A Christian Vision of Social Justice

Social change can be pursued with mercy and hope.

Like a lot of people, I’ve tried to envision a way to promote social change that doesn’t involve destroying people’s careers over a bad tweet, that doesn’t reduce people to simplistic labels, that is more about a positive agenda to redistribute power to the marginalized than it is about simply blotting out the unworthy. I’m groping for a social justice movement, in other words, that would be anti-oppression and without the dehumanizing cruelty we’ve seen of late.

I tried to write a column describing what that might look like — and failed. It wasn’t clear in my head.

But this week I interviewed Esau McCaulley, a New Testament professor at Wheaton College and a contributing writer for New York Times Opinion. He described a distinctly Christian vision of social justice I found riveting and a little strange (in a good way) and important for everybody to hear, Christian and non-Christian, believer and nonbeliever.

This vision begins with respect for the equal dignity of each person. It is based on the idea that we are all made in the image of God. It abhors any attempt to dehumanize anybody on any front. We may be unjustly divided in a zillion ways, but a fundamental human solidarity in being part of the same creation.

The Christian social justice vision also emphasizes the importance of memory. The Bible is filled with stories of marginalization and transformation, which we continue to live out. Exodus is the complicated history of how a fractious people comes together to form a nation.

Today, many Americans are trying to tell the true history of our people, a tale that doesn’t whitewash the shameful themes in our narrative nor downplay the painful but uneven progress — realist but not despairing.

McCaulley doesn’t describe racism as a problem, but as a sin enmeshed with other sins, like greed and lust. Some people don’t like “sin” talk. But to cast racism as a sin is useful in many ways.

The concept of sin gives us an action plan to struggle against it: acknowledge the sin, confess the sin, ask forgiveness for the sin, turn away from the sin, restore the wrong done. If racism is America’s collective sin then the tasks are: tell the truth about racism, turn away from racism, offer reparations for racism.

A struggle against a sin is not the work of a week or a year, since sin keeps popping back up. But this vision has led to some of the most significant social justice victories in history: William Wilberforce’s fight against the slave trade, the Rev. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s and the Confessing Church’s struggle against Nazism. And, of course, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.

From Frederick Douglass and Howard Thurman to Martin Luther King Jr. on down, the Christian social justice movement has relentlessly exposed evil by forcing it face to face with Christological good. The marches, the sit-ins, the nonviolence. “You can’t get to just ends with unjust means,” McCaulley told me. “The ethic of Jesus is as important as the ends of liberation.”

He pointed me to the argument Thurman made in “Jesus and the Disinherited,” that hatred is a great motivator, but it burns down more than the object of its ire. You can feel rage but there has to be something on the other side of anger.

That is the ethic of self-emptying love — neither revile the reviler nor allow him to stay in his sin. The Christian approach to power is to tell those with power to give it up for the sake of those who lack. There is a relentless effort to rebuild relationship because God is relentless in pursuit of us.

“He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love,” King wrote. “We can never say, ‘I will forgive you, but I won’t have anything further to do with you.’ Forgiveness means reconciliation, a coming together again.”

McCaulley emphasizes that forgiveness — like the kind offered by the congregants of the Emanuel A.M.E. church in Charleston, S.C., and family members after parishioners were murdered in 2015 by a white supremacist — is not a stand-alone thing. It has to come with justice and change: “Why is Black forgiveness required again and again? Why is forgiveness heard but the demand for justice ignored?”

But this vision does not put anybody outside the sphere of possible redemption. “If you tell us you are trying to change, we will come alongside you,” McCaulley says. “When the church is at its best it opens up to the possibility of change, to begin again.”

New life is always possible, for the person and the nation. This is the final way the Christian social justice vision is distinct. When some people talk about social justice it sounds as if group-versus-group power struggles are an eternal fact of human existence. We all have to armor up for an endless war.

But, as McCaulley writes in his book “Reading While Black,” “the Old and New Testaments have a message of salvation, liberation and reconciliation.”

On the other side of justice, we reach the beloved community and multiethnic family of humankind. This vision has a destination, and thus walks not in bitterness but in hope.

Jon Meachum: The Constitution is a Calvinist Ducument. The Declaration was an Englightenment one

