With astonishing speed,
the evangelical world has been invaded by social justice
ideology. In a recent podcast, the current president of the Southern
Baptist Convention (until now a theologically conservative body), J.D. Greear,
highlighted "white privilege"
as a serious moral issue for Christians. Likewise, David Platt,
former president of the SBC's International Mission Board, browbeat
evangelicals for having too much of the same skin
color: "Why are so many of our churches so white?"
At another historically conservative
denomination, the Presbyterian Church of America, things are not any better. Its institution and my own alma mater, Covenant
Seminary, hosted a conference
on race whose onetime director was a Black Lives Matter
activist. Furthermore, the seminary and the PCA denomination as a
whole have been embroiled in controversy over
the Revoice Conference, which promotes the idea
of LGBT victimhood.
Though
these evangelicals may be "woke" about some issues, they are
definitely asleep about others. For instance, concern about the
plight of the aborted unborn has been waning among them. In a YouTube video, a recent graduate
of the SBC's Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary observes that these
days, one frequently hears about social justice issues on campus but rarely
about abortion. Among woke evangelicals, ironically, victimhood ideology
has managed to push into the shadows conspicuous sins against present-day
victims. This reveals a significant corruption of conscience.
Conscience
has always played an indispensable role in Christianity. Jonathan
Edwards calls conscience "the instrument in the hand of God, to
accuse, condemn, terrify, and to urge to duty." The importance
of individual conscience stands out conspicuously in the
Bible. However, within the moral universe of leftism, the concept of
victimhood silences or perverts individual conscience. Among those
who embrace a victim identity, the wail of group grievance often drowns out individual
conscience. Furthermore, many come to feel guilt and shame about
things that are not really wrong. A fixation on victimhood causes
even fictitious transgressions like "microaggression" and
"cultural appropriation" to gain legitimacy in endless cries for
redress.
Nazi
Germany represented the antithesis of Christian conscience. Though
the Nazis are often invoked to stigmatize people not in line with progressive
causes, the reality is that an obsession with German national victimhood after
World War I fueled the Nazi rise to power and helped inspire the creation of
that bizarre ideology. As Kurlander explains in his book Hitler's
Monsters, many Germans came to see themselves as colonized,
oppressed people. Consequently, Judaism and Christianity were
branded as alien intruders imposed on supposedly subjugated
Germans. As a result, Germany experienced a widespread longing to
return to pagan German religious roots and the proliferation of anti-Semitism,
leading ultimately to the Holocaust.
Terrorism,
riots, murder, bullying, and genocide have all been excused as justified
responses to victimization, real or imagined. In his book The
Vanishing Conscience, California pastor John MacArthur comments,
"Anyone can escape responsibility for his or her wrongdoing simply by
claiming the status of a victim." Along with leftist victimhood ideology, he noted that the
psychotherapeutic outlook has contributed significantly to the muting of
conscience in modern churches. For instance, many church leaders are
convinced that instruction about personal sin and guilt wounds self-esteem.
Though
many prominent evangelicals have jumped on the victimhood bandwagon, others are
protesting the incompatibility of the Christian faith with the promotion of
collective blame. One such dissenter, Darrell Harrison, laments
the way his fellow black evangelicals are being seduced by leftist ideology and
neglecting Gospel proclamation. Last year, a number of evangelical
leaders joined together to issue "The Statement on Social Justice and
the Gospel," which reaffirms traditional views of sin and salvation, along
with exposing the social justice message as heterodox. The statement rejects the
notion that "the postmodern ideologies derived from intersectionality,
radical feminism, and critical race theory are consistent with biblical
teaching." Taking aim at fashionable leftist pieties, they
declare:
Although
families, groups, and nations can sin collectively, and cultures can be
predisposed to particular sins, subsequent generations share the collective
guilt of their ancestors only if they approve and embrace (or attempt to
justify) those sins. Before God each person must repent and confess
his or her own sins in order to receive forgiveness. We further deny
that one's ethnicity establishes any necessary connection to any particular
sin.
Even
more significantly, corporate blaming obscures the real heart of the Christian
message, which is deliverance from guilt by faith in the atoning sacrifice of
Christ. In a collective orientation, rather than taking inventory of
personal moral failures and confessing real sins, many engage in
virtue-signaling about the crimes of their own social group. Others
foist responsibility for their own sins onto the members of an accused
group. For believers, exchanging personal responsibility for
corporate blaming means being robbed of cleansing of
conscience. Rather than salvation from guilt, they must then bear
the perpetual blame of the leftist worldview, which can never adequately be
atoned for by reparations or by anything else.
At a recent conference critical of the social justice
trend, Phil Johnson quipped that virtue-signaling seems to be the latest
proselytizing strategy among many evangelicals. In this time of
increasing contempt for the lives of the most vulnerable, that is dubious
virtue, indeed. To borrow the words of Jesus, woke evangelicals have
become adept at the ability to "strain out a gnat but swallow a
camel" (Matthew 23:24). Or how about simply calling it, as he
did, hypocrisy?
Bruce W. Davidson is a professor at Hokusei Gakuen University in Sapporo,
Japan and a contributor to The Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia.
