Mere ‘Christianity’: How Social Justice Is Corrupting the Faith

Even during a season of numerous tectonic shifts in American life, one that deserves special note is the massive leftward political tilt that has occurred among many Christians. People who just a few months ago were filling their social media accounts with photos of their children, cooking recipes, and inspirational Bible verses now voice some of the most radical left-wing talking points about gender, “privilege,” and “Whiteness.” Pastors promote the work of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo as if they were sacrosanct; post long, progressive screeds to their blogs and social media accounts; and insinuate that those who disagree are guilty of white supremacy. Christianity Today publishes articles that bemoan the fact that Christianity is not central to the activist movements going on in the streets and is instead “more like an awkward extra appendage to progressivism than its beating heart.” Dan Cathy, the outspokenly Christian CEO of Chick-fil-A, suggests that whites should shine the shoes of black people out of a sense of racial guilt. Groups of white Christians are filmed bowing down before their black church members to ask for forgiveness for the sin of “systematic racism.” As if some switch had been flipped, a huge portion of the professing Christians are suddenly parroting the most extreme views of what was, until only yesterday, the fringe left.

Those Christians who do so rarely, if ever, understand how specious this movement’s arguments are or how they manipulate language by loading familiar words with entire orthodoxies. (For example, isn’t it interesting that words as well as silence are now routinely described as “violence,” but looting and setting fire to buildings isn’t?) Nor are they aware of how radical the agenda is. “Black lives matter” is an indisputably true statement, and there are legitimate causes for concern when it comes to policing, but why, for instance, does the official Black Lives Matter website have so many references to transgenderism? Why are there exhortations to “dismantle cisgender privilege” and “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family”? Why all this talk of fostering a “queer-affirming network” and freeing themselves from “the tight grip of heteronormative thinking”? Why is there video footage of BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors, calling herself a “trained Marxist”? Does the average Christian supporter of BLM understand this language? Are they familiar with the ideology from which it springs? With terms like intersectionality and poststructuralism or names like bell hooks (who intentionally writes her name without capital letters) or Judith Butler? Are they aware that the “progressive” stance on protesting now includes a defense of looting? I have reason to doubt it.