Glenn Beck vs. Christian "Social Justice"

Glenn Beck has devoted time recently on his Fox News show to attacking Christian pastors preaching advocacy for "social justice," likening it to Marxism, Communism and Nazism. Pastor Jim Wallis of Sojourners answers.

I felt it necessary to respond when I heard that a Fox News personality had attacked the heart of the mission statement of Sojourners: “to articulate the biblical call to social justice.” He only attacked me when I challenged his misrepresentations and distortions of a central Christian teaching that is integral to biblical faith.

If Beck had merely attacked “big government” again, as he does each night...it wouldn’t have been news. But what he did say, and continues to say, is that “social justice” is both a dangerous and destructive teaching. The term continues to be derided on his famous blackboard, along with whoever challenges his ideas.

While I have agreed that the cause of social justice has sometimes been politicized for ideological purposes by both Left and Right, I continue to defend the term itself as biblical and at the center of church teachings across the centuries and our many traditions (including Beck’s own Mormon Church, as many of its leaders have pointed out). And I have been heartened to see Christians of diverse political views and voting patterns rise to defend the integrity of social justice as core to the gospel.

Bravo. The logic behind the marriage of Christian teachings and right-wing politics continues to escape me. How can we reconcile policies of pre-emptive war, torture and tax cuts for the wealthy with the teachings of Christ? The 9th commandment forbidding "bearing false witness against thy neighbor" and Beck's rather elastic relationship with the truth (according to Politifact.com)?

The answer, of course, is that it isn't about logic for politically conservative Christian fundamentalists. As Andrew Sullivan points out in his book The Conservative Soul, it is about the psychological comfort found in rigid, punitive, patriarchal certitude in the face of profound cultural, technological and economic upheaval. Karen Armstrong makes a similar argument about the rise of religious fundamentalism throughout history in the Christian, Jewish and Islamic faiths in The Battle for God. Both describe how fundamentalists misrepresent a complex, nuanced text like the Bible as a simplistic set of prescriptions that somehow finds them blameless and those who disagree not only mistaken but immoral. This comes frighteningly close to idolatry, which the second commandment takes a dim view of.

--Ballard Burgher