Social Justice: the king of fraud

I know this title tests your resolve. You are now saying, "what is this crazy man talking about now?" How can Social Justice be the king of fraud? Everyone is in favor of Social Justice. It's the king of virtue,not fraud. I must be as "politically incorrect" as one can be. So bear with me and let me make my case. BTW, I am not the only one who has reached this conclusion.

Here's the summary point:
Social justice divides people, not unify them. Social justice produces a contest for who's the judge.

Let me focus this blog on what is social justice? what is fraud? and why is social justice a fraud perpetuated on society? First of all, fraud is easy to discuss. Fraud is basically a legal term used to refer to intentional deception for personal gain. I do not advocate that every proponent of social justice is intentionally defrauding others. Yet, if you participate in  a ponzi scheme, you are in some way guilty of fraud, although you are unknowingly perpetuating the fraud.

Social Justice is a much more complex topic. I have blogged about justice before, but it has been quite a few years.

 If you google "social justice", you'll get something like this from the premier authority, Wikipedia: "Social justice is the fair and just relation between the individual and society." As usual, this definition is problematic. Justice is technically not fairness, but a special form of fairness. Justice and Fairness are not isomorphic (excuse me, isomorphic means "exactly the same or identical in every way"). Justice is an obsession of human nature.

Justice is a scale, the balance between what people receive relative to what they do. Justice usually refers to getting what one deserves, either a reward for good or punishment for bad. However, the judgment of what is just is highly subjective.

There are other forms of fairness besides justice. One is equality, one is need and one is generosity. When everyone gets the same or when everyone gets what they need or when someone gives from their own abundance, then we often say that "this is fair." Since people choose among the the various forms of fairness to determine if something is "right" (another word for fair"), then fairness is subjective in many ways.

So far, we have seen that fairness is complex and subjective and justice is technically just one form of fairness. What is it that society wants when it advocates "social justice"?  First, the notion of social justice is relatively new throughout all of history. It was ushered in by the Renaissance and Reformation some 500 years ago. Social justice is simply code for human rights.

The current cultural notion of justice abandons the single idea of reciprocity (we get what we deserve) and rewrites the notion of "deserve" from one's performance to include equality, needs, and generosity. Equality has been hijacked to mean "sameness." Needs are subject to individual preference. Generosity is what others think people who have more than they do should do to be fair. The question of one's rights or what someone deserves cannot be answered by one voice of society. Justice requires a judge. Thus, one of the benefits of power is to control what happens in society for the "sake of social justice." The one with power becomes the judge.

One critic of social justice put it this way, "since the program of social justice inevitably involves claims for government provision of goods, paid for through the efforts of others, the term actually refers to an intention to use force to acquire one's desires. Not to earn desirable goods by rational thought and action, production and voluntary exchange, but to go in there and forcibly take goods from those who can supply them!" Or, in other words, social justice is a redistribution of goods based on who can become the judge.

Obama did not invent social justice, but he is an iconic advocate of using its deception for gaining personal power. He is not alone. I hear social justice as the calling card of the church, especially works oriented faiths such as Catholics, Nazarenes, Wesleyans, and even mainstream reformed denominations. The fraud od social justice finds its way into every form of society who needs to use its deception for its own purposes.

Basically, Social Justice has become the primary agency in which man aspires to be God. As far as I know, there is no claim man can make to absolute truth except the Bible. Science and Philosophy have arguably denounced absolute truth. Therefore, social justice for many people is man's permission to apply relative truth for personal gain, even if the gain is to satisfy guilt or obtain virtue by works. Fairness is the king of relativism, which is the main weapon culture uses to fraud or deceive by forcing the desires of those in power on others.

If you think I am crazy, consider this. The Founding Fathers created the Constitution and Bill of Rights to protect individuals in society from the federal government seeking the power to determine who deserves what. They foresaw that people would seek power over others in the name of justice. For the past 150 years this is what has happened. Social justice has been the fraud by which some individuals have sought power to control what people do.

For those who accept God as the source of absolute truth, what does God say about Justice? First, He says we are created in His image. In this sense we are created equal, but we are not equal in ability, personality, socio-economic advantage, etc. While theologians don't exactly agree on what "in His image" means, most agree it deals more with being His representative, placing our identity into His original intent.

What about rights and what we deserve? What does God say about that? Well, I hate to bring the bad news, He says we deserve Hell and we have no rights. Jesus says that if someone in authority asks us to go one mile, which they can rightfully do, then go 2 miles, which they have no right to ask us to do. In other words, the Kingdom of God is not about rights in this world. Jesus' legal rights were violated over 40 times on his last day on earth. He could have fixed that if that was His purpose. As we said, the US Bill of Rights is not God's description of what we deserve. They are simply a reaction by the founding fathers to the historical experience of man's sovereignty and government abuse. They were established to protect individuals from the power of the government to be the absolute judge. We have no inalienable rights granted to us by God. All we have is what He decides to supply us. We are pilgrims and sojourners.

But there is Good News, we should not fear because He willfully desires to give us all He has. Even Jesus says He didn't come this time to judge right and wrong, but to provide a pathway home.

This is called Grace. God, through our faith in the redemptive work of the Cross, offers to us the provisions and privileges of the Heavenlies. From receiving this Grace, we then willfully serve. We give generously because we recognize its not ours in the first place. We are not the agents of justice. God is the perfect balance of Justice and Love, not us. Christians are caught up in the fraud of Social Justice when they believe they must get into the struggle for power to judge what people deserve.


We are created to be light, agents of Grace, and we perpetuate fraud when we are deceived to claim our role as the judge.