I want to first apologize to those who are waiting for The Tryth of Systemic Racism pt.4. It will be tied into this series of forthcoming posts entitled “Will the real Justice, please stand up!” This article will assist that post significantly because this post is the foundational understanding for processing justice, the lack thereof, and the truths and myths of systemic racism. Why foundational? I believe that the current “fault line “ separating biblical justice and social justice is at best naive and at worst presumptuous.
Between April and July, a couple of books on some aspect of social justice will be available for consumption. These books will undoubtedly have some great content and will likely be declared the winner by those who affirm the author's position. However, if these books attempt to tackle a massive issue like justice, focusing solely on contrasting biblical versus social, they will be addressing a minuscule aspect of the problem. The appeal will likely be the author, who we hope will present an argument that is broad in its scope, convincing in its details, and helpful in its conclusion. For me, this is where Voddie’s book “Fault Lines” misses the mark.
It’s not that I think Voddie‘s book is bad in and of itself; there are some helpful things in there that I agree with. But it misses the mark of the greater dramatic moment we find ourselves in. And it’s not just Voddie‘s book. Many of these books on justice (biblical vs. social) miss the point of the greater national dynamic. As usual, now that Voddie's book is out, many who agree with him will assume the matter of justice has been settled. But sadly, it is not. His book will offer the same content that his presentations have always provided; a particular viewpoint. No one book will be able to satisfy the matter of justice completely. There is far too much involved as we are deeply entrenched in a more pronounced battle than a treatment on justice can handle. Justice is too narrow a focus, and it doesn’t take into account that most of the problem, in and out of the church, is not confusion about what Justice is.
If we think the problem of justice is rooted in Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, The Frankfurt School, Kimberly Crenshaw, Derek Bell, and other Euro-American 19th & 20th-century socialistic philosophers, we’ve already lost. Not because there is nothing wrong with their view of justice, they are significantly flawed, particularly in their application. We’ve lost because we do not seem to grasp that most Americans' underlying issue has more to do with the cultural context and the way that justice has been applied not confusion about what justice is. Voddie’s book does not speak to the more significant problem, and its solution is essentially to choose which side of the fault line you are on. But then what? Take up social media arms against other professing believers who see value in the social justice you disapprove of? Is that the goal? Show people their error and then go back to pretending like God doesn’t expect us to care about these issues? Does the notion that social justice is not biblical negate the reality of injustice as a part of our fallen society? What actions do we take biblically since we now understand that the steps socially are not biblical? What does biblical justice require of us? So far, most of what I've seen from non-social justice folks is nothing. That’s Vocal Justice. Talk about what social justice isn’t and do nothing to show what biblical justice is. The result will be a host of Keep Warm and Well Fed Community Churches, fighting a civil war over justice that the American Evangelical Church (AEC) has no good track record of demonstrating, past or present.
With that being said, I’m also not surprised these books are being written. Biblical vs. Social Justice has been at the center of a lot of conflict within the American Evangelical Church (AEC), most notably those who are reformed. Conferences, tweets, lectures, sermons, and blogs are inundating our minds, pleading with us to consider their content. It feels more like a competition on who’s right or instead who’s wrong in their understanding of Justice. It is a unified division, and with every book, that “unity” gets more divided. Mainly because we are all too triggered, too tired, too displaced, and too unified by the wrong things. Add to that, too narrowly focused, thus ignoring the broader cultural misgivings that exist. We are missing what’s most important to many Americans. To understand what that is, a brief perspective on American Foreign Policy is necessary.
Yale Law professor Amy Chua’s latest book, “Political Tribalism,” explains an essential realization of why American foreign policy often fails. Using multiple examples from Vietnam to Iraq, she demonstrates that American foreign policymakers never consider the ethnic distinctions of the nations they try to democratize. Our politicians assume that each government will take on a national identity more important than their ethnic identity. In almost every instance, this has proven wrong. The ethnic distinctions are what cause the most conflict. Take, for example, Afghanistan. Amy Chua explains in detail the problem America had trying to set up a functioning government to mimic our democratic standards.
