Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism's Looming Catastrophe

I have heard a mantra lately that rings hollow in my ears: “There can be no reconciliation without justice.” When I hear that, I want to scream, “YES! AND THE DEATH OF CHRIST IS THAT JUSTICE!” All other justice is proximate and insufficient. It is because of Christ’s work on the cross that that we can heed the apostle’s admonition: “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you” (Ephesians 4:31–32). Who am I to tell a white brother that he cannot be reconciled to me until he has drudged up all of the racial sins of his and his ancestors’ past and made proper restitution? Christ has atoned for sin!

I believe the current concept of social justice is incompatible with biblical Christianity.

The most popular antiracist curriculum among conservative evangelicals is Latasha Morrison’s Be the Bridge: Pursuing God’s Heart for Racial Reconciliation. In the accompanying curriculum, Whiteness 101: Foundational Principles Every White Bridge Builder Needs to Understand, Morrison defines racism as “a system of advantage based on race, involving cultural messages, misuse of power, and institutional bias, in addition to the racist beliefs and actions of individuals.” It is important to note that this redefinition of racism, among other things, changes the location and therefore the nature of the sin. We are no longer dealing with the hearts of men; we are addressing institutions and structures. “For as long as America exists with its current institutions,” writes DiAngelo, “it will also need to be in group therapy where our turn begins with: ‘Hi. I’m America, and I’m racist.’ 

The facts about Black Lives Matter are not in dispute. The organization is Marxist, revolutionary, feminist, misandrist, pro-LGBTQIA+, pro-abortion, and anti-family, with roots in the occult. It is unacceptable for Christians to partner with, celebrate, identify with, or promote this organization. And that includes being bullied or pressured into using the phrase “black lives matter.

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16–17). In no area does God require me to walk in a level of righteousness for which the Scriptures do not equip me—including any and all aspects of justice.

At the heart of the “woke” movement lies the idea that the sin of racism is no longer to be understood as an individual sin.

There can be no reconciliation without justice.” When I hear that, I want to scream, “YES! AND THE DEATH OF CHRIST IS THAT JUSTICE!” All other justice is proximate and insufficient.

Pastors, I beg you to consider what I have written here. I believe the Church—your church—is under attack. As shepherds, we must defend the sheep. We must repel the wolves. And yes, the wolves are many. However, this one is within the gates and has the worst of intentions. He desires to use your genuine love for the brethren as leverage. Don’t let him! Recognize the difference between the voice of the Good Shepherd who calls you to love all the sheep and the voice of the enemy that tells you some of them are guilty, blind, ignorant oppressors and that others are oppressed—all based on their melanin. Reject cries that take principles and stories of individual restitution (Numbers 5:7; Luke 19) and eisegetically twist them into calls for multi-generational reparations. Reject the cries of those who twist the repentance of Daniel and Ezra 1) on behalf of theocratic Israel and 2) for sin that took place during their lifetime, in an effort to promote multi-generational, ethnic guilt that rests upon all white people by virtue of their whiteness.

There are two competing worldviews in this current cultural moment. One is the Critical Social Justice view—which assumes that the world is divided between the oppressors and the oppressed (white, heterosexual males are generally viewed as “the oppressor”).3 The other is what I will refer to in these pages as the biblical justice view in order to avoid what I accuse the social-justice crowd of doing, which is immediately casting its opponents as being opposed to justice.

I can and do look injustice in the eye and call it what it is. It is my duty as a herald of God’s Word. In this case, however, the injustice I see is the false witness-bearing, Marxist ideology-promoting, Gospel-perverting ideology of Critical Race Theory and its offshoots.

Current cries about “over-policing” of black communities and the need to “defund the police” are inconsistent with the facts on the ground.

Whenever you hear this mantra, I hope you remember Proverbs 18:17: “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.

I am happy to save every single child I can. I am not a social justice warrior, but I believe God meant it when He said, “Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause” (Isaiah 1:17). But I don’t believe He called me to use the government as a proxy. God calls His people to be His hands and feet in this regard. Believing this transformed my life and that of my family to the tune of adopting seven newborns in nine years as an expression of our pro-life commitment.

This, by the way, is why CSJ proponents tend to downplay the sufficiency of Scripture: to them, racism is not a heart issue or personal sin; it is a 'systemic' problem. Therefore, reform is the solution, not repentance.

