an oppressed class through the degradation of another class, is a reactionary process based on the arousal of envy. At this base level, and in other respects, Communism is directly linked to the French Revolution. Austrian philosopher and defender of freedom, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, provides historical context,
If one were to take paper and pencil to make an estimate of how many people were murdered or killed in battle because of the ideas of the French Revolution in their various stages, guises, and evolutionary forms, because of the ideas of equality, ethnic or racist identity, a ‘classless society,’ a ‘world safe for democracy,’ a ‘racially pure people,’ ‘true social justice achieved by social engineering’ – one would arrive at simply staggering sums. Even the Jewish holocaust offered by the National Socialists with five or six million dead would seem almost a drop in the bucket.21
Weaving the thread of envy and social change, Kuehnelt-Leddihn reminds us,
In the last 200 years the exploitation of envy, its mobilization among the masses, coupled with the denigration of individuals, but more frequently of classes, races, nations or religious communities has been the very key to political success. The history of the Western World since the end of the eighteenth century cannot be written without this fact constantly in mind. All leftist ‘isms’ harp on this theme, i.e., on the privilege of groups, minority groups, to be sure, who are objects of envy and at the same time subjects of intellectual-moral inferiorities. They have no right to their exalted positions. They ought to conform to the rest, become identical with ‘the people,’ renounce their privileges, conform. If they speak another language, they ought to drop it and talk the lingo of the majority. If they are wealthy their riches should be taxed away or confiscated.22
This method of arousing envy, often disguised as virtue — “we’re doing this for the poor and oppressed” — is built upon a sense of moral superiority and indignation, which then ferments into action. At this point the emotion of the ideal becomes the driver of transformation, energizing the masses, who democratically embrace Socialism. Or, not content by the slowness of Socialism and whipped-up by the influence of change agents and community organizers, the pursuit of social justice takes a revolutionary approach, the violent gutting of one class for the greater good. Either way, by ballot box or the barrel of a gun, the mob has ruled in favor of collectivism. And whoever controls the mob through the emotion of the ideal is the one who rules: equality will be enforced as the people bask in the “warm herd feeling of brotherhood.”23
Literary critic and former Marxist, Herbert Read, well understood these connections,
Communism is an extreme form of democracy, and it is totalitarian: but equally the totalitarian state in the form of fascism is an extreme form of democracy. All forms of socialism, whether state socialism of the Russian kind, or national socialism of the German kind, or democratic socialism of the British kind, are professedly democratic, that is to say, they all obtain popular assent by the manipulation of mass psychology.24
As Robert Gellately writes in Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe, “Communism was meant to have a universal liberating purpose. It was to bring the end of inequalities and establish real social justice.”25
In 1898, Eugene V. Debs — later dubbed “America’s greatest Marxist” — equated a collective society with industrial freedom and social justice.26 A few years later, during World War I, he noted that permanent peace based on social justice wouldn’t occur until “national industrial despotism” was replaced by “international industrial democracy.” Economic profit was anathema to peace and the ending of war could only come with the ending of “profit and plunder among nations.”27 A new order was needed where one class was striped and replaced by a more progressive, humane, and international apparatus.
In that same time period, Maxist revolutionary V.I. Lenin “came to power with an ambitious programme of measures designed to ensure social justice and improve the lot of the poor.”28 Maxim Gorky, friend of Lenin, framed this with endearment,
…It would be a difficult task to paint the portrait of Vladimir Ilyitch Lenin. His words were as much a part of his external appearance as scales are of fish. The simplicity and straightforwardness of everything he said were an essential part of his nature. The heroic deeds which he achieved are surrounded by no glittering halo. His was that heroism which Russia knows well – the unassuming, austere life of self-sacrifice of the true Russian revolutionary intellectual who, in his unshakable belief in the possibility of social justice on earth, renounces all the pleasures of life in order to toil for the happiness of mankind.29
The result was disastrous. Mervyn Matthews tells us, “The efforts to banish ‘capitalist exploitation’ had all but destroyed the wealthier classes without benefiting more than a tiny proportion of the poor.”30
But it did benefit Lenin and company. Never mind the mountain of corpses; progress always comes with a price,
“Since the French Revolution established a new high mark of political liberty in the world, there has been no other advance in democratic progress and social justice comparable to the Russian Revolution…” (Socialist Party of America news release, August 1918).