“Blindness to group identity also fatally undermined our military intervention in Afghanistan. After 9/11, this time, we didn't have a Cold War lens. Now we had a big anti-Islamist lens, and we saw the Taliban as a bunch of cave-dwelling, fundamentalist, harboring Osama bin Laden. And once again, we missed the ethnic and tribal identities that are all important in Afghanistan. Afghanistan's national anthem mentions 14 different ethnic groups and the largest three are the Pashtuns, the Uzbeks, and the Tajiks. And the crucial point here is that the Taliban is not just a religious fundamentalist movement. It is also an ethnic movement. Afghanistan was founded and ruled for basically hundreds of years by the biggest group, the Pashtuns. A lot of people think of the Pashtuns as the same thing as Afghanis. They just use these terms interchangeably, but we didn't know anything about this. When we intervened, the Pashtuns, long in their dominant role, had started to lose their historical dominance for a variety of reasons; the Cold War and they were very threatened by the Uzbeks and the Tajiks."
"Well, we missed this. So when we intervened, and we impressively toppled the Taliban, at least temporarily, they came right back. We did so by allying ourselves with something called the Northern Alliance. That, unfortunately, was viewed as being mainly populated with Uzbeks and the Tajiks, the main rivals of the Pashtuns. It was seen as aligning ourselves with these threatening rival groups, and then the government that we set up was again seen as favoring these other groups marginalizing the Pashtuns. This turned enormous numbers of ordinary Pashtun Afghani citizens against us. As oppressive as the Taliban is, many Pashtuns would prefer to have them in power than having the rival ethnic groups they view as persecuting them. So 17 later years after we intervene, the Taliban is still around, our troops are still mired there, and almost none of our objectives have been met.”
What Amy describes in Afghanistan is why America is splintering in a number of different directions. We have presumed on the ethnic and psychological identity distinctions that people have as less important than the national identity of being an American. This is at the heart of the so-called justice debacle in our nation. It doesn’t begin with justice. Justice comes later. It’s a truth and hope deferred issue. And this is where I temporarily part ways with Voddie and others. We have different agendas. To be clear, my goal in this post is to try to explain why people believe the ideologies that they do, not to describe what their doctrines are, their histories, and why they are fallacies.
“What is Truth?” Pilate asked Jesus
For most Americans, absolute truth is not in the Bible, nor is it in science. Absolute truth is the American Dream or rather the principles that make America what it is. This is one of the greatest strengths of America. We are a country with a vision, and that vision leads to each person having a national identity. You may not know this, but America is one of the only countries where the national identity of being an American is more important than the ethnic identities that people have. For instance, in Iraq, they see themselves more as Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd than Iraqis. But in America, the opposite is true. We see ourselves as Americans.
People travel from all over the world to become an American often leaving their ethnic identity behind. In America, you’re: African American, Mexican American, Chinese American, German American, Swedish American, Italian American, and so forth. In other countries, the national identity is primarily essential when engaging in an international competition like the Olympics or war. Most nations, however, are more ethnically divided than they are nationally united. This is the great strength of America. People come here hoping to be American citizens attaching that national identity to whatever other identity they already have. The interesting point about all of this is that being American is not an ethnicity; it is an ideology.
In the Oxford English Dictionary, ethnicity is defined as “the fact or state of belonging to a social group that has a common national or cultural tradition.” American is described more broadly as “a native or citizen of the United States.” The dictionary definition doesn’t capture the global reality of what it means to be an American. An American identity goes beyond ethnicity because American is an idea. It’s an ideology that promises something most other countries can't. America promises economic opportunity, but more than that, it promises that one can be rich, accessible, and unique among the rest of the world. Most people come to America for the opportunity of a better life. And that better life is almost always connected to financial stability. Being an American means far more than just being a citizen of the United States. The American Dream is the absolute truth of America. We are the land of opportunity.