Where the battle rages the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battle-field besides is mere flight and disgrace to him if he flinches at that one point. —Elizabeth Rundle Charles

I do not mean that we must accept the world’s faulty, emasculated, unbiblical version of love—the version that sees any disagreement or confrontation as inherently unloving. No, we must love each other with a tenacious, biblical, Christlike love.

I am a debater; I always have been. But in the current climate, debate is becoming a lost art—partly because of a general decline in the study of logic and rhetoric, but mostly because of the general feminization of culture and its consequent disdain for open verbal combat. Gone are the days of Luther and Erasmus slugging it out over the question of original sin. Today both men would be accused of being petty (for daring to split hairs over such theological minutia), mean-spirited (for daring to speak so forcefully in favor of their own position and against the other’s), and downright un-Christlike (for throwing around the word “heresy”). I have often said, “The Eleventh Commandment is, ‘Thou shalt be nice”… and we don’t believe the other ten.” One of the negative results of this is no longer being able to deal with ideas without attacking the people who hold them. Disagreements quickly deteriorate into arguments and worse. Consequently, taking a position on an issue carries the automatic assumption that one is utterly opposed not only to the opposing view, but to all who hold it. Therefore, we don’t debate ideas at all, but go straight for personal attacks and character assassination. And this debate is no different. To the anti–Critical Social Justice camp, those on the side of CSJ are all Cultural Marxists. Conversely, to the social justice camp, those who oppose their cause are all racists (even fellow black people like me who, according to their definition of racism, can’t be racists… but I digress). The result is a standstill—a demilitarized zone that exists, not because hostilities have ceased, but because we all tacitly believe there is no solution. Meanwhile, well-meaning Christian laypeople find themselves at a loss. Which side do they choose? There are “big names” on both sides, so who’s right?

But the Dallas Statement didn’t warrant a drop of ink. Did these groups fail to address the statement because it was correct? If so, why didn’t they join us in signing it? Was it because, as more than one of the leaders of the aforementioned ministries stated, “The group lacked any names with gravitas,”3 therefore implying the statement was insignificant?

We are right to pursue justice, peace, and unity (Micah 6:8; Romans 12:18; John 17:20–21). That is not the fault line. The fault lies in believing that such a vision can be attained by affiliating with, using the terminology of, or doing anything other than opposing in the most forceful terms the ideology that lies at the root of the social justice movement.

Paul Washer put it well when he noted, “Five years ago, I was amazed as I saw the young, restless, and Reformed crowd at conferences talking about their latest encounters with Spurgeon, Calvin, Kuyper, and Machen… now they’re all talking about Christian Smith, Jemar Tisby, and Robin DiAngelo.” Granted, most of the men mentioned above believe firmly in the sufficiency of Scripture and have done so for decades. I am not talking about the liberal, openly social gospel/liberation theology wing of the CSJ movement. (At least not in this chapter.) In fact, many of the men to whom I am referring here have been on the front line of the battle against liberalism, mysticism, and pragmatism for many years. That is why the allusion to an unofficial new canon is so disturbing.

Our problem is a lack of clarity and charity in our debate over the place, priority, practice, and definition of justice.

In the social sciences, “critical” is “geared toward identifying and exposing problems in order to facilitate revolutionary political change.”7 In other words, it implies revolution. It is not interested in reform. Hence, we do not “reform” the police; we “defund” the police or abolish them. “It is more interested in problematizing—that is, finding ways in which the system is imperfect and making noise about them, reasonably or not—than it is in any other identifiable activity, especially building something constructive.

It is both ironic and sad that CSJ’s attack on the Gospel is so clear that an atheist can see it, yet many churches, denominations, seminaries, leading ministries, and ministers have fallen prey to this movement.

In other words, Critical Theory is not just an analytical tool, as some have suggested; it is a philosophy, a worldview.

After the Marxist revolution failed to topple capitalism in the early twentieth century, many Marxists went back to the drawing board, modifying and adapting Marx’s ideas. Perhaps the most famous was a group associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, which applied Marxism to a radical interdisciplinary social theory. The group included Max Horkheimer, T.W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Georg Lukács, and Walter Benjamin and came to be known as the Frankfurt School. These men developed Critical Theory as an expansion of Conflict Theory and applied it more broadly, including other social sciences and philosophy. Their main goal was to address structural issues causing inequity. They worked from the assumption that current social reality was broken, and they needed to identify the people and institutions that could make changes and provide practical goals for social transformation.