Public Theology & Christian Living

by Michael DeBow –

Introduction: Weasel Words
Christians today—regardless of the particular church they attend—are likely to have encountered the idea that the church should work toward the achievement of “social justice.” Unfortunately, this term is almost always left undefined by its champions and, in such a fuzzy form, can take the shape any person wishes to give it. Confusion as to the term’s meaning is compounded by the fact that the term is used not just by religious people, but also by people who do not belong to any religious tradition. As a result, the term has a potentially wide range of meanings—from a (basically) religious meaning to a wholly secular meaning.

The religious sense of social justice had a moment in the national media spotlight in early 2010, when conservative radio commentator Glenn Beck recommended that “if your church is promoting Jeremiah Wright-type ‘social or economic justice,’ you should run from it or at least get educated on what progressives mean by this.”¹ This advice garnered vehement condemnation from liberal church figures such as the Reverend Jim Wallis² and Dean Serene Jones of the Union Theological Seminary.³

This article will not seek to mediate the conflict between Beck and his critics as a theological matter. Rather, it will provide some concepts from the social sciences that might aid the reader in assessing the range of claims made about social justice. The first section briefly surveys the history of the concept of social justice, the second section turns to a consideration of America’s 20th century elaboration of it—our metastasizing Welfare State—and the third section offers a prediction about the future of social justice in American politics.

The article is grounded in the work of Friedrich Hayek, the 1974 Nobel laureate in economics and perhaps the most important social scientist of the 20th century.⁴ To call Hayek a social scientist is somewhat ironic, because for Hayek “social” was a “weasel word” of the first order, in the following sense: “As a weasel is alleged to be able to empty an egg without leaving a visible sign, so can these words deprive of content any term to which they are prefixed while seemingly leaving them untouched.”⁵

The reason for this linguistic phenomenon, according to Hayek, was a crucial change in the meaning of the word “social” during the period 1850-1875:

Originally “social” had of course a clear meaning . . . namely that of pertaining to, or characteristic of the structure and operations of society. In this sense justice clearly is a social phenomenon and the addition of “social” to the noun a pleonasm such as if we spoke of “social language” – though in occasional use it might have been intended to distinguish the generally prevailing views of justice from that held by particular persons or groups. But “social justice” as used today is not “social” in the sense of “social norms,” i.e., something which has developed as a practice of individual action in the course of social evolution, not a product of society or of a social process, but a conception to be imposed upon society. It was the reference of “social” to the whole of society or to the interests of all its members, which led to its gradually acquiring a predominant meaning of moral approbation.⁶

In 1988 Hayek identified 167 “nouns qualified by the adjective ‘social’” that were thereby emptied of their meaning.⁷ At the top of the list, figuratively speaking, was social justice, which he declared “a will-o’-the-wisp which has lured men to abandon many of the values which in the past have inspired the development of civilization . . . . ⁸ In the same vein, Hayek subtitled the second volume of his three-volume work, Law, Legislation and Liberty, “The Mirage of Social Justice.” Hayek’s judgment on “social justice” is severe. Let us consider if it is justified.

Etymology
The term “social justice” first appeared in the 19th century, but it had ancient religious— more specifically, Judeo-Christian—roots. Both Jewish and Christian scriptures emphasize the importance of extending charity and hospitality to those in need. Consider just one New Testament example, from the Sermon on the Mount: “Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.”⁹ In these texts Jesus seems to be addressing his followers as individuals and perhaps as voluntary members of a community of followers. He does not call for political action of any kind, let alone changes in government policy towards the poor. Such exhortations would have been out of place, to say the least, in Jesus’ time. (His society was not a democracy, and the Roman government did not operate poverty programs.) As a result, attempts to translate the Gospel’s radical charity and egalitarianism into a political agenda for our time seem fraught with difficulty.¹⁰ It is simply not obvious that the directive that Mr. A should give his cloak to Mr. X necessarily entails the directive that Mr. A should vote for Candidate B, who pledges to tax Messrs. A through T in order to provide government-issued cloaks to Messrs. U through Z. However, this article, as already noted, will simply avoid the theological questions raised by extrapolating from the Gospels a guide to political action today. Instead, the article will outline the problems that arise in using political and governmental action to pursue egalitarian ends. These problems stem precisely from treating individual and political (or “collective”) action as fundamentally similar. As we shall see, they are not.