By 1922 the Russian Revolution had cost the lives of six to ten million people.
Decades later in the Americas, Castro summed up the Cuban revolution “as an aspiration for social justice.”31 Che Guevara defined his bloody action as an “armed struggle for freedom of rights and social justice.”32 This crude theme is common to all leftist uprisings, because it rests in the heart of all leftist ideologies. The Will Miller Social Justice Lecture Series demonstrated this fact through the symbolism found on its banner: Marxism, world peace, social revolution, feminism, etc.
Celia Hart, an Internationalist, explained it this way,
…we must understand that the only road to peace and social justice is socialism. Peaceful coexistence and all its fallacies have tragically lost their opportunity to triumph. With the exploiting classes there will never be social justice; without social justice there will never be peace… Let’s join the people under the banner of the International. Never before has the world needed, as now, to remember November seven [the anniversary of the October Revolution]. Never before must we understand that the banner of Bolshevism never died… And let us shout to our enemies, regardless of whether they call us terrorists, that we will not fight for the imperialist war, or for the miserable peace of injustices; we will fight together for the socialist revolution in permanent combat. Workers of the World, Unite!33
It’s a radical call.
Today we see social justice linked to a range of issues, including green agendas, which is often loaded with the parallel phraseology of “eco-justice,” “green justice,” and “climate justice.”
Consider the following: In 1990, the Manitoba government in partnership with UNESCO convened the World Environment Energy and Economic Conference, which was themed, “Sustainable Development Strategies and the New World Order.”
The conference report was titled Sustainable Development for a New World Agenda. Chapter 2, “Towards A Global Green Constitution,” fleshed out a section with the subtitle “Social Justice.” It combined population control, energy regulations and accounting systems with “an official global policy of one child per family.” The “principle of global economic equality,” it noted, would be central to the “green government.” Moreover, the new ethos would offer values clarification in light of social justice goals,
Popular or not, green governments will oppose any culture if it proves to be prejudicial by reason of gender, age, colour, race, religion, belief, sexual orientation, mental or physical condition, marital status, family composition, source of income, political belief, nationality, language preference, or place of origin.34
“Intolerable attitudes” wouldn’t be tolerated, all in the name of protecting the oppressed. Now, real oppression does exist. Nobody in his or her right mind wants oppression to occur or flourish. But social justice ala Collectivism is the most dangerous form of oppression. Moreover, the truly downtrodden — like the peasants of the old Soviet Union — rarely have their load lightened under social justice. Instead, with the destruction of the creative capital inherent in a free market, the plight of the poor continues and becomes more difficult.
No wonder F.A. Hayek called Marxist-based social justice a “pseudo-ethics.” One that “fails every test which a system of moral rules must satisfy in order to secure a peace and voluntary co-operation of free men.”35
Getting Our Terms Right
“My church has a social justice mandate...”
Sounds nice, but can you tell me what that means? The usual response, thankfully, centers on feeding the poor, helping at a homeless shelter or safe house, assisting the elderly, working with troubled teens, or supporting an orphanage.
But that’s not social justice. The dominant social justice concept for the past 150 years has been centered on the sliding slope of Papal-advocated wealth redistribution, alongside a Marxist version of Collectivism. Feeding the poor and assisting the helpless, from a Christian perspective, isn’t social justice — its Biblical compassion, a generous act of love. Such acts of compassion engage individual lives, and are based on the Christian call of loving others more than self. This is the heart of compassion: An individual sees a need and operating out of love, reaches out to meet that need. Churches are to function in a similar manner. A need is evident, and moved by compassion, the congregation works to solve the dilemma. Coercion never enters the picture, nor does a political agenda emerge, nor is there a call for economic equality.