But the national identity comes with its weaknesses. As stated above, one of those weaknesses is to downplay the ethnic identities people already have. As if we can only do things in the name of the national identity of American. This was essentially what was behind people being offended at NFL players kneeling during the national anthem. The players were responding from the ethnic identity of being black, while many whites who were offended were thinking from the national identity of being an American. This conflict is happening more than we think; like American foreign policy, we often miss it, even when it's explained clearly. Another weakness, which is the main weakness of the national identity ideology, is who defines the parameters of what it means to be an American? Who is responsible for the vision of a just and free society, where meritocracy (if you work hard, it’ll pay off) levels the playing field for all people?
Here is the beginning of the problem and why we find ourselves in such disarray as a nation. It is not Marxist to speak historically objective truths. History shows that white men who owned property were the initial definers of the American Dream and what it means to be an American. In and of itself, it is not a bad thing that white men held this responsibility. Every nation started with a dominant ethnic group that paved the way for that country’s origin. And there were good white men in America's history. The challenge is when the ideology that the ethnic group puts forth promises a level of inevitable success, but then actively prohibits that success from the majority of people not in that ethnic group, those who bought into the ideological vision eventually lose trust in the initial visionaries. If the concept is strong enough, they will create their own decorum rules to attain that vision. This is precisely what is happening in American society today, whether we like it or not. People have lost trust in allowing white men to define the national identity parameters of being an American.
This is due primarily to: women being allowed to vote, open bank accounts, and be successful, blacks given civil rights, and breaking barriers in entertainment and sports, formerly white-skinned people (Italians, Irish, other European immigrants), being seen as white and no longer treated negatively by their ethnic distinctions, etc. Until the 20th century, many people were not allowed to experience the national identity's fruit and the "absolute truth" claims of the American Dream. They were judged by their ethnic or gender identities and did not have a credible voice. They couldn't evaluate the American Dream's truth claims until recently, and now, with new eyes, many are finding fault with the way the systems have been set up. It's taken a while to get to this point because those responsible for controlling the vision of America did not have a vested interest to listen to the people they were handling. Therefore, trust has been lost.
The loss of trust comes with what the Bible calls “a hope deferred.” This is a sadness that is accompanied by the realization that what is hoped for is not coming to fruition or will not become a reality. This sadness is real, biblical, and a response to many grievous attitudes and actions stemming from slavery to women being second-class citizens, and other injustices demonstrated since America’s founding. This is not Marxist history. It’s American history. However, the purpose of this post is not to dig into the details of explicitly documented injustices in America, but merely to point out that those injustices, over time, have eroded trust and hope in the well-casted vision of the American Dream and what it means to be an American.
On one level, what’s happening now is a strength of the absolute truth of American national identity. If people didn’t believe in it so much, they wouldn’t demand that it be given to them so strongly. And they wouldn’t create their own pathways to attain that dream. America’s national identity is strong. But unfortunately, it’s primarily been defined by a narrow margin of people. To maintain that margin, those people have excused and dismissed significant evil as a necessary cause for the national identity to gain strength. For hundreds of years, this ideology worked. However, now, its weakness has been exposed. People are hurt and unwilling to trust those who perpetuated it, even down to those who are the ancestors (beneficiaries) of those who perpetuated it.
Within the conceptual framework of what it means to be an American, the idea of justice, lady justice, who is blind to partiality, is a staple. Sadly, she has been blind to those who have historically needed justice, and therefore she is no longer trusted to be the means by which justice takes place. Primarily because justice has been wrongly demonstrated by those who gave themselves the responsibility to execute it fairly,. This is not Marxism. This is just an observation based on accurate historical data. If Marxism is the claim when describing objective historical truths that highlight evil, those who proclaim “that’s Marxism” are proclaiming that what happened historically, which is mainly responsible for the erosion of trust and hope along many Americans, was not evil at all. It is merely a figment of the philosophical imagination of Karl Marx and others, rather than a sobered disappointment and anger, at believing a vision of the American Dream that many have been forcefully kept from attaining. The battle for justice is not neutral then.