The term “social justice” was apparently coined by an Italian Jesuit named Luigi Taparelli (1793-1862), writing in 1840.¹¹ Working in the Thomistic tradition, Taparelli and others grappled with changes in 19th century society, particularly those associated with rapid industrialization and urbanization. On this view, social justice was primarily a demand placed on Christian believers with respect to the poor—either in terms of individual charity or of support for Catholic ministries among the poor.

Social justice has now been incorporated into much of what is now known as “Catholic Social Teaching.”¹² As a result, the term “social justice” remains in widespread use within the Catholic Church. For example, clicking on the “Social Justice Issues” tab on the homepage of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops opens a drop-down menu of 27 items, ranging from “Arms Control” to “Welfare”.¹³ The inclusion of arms control as a social justice topic tells us that the term is no longer limited to individual acts of charity or simple church programs to help the poor. In fact, many items on the Bishops’ menu—including Economic Justice, Environment, Labor Issues, and Social Security—seem rather remote from charity, and involve the church in politics to a substantial degree.

The Protestant analogue to social justice came along a bit later. The idea of a “Social Gospel” was developed by a group of American theologians including Washington Gladden (Congregationalist, 1836-1918)¹⁴ and  Walter Rauschenbusch (Baptist, 1861- 1918),¹⁵ and had much in common with the Catholic idea of social justice.¹⁶ The “mainline” Protestant denominations—Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists—do not use the term Social Gospel much anymore, but all these churches put a very heavy emphasis on both charity for the poor and on left-of-center political activism. For example, among Episcopalians today, discussions of both charity for the poor and political activism (environmental causes, gay rights) take place under the label “justice issues.”

Both Catholic and Protestant believers continue to speak in terms of social justice and justice issues, and these terms today cover both charitable outreach to the poor, as well as political activism in the service of both poor relief and other agenda items that do not seem to have much to do with the poor as such – i.e., arms control, environmental issues, gay rights, etc. As a result, current usage is quite confusing. It is critical to see the difference between (1) urging individual, voluntary acts of charity towards the poor, and (2) urging political/ governmental action on behalf of the poor—or any other group (such as environmentalists or homosexuals). Under the former, individual believers (religious or otherwise) are asked to give of their own resources to the poor. Under the latter, individual believers work through the political process to force others—via taxation and other forms of government coercion—to contribute to their preferred outcomes (whether poor relief or “cap and trade” or any other “justice issue”). Of course, government coercion will work its will on citizens who do not support the policy objectives sought, and who do not share the religious beliefs that motivate such support on grounds of social justice, just as it will on citizens who do support the objectives and/or the religious beliefs. At the time of implementation, dissent is useless.

Social Justice in America? The Welfare State and Equality as an Ideal

When fed into mass democratic politics, the idea of social justice was transformed rather quickly into the quest for “distributive justice.” Friedrich Hayek explained that by 1861 John Stuart Mill explicitly treated the two terms as equivalent in such statements as that “society should treat all equally well who have deserved equally well of it, that is, who have deserved equally well absolutely. This is the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice; towards which all institutions and the efforts of all virtuous citizens should be made in the utmost degree to converge.”¹⁷

Initially, according to Hayek, the term was used to “appeal to the still-ruling classes to concern themselves more with the welfare of the much more numerous poor whose interests had not received adequate consideration.” Over time, however, a remarkable thing happened: the scope of the term expanded considerably, so that it “gradually came to mean that ‘society’ ought to hold itself responsible for the particular material position of all its members, and for assuring that each received what was ‘due’ to him.”¹⁸ That is, the focus of social or distributive justice was no longer exclusively on the poor. Rather, the quest for justice now ranged over society as a whole. This proved a fateful development, as the modern Welfare State invites everyone to consider themselves entitled to transfer payments from other taxpayers. As a simple matter of fact, most Americans do benefits from such payments—whether in the form of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, AFDC, student loans, small business loans, and so on.