The Biblical parable of the Good Samaritan demonstrates true compassion (Luke 10). A Jewish man has been beaten, robbed, and left to die on the road. Various people pass him by, including the religiously pious. However, a Samaritan traveler sees the individual, and although the Samaritan is culturally alienated from the beaten man, he recognizes the desperation and individually takes action; dressing his wounds and providing a place of rest and refuge. And the Samaritan pays for it himself without demanding remuneration or compensation, either from the victim, his family or community, or from the government or ruling class.
However, if the Samaritan were a supporter of the dominant theme of social justice, he would have acted with a different motive for different ends. The Samaritan would have used the occasion to lobby for social transformation:
1) The robbers were really victims of an unjust economic system, and had acted in response to the oppression of the capital class.
2) In order to bring justice to this oppressed class, and to steer them back to a caring community, equitable wealth redistribution should take place. The rich must be taxed to fund necessary social programs. A more equitable society is needed.
3) Who will pay the victim’s medical bills? The community, or the rich.
4) This tragic event, the Samaritan would tell us, is a graphic reminder of the class struggle. We are victims of an unjust economic order. Therefore, we must be the “voice of the voiceless” and advocate for radical social change.
In the social justice framework there is another agenda that lurks behind the tragic: A political/economic cause is piggybacked and leveraged — economic equality via wealth redistribution. This isn’t about helping the victim; it’s about using the victim.
Biblical justice, on the other hand, never seeks to dismantle class structures. Evil actions are condemned, but this isn’t specific to a particular social strata. Consider the words of Leviticus 19:15 — “You shall do no injustice in judgment. You shall not be partial to the poor, nor honor the person of the mighty. But in righteousness you shall judge your neighbor.”
Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson helps put things into perspective,
[Biblical] Justice not only means that nobody is to be picked on because he is poor or favored because he is rich, but that (contrary to the doctrine of ‘social justice’) nobody is to be picked on because he is rich or favored because he is poor.36
Dr. Hendrickson elaborates,
The fundamental error of today’s ‘social justice’ practitioners is their hostility to economic inequality, per se. Social justice theory fails to distinguish between economic disparities that result from unjust deeds and those that are part of the natural order of things. All Christians oppose unjust deeds… [But] it isn’t necessarily unjust for some people to be richer than others.
God made us different from each other. We are unequal in aptitude, talent, skill, work ethic, priorities, etc. Inevitably, these differences result in some individuals producing and earning far more wealth than others. To the extent that those in the ‘social justice’ crowd obsess about eliminating economic inequality, they are at war with the nature of the Creator’s creation.
The Bible doesn’t condemn economic inequality. You can’t read Proverbs without seeing that some people are poor due to their own vices. There is nothing unjust about people reaping what they sow, whether wealth or poverty.
Jesus himself didn’t condemn economic inequality. Yes, he repeatedly warned about the snares of material wealth; he exploded the comfortable conventionality of the Pharisaical tendency to regard prosperity as a badge of honor and superiority; he commanded compassion toward the poor and suffering. But he also told his disciples, ‘ya have the poor always with you’ (Matthew 26:11), and in the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:24-30) he condemned the failure to productively use one’s God-given talents – whether many or few, exceptional or ordinary – by having a lord take money from the one who had the least and give it to him who had the most, thereby increasing economic inequality.
The Lord’s mission was to redeem us from sin, not to redistribute our property or impose an economic equality on us. In fact, Jesus explicitly declined to undermine property rights or preach economic equality when he told the man who wanted Jesus to tell his brother to share an inheritance with him, ‘Man, who made me a judge or divider over you’ (Luke 12:14).
I confess that it’s easy to fall into the social justice mindset of oppressor/oppressed. My childhood rant over what I perceived to be injustices showed me, in retrospect, the power of an emotional ideal. Yet if by some twist I had followed my self-righteous emotional outburst and had become a social justice advocate, in the true sense of the phrase, a sad irony would have occurred: In the name of “justice,” I would have promoted socially-sanctioned theft. The collective all-for-one is really theft to all.
