Social Justice Before Your Very Eyes

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.

For that matter, there's every reason to believe that most supporters of school vouchers, and most supporters of the president's "faith-based initatives" sincerely think that these are sound methods of securing social justice here at home. Primarily, though, the social justice impulses of contemporary Christianity are directed abroad. That, however, is by no means obviously inappropriate. What used to be known as the "third world" is, rather clearly, the location of social injustice that is both more severe than what exists here at home, and also effects far more people.

The fact that many of these social justice initiatives are ill-designed, and that they are tacked on to various more-or-less nutty proposals that strike Mark and I as unrelated to social justice is by no means unique. For a very long time in America, a great deal of fervor went into criminalizing the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages. This was believed by many at the time to be absolutely vital to the future moral integrity of the nation. The impulse in question was, meanwhile, by no means unrelated to some worthy impulses toward social reform, and to some totally unworthy impulses toward nativism and xenophobia. The religious impulse today is, of course, not precisely akin to the one that existed in previous times, but it is similar to past manifestations of the trend in that it mixes good ideas with bad approaches to worthy aims to dogmatic pursuit of certain goals that strike secular people as silly or malevolent.