Indeed, it looks as if the American median voter during the New Deal and the Great Society had mixed motives. Help the less fortunate, yes, but also promote the voter’s self-interest. At the very least, maybe he or she will need the safety net one day. More ambitiously, the transfer program may be designed to help middle-class folks (who tend to vote) in addition to (or perhaps instead of) poor people (who tend not to vote as often). For example, Obamacare’s subsidies to support the purchase of health insurance will extend to families of four with a combined income of up to 400% of the federal poverty level (or $88,000 annually). This tangled web of a desire to aid the poor, combined with a desire to use politics to confer benefits on one’s own social group whether poor or not, obviously contributed greatly to the growth of America’s Welfare State.²⁰

Thus it came to pass that in 20th century America, social justice became distributive justice—which basically came to be equated with government programs to redistribute income. Present-day American politics is dominated by the idea that, as Barack Obama explained on the campaign trail in 2008, “when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”²¹ Furthermore, to borrow from Friedrich Hayek once again, “The commitment to ‘social justice’ has in fact become the chief outlet for moral emotion, the distinguishing attribute of the good man, and the recognized sign of the possession of a moral conscience.”²²

In practice, the chief characteristic of the secular quest for social justice is that it has no limiting principle. That is, there is no obvious stopping point for egalitarianism short of complete equality of incomes and, one supposes, everything else. The problem is that a thoroughgoing egalitarianism would entail a government with nightmarishly far-reaching powers. Simply trying to imagine a regime of perfect human equality leads us in the direction of what turns out to be a quite fantastic regime of perfect equality such as that portrayed in Kurt Vonnegut’s famous short story, Harrison Bergeron,²³ which begins

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

While we have thus far been able to avoid such dystopian scenarios, a society that exalts the goal of social justice runs the risk of sooner or later resembling, to one degree or another, the Hell of C.S. Lewis’s imagination: “a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.”²⁴

By this process Americans moved from a concern for the poor to a commitment to equality that is incapable of realization and that covers everyone in society. In our political system, the possibility that politicians will make up for social justice’s lack of a limiting principle by exerting self-discipline in appealing to voters is slim indeed. Moreover, once deficit spending becomes an acceptable course of action, voters and politicians can burden future generations (who do not currently have any political power) in order to confer benefits on current voters.

2010 marks the 75th anniversary of Social Security, and the 45th anniversary of Medicare. Both programs are insolvent, with the net present value of the shortfall in the two systems at well over $100 trillion and climbing quickly.²⁵ The pressure on both programs increases every day as thousands more Baby Boomers become eligible for the benefits they have been “promised.” Obviously, America’s current set of entitlement programs are unsustainable—to borrow a currently fashionable phrase from the environmental movement.

To celebrate the anniversaries of Social Security and Medicare, our majority party saw fit to create yet another unsustainable entitlement program. Passage of Obamacare brings us closer to the day of reckoning for America’s out-of-control entitlement spending, but was justified in terms of the “justice” of providing health insurance coverage to 30-plus million Americans who currently do not have insurance and are not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid. (I assume the claims that Obamacare will lead to deficit reductions and health care cost containment were so unbelievable as not to have motivated anyone to support the legislation.) Putting aside questions of who will actually pay the costs associated with the new law (employers or employees, for example), Obamacare will tax roughly the top 5% of the income distribution to provide insurance to approximately 10% of the population, at the further cost of disrupting the existing arrangements of the remaining 90% of the population. The implementation of Obamacare is quite likely to increase the degree of intergenerational conflict in our society.²⁶

In brief, America’s experience to date demonstrates that pursuing social justice through political action generates at least six serious problems:

1 It tends to play into hands of interest groups seeking beneficial legislation and the politicians who service them, thus becoming about self-interest rather than social good. (In other words, social justice becomes a fig leaf for self-interest!)

2 It tends to overlook the negative effects of high levels of government expenditure (including transfer payments) on the private sector. As a result, larger expenditures on programs that actually combat poverty deter private sector growth and thus become counter-productive at some point. The increase in the welfare of the poor as a result of the transfer payments is more than offset by a decline in the number of jobs available to entry-level personnel, and so on. (Surely killing the goose that lays the golden eggs can’t be a justice issue!)

3 It tends to involve the creation of very large government programs and bureaucracies, which in turn tend to generate bad unintended consequences.

4 It tends to reinforce self-righteousness and intolerance. (Anyone who opposes social justice is, by definition, unjust – a bad person!)

5 It tends to coercion. (Bad people who oppose social justice need to be coerced and it is a good thing to do so!)

6 Too much social justice leads to increasing levels of social discord, as supporters and opponents become much more polarized in their beliefs, and angry at those on the other side of the political debate.