Dear Christians, let us act with compassion, be charitable, and pursue true justice. Let us be wise in our actions, clear in our language, and honest in our motives.
Endnotes:
Celia Hart, The Flag of Coyoacan, edited by Walter Lippmann in August 2004. Reprinted in Marxist.org.
William E. Murnion, “The Ideology of Social Justice in Economic Justice For All,” Journal of Business Ethics, p.848, 1989.
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse (Arlington House, 1974), p.17.
Prose of Relevance, Volume 1 & 2 (Methuen, 1971); Maryjane Dunstan and Patricia W. Garlan, Worlds in the Making: Probes for Students of the Future (Prentice-Hall, 1970).
Frederick C. Barghoorn, Soviet Foreign Propaganda(Princeton University Press, 1964), p.93-94.
Ibid. p.89.
Marvin L. Krier Mich, Catholic Social Teaching and Movement (Twenty-Third Publications, 1998), p.80-81. See also Daniel M. Bell, Liberation Theology After the End of History (Routledge, 2001), p.104.
Daniel M. Bell, Liberation Theology After the End of History (Routledge, 2001), p.104.
Ibid. p.104.
Thomas Behr, “Luigi Taparelli and Social Justice: Rediscovering the Origins of a Hollowed Concept,” Social Justice in Context, Volume, 1.
Pope John XXIII,Mater et Magistra, paragraph 40.
Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, see section 4, paragraphs 130 to 141.
Philip C. Bom, The Coming Century of Commonism: The Beauty and the Beast of Global Governance (Policy Books, 1992), p.312.
Pope Paul VI, Talk at the United Nations, October 4, 1965; section 3.
As quoted by John A. Coleman, Globalization as a Challenge to Catholic Social Thought (Center for Catholic Studies and Social Thought, 2004), p.9.
Ibid.
William E. Murnion, “The Ideology of Social Justice in Economic Justice For All,” Journal of Business Ethics, see pages 847-857, 1989.
Philip C. Bom, The Coming Century of Commonism, p.315.
The Chartist Movement: The Fraternal Democrats to the Working Classes of Great Britain and Ireland, January 10, 1848, as republished at Marxists.org.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Penguin, 1967), p.104.
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse (Arlington House, 1974), p.419.
Ibid., p.18.
Ibid., p.17.
As quoted in Leftism, p.174.
Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (Vintage, 2007), p.10.
Eugene V. Debs, “The American Movement,” published in Debs: His Life Writings and Speeches, and reprinted at Marxist.org.
E.V. Debs, “The Prospect for Peace,”American Socialist, 1916, reprinted at Marxist.org.
Mervyn Matthews, Poverty in the Soviet Union: The Life-styles of the Underprivileged in Recent Years (Cambridge University Press, 1986), p.7.
Maxim Gorky, “Days With Lenin,” Readings in Russian Civilization, Volume 3 (The University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp.517-518.
Matthews, Poverty in the Soviet Union, p.7-8.
Castro, “When the People Rule,” speech on January 21, 1959, Havana, Cuba.
Che Guevara, interview, April 18, 1959. Two Chinese journalists, K’ung Mai and Ping An conducted the interview “on the 108thevening after the victory of the revolution.”
Celia Hart, ibid.
Jim Bohlen, “Towards A Global Green Constitution,” Sustainable Development for a New World Agenda (Proceeding, October 17-20, 1990), p.11.
F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty: The Political order of a Free People (University of Chicago Press, 1979), p.135.
Mark W. Hendrickson, “The ‘Social Justice’ Fallacy? Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing,” April 7, 2010 (The Center for Vision & Values, Grove City College).
This was a long, difficult read but worth the effort. Thank you. Other authors have detailed at ground level some of the horrors unleashed by these movements. No need to do that here.