It’s not a fight between biblical and social. It’s a battle of angst for believing in a definition of justice that was never truly demonstrated. Along with excuses made to defend that injustice, a bad taste has been left in the mouth of many. People are arguing over justice, not primarily because of contrition towards blacks for racism, but over the injustice of not getting the benefits of the supposed American Dream, advertised by those who designed its parameters. This is why people are angry at white men. While that anger will prove to be unhelpful and more divisive than soberly considered, it is the motive for a lot of the clashes happening around the country as we speak. America is at odds in a way like never before, and the church is, unfortunately, not exempt.
Trust and hope have been sifted as wheat in the American Evangelical Church (AEC) for similar reasons as the broader American culture. The church’s complicity in the American injustices of the past has primarily been placed at the foot of the cross, where those who have experienced the trauma of that injustice are supposed to demonstrate forgiveness, even when reconciliation is still lacking. In the next “Would the real Justice, please stand up,” I will explain the particulars of the erosion of trust and hope within the church that is coming from both sides. In the church, the emphasis is not so much on the national identity of being an American but on applying one's identity in Christ. However, there are similarities to the church's expectations that glean from the "absolute truth" of the American Ideology of meritocratic success. In other words, the AEC has adopted some of the cultural understanding of justice and national identity. Soundly imitating the culture in a collective cry of, “that was a long time ago!” How insensitive to the reverberating consequences on the collective American conscience, that sees and treats a particular ethnicity in a negative light for the majority of America’s founding; would no doubt find it difficult to see that ethnicity as some how deserving of the national identity, when its place in society has not made significant progress after all of this time. It is the grace of God that there is any relational capital between blacks and whites, especially in the church.
On all sides of the spectrum, we are American in our expectations and practices. There are many layers to understanding the drama in the church, which is why I want to dedicate a whole post to it. It’s essential to see that the issues are not primarily about Biblical versus Social Justice. What we’re seeing is less about justice and more about defending individual culpability over corporate responsibility and vice versa. Truthfully, the AEC doesn't have a strong track record of justice, either biblical or social, making the current debacle somewhat childish. And similar to the broader cultural narrative, the church is missing the mark, focusing on the equivalent of the national identity (who’s a Christian), instead of the ethnic identity (particular groups within the broader essence of “Christian,” ) who have been severely hurt and have lost trust towards the dominant ethnicity that defined what it means to be a Christian, particularly a reformed Christian. This will be discussed further in the next post on justice. This isn’t a Marxist interpretation of history. This is the reality of American History in and out of the church. Again, my goal in this post was to introduce a direction that is not a head-on collision between social and biblical justice. That conversation is a distraction.
For Christians, the battle for objective truth is about the Bible, often versus the culture. But that is not the primary battle of objective truth that the non-Christian culture is pushing back against. Their objective truth is the American Dream. People are pushing back against America's truth because it’s only favored, for the most part, a small subset of people. So what we’re trying to understand now as a nation, and as the church who was complicit in a lot of injustice, is how do we think about justice in light of significant injustice displayed by people, who were given or assumed the responsibility of administering justice? This is the depth of the conversation we are not having. This is why there is a significant struggle because we are not neutrally defining justice and comparing the biblical version against a social justice version. We are trying to understand justice as a nation, and as the church, with the backdrop of knowing the AEC historically, and even recently, disregarded justice, which has consequences that we have inherited today. These observations are not Marxist; they are American. And they are pointing to a larger dynamic of a hope deferred and a lack of trust in the former way of defining the national identity of being an American as well as a Christian. The absolute truth of the American Dream has been shattered. And so has the total trust. If we don't acknowledge this, then we’ll just be slinging proverbial mud pies at each other as people pick the personal fault line they will stand on.
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Will the real Justice please stand up?
Outstanding... Appreciate the clarity of your argument. It gets at the tension that I've felt for some time now, in that what seems to unite many of us is our ability to talk past one another while decidedly missing the point.