For all these reasons, it is reasonable to expect that an increasing emphasis on social justice should result in a higher level of political activity and a more divisive kind of politics being practiced.²⁸

Of course, the absence of a limiting principle to social justice-inspired transfer programs, and the absence of any real self-discipline on the part of voters and politicians do not mean that there are no limits to transfer spending. The limits will be set by at least three factors. First, American taxpayers, confronting higher and higher taxes to pay for an ever-larger set of transfers, will make new trade-offs between work and leisure. Second, higher taxes will provide a greater incentive for transactions to move into the underground economy. Third, the Federal government’s ability to print and borrow money will at some point encounter disabling resistance from lenders worldwide. The American Welfare State cannot continue to grow forever.²⁹ Clearly we’ve made collective promises to ourselves and others that we cannot and will not keep. What will the unwinding of social or distributive justice look like?

One Future for Social Justice in America: From Riga with Love
In June 2009 a photograph appeared on the internet that is almost a perfect representation of the downside of social justice I have tried to explain. Unfortunately the photo is now archived, so that I cannot provide a link to it for the reader to follow. This is unfortunate, because I think that the photo provides a good visualization about the most likely end of the road for the egalitarianism in Europe and, possibly, in the United States. The caption read, in part, “Two pensioners fight during a protest rally organized by trade unions in Riga on 18 June 2009. Thousands of Latvians rallied in the Baltic state’s capital as trade unions stepped up their battle against an austerity drive in an EU member nation trying to stave off bankruptcy.” The austerity measures included 10 percent cut in pension payments. The pensioners shown in the photo are two older women, each grabbing for the other’s throat. The viewer gathers that the ladies disagree on some aspect of Latvian social welfare policy.

Unless a large majority of Americans can overcome the notion that society as a whole “owes them” certain government-conferred benefits as a matter of social justice, then the size and scope of the Welfare State will continue to grow, the stakes of political contests will grow, and social fissures will be exacerbated. The road to social justice will have lead to a meaner, nastier politics, and we will all be tempted to behave like the two ladies in Riga.

Conclusion
It seems very likely that calls for social justice will continue to sound sweet to the ears of many, particularly younger people seeking opportunities to “make a difference” in the world.³⁰ Those attracted to this ideal would do well to keep clear the distinction between individual, voluntary acts of charity, on the one hand, and government social welfare programs on the other.

Michael DeBow is Professor of Law, Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama. Professor DeBow can be reached at medebow@samford.edu. This article is a revised and extended version of remarks he gave at a conference titled “Environmental Stewardship: A Program for Religious Leaders,” conducted by the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (“FREE”) in Big Sky, Montana, in September 2009. Professor DeBow thanks FREE and its chairman, Dr. John Baden, for the opportunity to think about and speak on this subject.

