Why Evangelicals are terrible at social justice

I have been thinking through this question from a number of angles lately, and now it's time to put some of those thoughts to paper.

Let's start with Emerson and Smith:

"Because evangelicals view their primary task as evangelism and discipleship, they tend to avoid issues that hinder these activities. Thus, they are generally not counter-cultural. With some significant exceptions, they avoid “rocking the boat,” and live within the confines of the larger culture."  Divided by Faith, p21 (OUP, 2000).

This is Emerson and Smith walking through the history of racialisation in America, and explaining why both theological and sociological currents contributed to slavery, and post-slavery racialisation. But I think it's worth reflecting on this fundamental feature of evangelicalism to start with - a (relatively narrow) focus on the work of evangelism, saving individual souls, and discipleship, usually configured around personal morality. Anything that is seen as a 'distraction' from this is a distraction from gospel ministry, and evangelicals are consumed by a slippery-slope fear and fallacy.

That fallacy is elegantly expressed in the fallacious axiom expressed at the top of this article:

"Our generation however, is in danger of assuming what this gospel is. If what is taught in one generation becomes assumed in the second generation, then it will be forgotten in the third generation before being denied in the fourth generation." (Richard Chin, "The Momentous News of the Gospel", TGCA, 22nd Sep 2022)

Almost everything else in Chin's article I would agree with, including his statement that social justice is not the gospel, but a necessary entailment of the gospel. However, evangelicals have a problem with necessary entailments, and it's encapsulated in the above statement. That axiom derives from Don Carson, drawing explicitly on Paul Hiebert analysing shifts in the Mennonite church:

"One generation of Mennonites believed the gospel and held as well that there were certain social, economic, and political entailments. The next generation assumed the gospel, but identified with the entailments. The following generation denied the gospel: the “entailments” became everything."

[Carson repeats this in several texts: The Cross and Christian Ministry, p63; as well as more recently Basics for Believers]

Photo by Kalea Morgan on Unsplash

I suggest there are two significant problems with this. Firstly, this quotation has been taken from a specific analysis of a historic shift, and applied as if it were a general truth to gospel movements. It creates constant fear and anxiety that gospel fidelity is one generation away from being lost. Secondly, it is deployed as part of a slippery-slope argument - too much attention to social, economic, and political entailments is "a drift to liberalism", and the evangelical instinct to purity and protectionism is therefore stay away from it.

When we look historically at the Social Gospel movement of the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century, the alignment of social justice concerns with more liberal theological positions, started driving a wedge that has polarised social justice from theological conservatism in white churches. Precisely because anything seen as 'social justice' came to be associated with theological liberalism, theological conservatives increasingly retreated from social issues, focused on personal morality, and aligned themselves more with political conservatives.

This alignment and polarisation was only increased throughout most of the 20th century, by the steady identification of "traditional Christian values" with "Western liberal democracy and capitalism", and of "liberal theology" with "progressive politics", and by extension, socialism, marxism, and atheism. Those last three are seen as an unholy triad and anything even remotely engaging with marxist theory is suspect by association.

This leaves evangelicals without any meaningful toolkit to discuss collective realities. They cannot robustly engage in a discussion of class dynamics, because (i) any discussion of class sounds marxist; (ii) they don't have an alternate framework to offer; (iii) they are captured by hyper-individualism.

“That hyper-individualism sees all social problems as the result of (a) individual moral choices by free agents, (b) the bad influences of individual relationships, never (c) social and institutional structures and group dynamics.”  Emerson and Smith, Divided by Faith, p78 (OUP, 2000).

The combination of these factors means that when Richard Chin writes "To neglect the poor and needy is as serious a sin as committing adultery!" it rings a little hollow. Evangelicals by and large think committing adultery is a very serious sin, but they conceive of neglecting the poor and needy as a personal responsibility to be addressed through individual charity.

I want to suggest that the evangelical fear of secondary entailments becoming primary commitments is driven by another, larger fear as well: the place of works. Evangelicals, committed to the doctrine of justification by faith alone, struggle to articulate a proper place for works.

If we put together salvation by faith not by works (Eph 2:8-9), and then , faith without works is dead (Jacob 2:14-26). True faith always leads to and drives works. Works can never drive the train. It's always the carriage.

But evangelicals qua Protestants are chronically driven by the need not to be Roman Catholics,  and not to suggest that people are saved by works, and so they end up practically incapable of teaching morality. That's why the application of so many sermons comes down to (1) read your bible more, (2) pray more, (3) do personal evangelism, and the primary motivator (spoken or not) is often guilt.

A more robust understanding of preaching, ethics, and grace-fuelled living is needed. Not least, how to read the Old Testament. Evangelicals do well at redemptive history or biblical theology, that is reading the OT in terms of the Bible's overarching story of redemption centred in Christ. But they don't have a good grasp of how to read and apply the OT today. The work of someone like Christopher Wright in this area needs tremendously more exposure and application. The Mosaic covenant is given as a response and after the Exodus, as ethical instruction to shape the life of redeemed and liberated people. Yes, important differences apply and must be applied, but this is the ethical basis for Jesus, the Apostles, and the NT. Furthermore it’s primarily a collective and social ethic. It's about the shape of liberated life individually, collectively (the church) and socially (the world). The prophets in turn spend most of their ink calling the people of God *back* to covenant fidelity, in terms of the triple themes of idolatry, religious hypocrisy, and (social) injustice. Our preaching of those texts must not reduce it them to the personal.

The Christian hope does not have its primary telos in a utopian world here and now. But its eschatological hope has too often be rendered as an excuse to neglect the here and now. The result is that we preach a gospel of forgiveness, devoid of reconciliation or transformation, to assuage consciences that they'll go to heaven when they die. This is a truncated gospel that defrauds believers. Lives transformed by grace are supposed to be transformed thoroughly and expressed through ongoing transformation - repentance, forgiveness, and the pursuit of love and justice.

To put this diagrammatically, I think evangelical preaching often functionally goes like this:

(Justice) > Judgement > Gospel > individual repentance and faith

And stops there. The end application is just 'you need Jesus’. And the starting point often isn’t even justice, it’s just judgment - God appears to judge humans in order to create the conditions of their needing saving. Here’s a better paradigm:

Justice > Judgement > Gospel > Repentance, Faith, Forgiveness > Grace-fuelled Justice

This does two things. Firstly, if we get our orientation around Justice right in the first place, in the sense of God is Good, ordered a Good world, and desires good ordering of his world, then we get a genuine reason for judgement - God’s goodness. God’s judgment is the product of his hatred of evil. When we recognise that evil within ourselves, then we are indeed driven to the good news of the Gospel, and the primary response of repentance & faith, which results in forgiveness, reconciliation to God, and ought to then work itself out in grace-shaped relationships within the church, as well as grace-fuelled works including social justice both inside and outside the church. This is grace-fuelled Christian living, neither moralism nor guilt-driven.

So often instead we have hyper-individualism, functional Marcionism, and slippery slope fears, that all shape a theological culture that is stunted. If, instead, we truly lived in light of the whole counsel of Scripture, and considered taught, preached, and practice that true faith resulted in genuine fruit at not only the personal level, but the ecclesial, communal and societal, then what would he the result? I suggest it would be this: by your love, all people will know that we are Jesus' disciples (John 13:35).