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me to this point so I I do think it’s
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a it’s a good bright line to draw John
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Jefferson knew that part and this is in
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your book all these codes about
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partisanship I mean he was pretty
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dedicated to engagement and political
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issues but what would he think of the
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type of partisanship we have now at this
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moment I think he would recognize it
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honestly he once said divisions of
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opinion have convulsed human societies
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since Greece and Rome divisions of
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opinion were the oxygen of a free
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government I’m a skeptic of the a
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prevailing scholarly view that the
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founders had this vision of a one-party
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one-party state and we would all be on
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Olympus with powdered wigs and
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solving problems they may have had that
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vision we all had that vision and but
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they understood reality oh if you if you
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worry if you’re worried about or if you
doubt me about whether they understood
reality read the Constitution which is
entirely about reality constitute if
Jefferson was an Enlightenment document
the Constitution is a Calvinist document
as looms we are all Despres sinful and
driven by appetite and ambition and
we’ve done everything we can
since then to prove them right so I
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think you know this is a the Hemings the
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story about Sally Hemings was first
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publicized in 1802 and we with all love
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and respect to a net we don’t know that
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much more than that first piece doing it
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wasn’t seen as a historical or cultural
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document it was a partisan attack yeah
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you know right and and continued during
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that you know during his presidency and
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in a few times afterwards there’s been a
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big debate recently coming out of the
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New York Times 16:19 project how much do
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we need to revise our concept of the
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founding of this nation do you think
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that makes sense or has it gone a bit
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too far the pendulum is historians have
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been writing about this down for quite
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some time but what we haven’t done as
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much as to think about what that means
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for us today
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that the legacy of slavery is still with
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us there’s a tendency there has been a
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tendency on the part of many people to
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say oh well we knew that but that’s over
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I think that’s the that’s the
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contribution of the magazine of 1619 is
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not to tell us something many things we
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didn’t know but to say there is a
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connection to this that is continuing
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you don’t get rid of hundreds of years
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of slavery in a century or so and we
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really don’t get going as legally full
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citizens until 1965 the passage of the
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vote
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that’s not in the history you know
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that’s a blink of an eye so they even in
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total blink of an eye in history and
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thinking that this stuff is all in the
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past has been the problem and that’s I
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think that’s what the project was trying
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to do is to say no this isn’t over John
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I was struck I believe it was the
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remarks at the signing of the Civil
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Rights Act and in July July 2nd 1964
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Lyndon Johnson grounds his remark at the
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bill signing not on Philadelphia but on
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Jamestown it which which I was struck by
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talk about a complicated figure well you
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know were the Democratic nominee for
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president is a 77 year old white man who
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was the vice president of the first
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african-american president incredibly
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loyal and eulogized Thurmond and
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Eastland you know so well if you’re
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looking for simplicity if you’re looking
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for straightforward figures good luck
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I don’t know who they would be I think
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what an it just said is absolutely
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essential I have a theory
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aboard Walter with this I think
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privately actually that we’re only a 60
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year old nation right the country we
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have right now the polity we have which
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is soon going to be majority diversity
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whatever phrase it is was really created
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in 1964-65 not only with the Civil
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Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act but
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with the Immigration Act yeah which
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totally changed the nature of the
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country and so no wonder this is so hard
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no wonder we’re having such a ferocious
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white reaction this is kind of the 1830s
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in a way and so it’s not to excuse it
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but I do think it explains it a little
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bit and this idea of Prague
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and I know it sounds tinny to people and
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look if you look like me you can talk
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about progress right I’m the boring Lee
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heterosexual white southern Episcopalian
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right I mean things tend to work out for
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me in America so I stipulate that but
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but it’s simply the lesson of history
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that we are in fact a better country
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than we were yesterday doesn’t mean
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we’re perfect doesn’t mean we stop up
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but our are enough of us devoted to
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doing all we can as citizens and as
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leaders to try to create a country that
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more of us can be proud of and if we are
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then let’s get to it yeah and and I
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would throw in women the changing role
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of women from the 1960s and this is
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that’s a good point I wouldn’t I agree
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with 60 years again a short time in
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history where everything everybody’s
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sort of in place it’s like Ken Burns
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said that he found it difficult to call
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talk about the Golden Age of baseball
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and there were no black players in the
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major league how do you how do you do
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that and this is a similar situation
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where you have blacks legally allowed to
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vote and those rights are protected I
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mean there’s issues with voter
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suppression but sort of on paper
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equality is there and it’s hard is
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wrenching for people who have had you
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know power who are used to a certain
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hierarchy a certain way things are were
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or they think about their grandparents
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or good old days it’s hard to get used
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to all of that and so you’re right
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there’s no wonder that there’s a people
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Annette gordon-reed Jon Meacham thank
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you for joining us to be here
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[Music]
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[Music]
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you

Christ Means “Anointed”

Cynthia Bourgeault has spent years studying Mary Magdalene, one of Jesus’ closest apostles, often conflated with a prostitute. Cynthia reclaims Magdalene’s significance as Jesus’ beloved companion and a model of authentic love.

Christ is not Jesus’s last name—an obvious but so-often overlooked truism. It means “the anointed one.” And however much his followers may have wished for the ceremonial anointing that would have proclaimed him the Davidic Messiah, the fact is that he became “the Anointed One” at the hands of an unidentified woman who appeared out of nowhere at a private dinner bearing a jar of precious perfume and sealed him with the unction of her love. . . .

I believe that the traditional memory of Mary Magdalene as Jesus’s anointer . . . holds the key to . . . understanding . . . the Passion as an act of substituted love. It also . . . offers a powerful ritual access point to the Christian pathway toward singleness and “restoration to fullness of being.” If we are fully to avail ourselves of Mary Magdalene’s wisdom presence today, it will be, I believe, primarily through recovering a wisdom relationship with the ritual of anointing—that is, coming to understand it . . . as an act of conscious love marking the passageway into both physical and spiritual wholeness.

Her passion has transformed her into one of the initiated ones. And in The Cloud of Unknowing, the author recognizes this same quality of passion as the key element that not only frees Mary from her sins but catapults her into unitive consciousness and a state of continuous beatific communion:

When our Lord spoke to Mary as a representative of all sinners who are called to the contemplative life and said, “Thy sins be forgiven thee,” it was not only because of her great sorrow, nor because of her remembering her sins, nor even because of the meekness with which she regarded her sinfulness. Why then? It was surely because she loved much.

. . . Even though she may not have felt a deep and strong sorrow for her sins . . . she languished more for lack of love than for any remembrance of her sins. . . .

…