Notes

¹ Glenn Beck, What Is “Social Justice”?, Fox News (March 23, 2010) http://www.foxnews.com/ story/0,2933,589832,00.html.
²Rev. Jim Wallis, “Glenn Beck Is Wrong, Social Justice Is At The Heart of Gospel” (VIDEO), Huffington Post (March 12, 2010), http://www.huffingtonpost. com/2010/03/12/rev-jim-wallis-glennbeck_n_497715.html.
³Serene Jones, “An Open Letter to Glenn Beck: We’re Sending You Bibles!,” Huffington Post(July 19, 2010), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/serene-jones/anopen-letter-to-glenn-b_b_650604.html. For more on the reaction, see Amy Sullivan, “Why Does Glenn Beck Hate Jesus?,” Swampland (March 14, 2010), http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2010/03/14/ why-does-glenn-beck-hate-jesus/.
⁴Information on Hayek’s many contributions to economics can be found on http://nobelprize.org/ nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1974/hayek. html.
⁵Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit (1988), 116. 
⁶Friedrich Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 2: The Mirage of Social Justice (1976), 78-79 (emphasis added).
⁷Fatal Conceit, supra note 4, at 115-16.
⁸Mirage, supra note 5, at 67.
⁹Matthew 5:42 (King James Version).
¹⁰In light of the Glenn Beck controversy, it seems important to note that not all Christians who hold liberal political beliefs do so as a result of their reading of the Gospels. See, for example, Garry Wills, What Jesus Meant (2006), 51 (the “primitive communism” practiced by early Christians “was, of course, a voluntary community activity, not state socialism of any kind (Jesus had no political program)”). 
¹¹Mirage, supra note 5, at 176 n.8; Thomas C. Behr, Luigi Taparelli D’Azeglio (1793-1862) and the Development of Scholastic Natural-Law Thought As a Science of Society and Politics, 6 J. Markets & Morality 99 (2003), http://www.acton.org/ publications/mandm/mandm_article_62.php. ¹²This large body of work that may be accessed at many points on the internet, including the website of the Theology Library at Spring Hill College, http:// www.shc.edu/theolibrary/cst.htm.
¹³http://usccb.org/.
¹⁴See the biography of Washington Gladden at http://washingtongladdensociety.org/biography.html.
¹⁵Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918), http:// people.bu.edu/wwildman/bce/rauschenbusch.htm. 
¹⁶The economist Richard T. Ely is also associated with the Social Gospel, particularly through his influence on his friend, Rauschenbusch. Ely’s 1889 book, Social Aspects of Christianity and Other Essays, is available on Google Books.
¹⁷Mirage, supra note 5, at 63 & 176 n.4 (quoting John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (1861), 92). See Fatal Conceit, supra note 4, at 118 (“Thus use of the term ‘social’ becomes virtually equivalent to the call for ‘distributive justice.’”).
¹⁸Mirage, supra note 5, at 79 (emphasis added). 
¹⁹The tendency of transfer programs to benefit the middle class was recognized early on by Aaron Director. See George J. Stigler, Director’s Law of Public Income Redistribution, 13 J.L. & Econ. 1 (1970).
²⁰I use the term Welfare State reluctantly, since I would rather not concede that government programs actually improves the welfare of citizens. Other more descriptive terms include Redistributive State and Transfer State, but these are less well-known terms, alas. See Terry L. Anderson & Peter J. Hill, The Birth of a Transfer Society (1980).
²¹The quote and its context is available on many websites, including Jake Tapper’s “Political Punch” blog for ABC News, http://blogs.abcnews.com/ politicalpunch/2008/10/spread-the-weal.html. 
²²Mirage, supra note 5, at 66.
²³Kurt Vonnegut, “Harrison Bergeron” was published in 1961 and reprinted in the 1968 title, Welcome to the Monkey House. A short film based on it was released under the title “2081” in 2009; its website is http://www.finallyequal.com/. The site contains a two-minute video trailer which jarringly conveys Vonnegut’s vision.
²⁴C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1960), ix (emphasis added).
²⁵This means that the government would need to invest $100 trillion right now in order for its income to be sufficient to pay all the future benefits promised under these entitlement programs as currently defined. $100 trillion is roughly 5.5 times the size of the entire U.S. gross domestic product for 2008. For details of this gargantuan unfunded liability, see the annual reports of the Trustees of the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds on http://www.ssa.gov/ OACT/TR/. See also the analyses in Jagadeesh Gokhale, Social Security: A Fresh Look at the Alternatives (2010); and Laurence J. Kotlikoff & Scott Burns, The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know About America’s Economic Future (2004).
²⁶See Janet Adamy, “Health Law Augurs Transfer Of Funds From Old to Young,” Wall Street Journal, July 26, 2010, p. A1, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1 0001424052748703340904575285002595068 326.html.
²⁷See the work of Charles Murray, including his Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 (1984).
²⁸Making this prediction brought to mind a widely quoted quip of a noted legal historian that “The worse the society, the more law there will be. In Hell there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed.” Grant Gilmore, The Ages of American Law (1977), 111. I would change the second sentence to read “In Hell there will be nothing but government, and social justice will be zealously pursued.”
²⁹If you doubt this, spend a minute or two watching http://www.usdebtclock.org/, and try to convince yourself this can go on indefinitely.
³⁰Readers interested in further investigating this subject – particularly younger readers – should visit the Heritage Foundation’s new “Seek Social Justice” website at http://www.seeksocialjustice.com. Also recommended: Jay Richards, Money, Greed and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem (2009).

For Further Study

Questions for Debow’s, “Social Justice: Reasons for Skepticism” 

1. What are “weasel words”? How has the word “social” become a weasel word?

2. What do we learn and not learn from Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:42?

3. What was the original use of the term “social justice”? How has it come to be used today?

4. What is meant by “distributive justice”? Does DeBow think it is just? Why?

5. What is the chief characteristic of the secular quest for social justice? What is the problem with this?

6. What are the six problems generated by the quest for social justice? How serious are these issues?

(First published in Areopagus Journal in Vol. 10 No. 3 – What is Social Justice?)