The Social Justice Two Step

The Social Justice Two-Step and How It Works

Hey guys, it's some more car sessions by the beach. I'm sitting out here. My wife is at the beach. I'm in Southern California visiting family and decided I would do a few podcasts. Here's one of them.

Very quick thought for you, but I think a really important one. And I'm calling it the Social Justice Two-Step because I was reading a book by Lisa Sharon Harper. She's a rising star in, I guess you could call it the Christian social justice movement, I don't know.

And anyway, she has a section in the book. There's so much false teaching in this book, but there's one section in particular that made me realize, okay, this is the kind of thing I've heard so often.

And it's really so simple. And so I just wanted to share with you how social justice advocates force their fusion of Neo-Marxism critical theory, liberation theology and evangelicalism generally onto evangelical Christians.

And it's two things. It's listening, number one, and lamenting, number two. And those are the words they generally use. You need to listen, you need to lament. So two L's, we can remember that. And I call it the Social Justice Two-Step.

And here's the reason. It's all they need to do, if they can get you to do those two things, to start the process of converting you into a social justice advocate like them. And it's kind of deceptive because the listen isn't really listening and the lament is more, it's more than lament.

It's more than listening, it's more than lamenting, but those are the words that they use. So kind of like a Trojan horse or a Motten Bailey, they're, hey, there's no harm in listening, right? And you think, well, yeah, of course there's not.

Well, there's no harm in lamenting, right? Okay, you're not doing anything. Well, for those who want to stay away from reparations or some of the, you know, just more crazy and just outlandish things that social justice advocates want to push, they will be told, they're kind of approached with baby steps.

They will be told, well, just listen then. And packed within this word listen is giving up your critical thinking, letting someone else do the thinking for you because they're the experts, because they have oppression and they know more or because they're sociologists and they've studied the issue, whatever it is, they're the experts and you need to listen to them.

You need to submit to them. Let them do the thinking for you. It's time for you to turn off your critical faculties. You're not, it's none of your business to evaluate what they're going to tell you. You just need to imbibe it.

You need to digest it. You need to, you need to swallow it. It's yours now. And you don't have a right to think about this issue. So you're giving up something very important, which is your critical faculty.

And you're starting out by admitting that you are not capable of thinking through some issue of justice, some issue related to justice. And so you need these other perspectives. And once that first step is accomplished, the second step isn't very hard.

Lament as Repentance, Penance, and Social Guilt

Second step is lament. So someone else is doing the thinking for you, a social class, a representative of a social class, self-proclaimed representative more often, an expert of some kind in sociology or some academic field.

And once you submit to them and that they can interpret the Bible for you, they can tell you what justice really is, they know more about the situation than you, you're just so limited and you'll never know.

So you need to rely on their wisdom. Then you lament because it turns out in the story that they weave for you, you're guilty somehow. Or someone else is guilty, but you're somehow complicit because of A, B, or C, or you just didn't realize.

And that even not realizing all the injustice around you was some form of complicity at the very least. I mean, you'll even hear ethnic minorities say things like, I just didn't realize. And for that, I'm even guilty in this.

I'm guilty of whiteness, right? And so the lamenting is to then basically, it's a form of repentance generally. There's penance usually involved. This is where you end up having to, this is where the reparations are snuck in and those kinds of things.

But it's not just that, it's usually more tame. It's usually a redistribution of privilege, so-called. Position, influence, money in other ways. Giving to certain causes, voting a certain way. All these kinds of things.

That's part of your lamenting. That's part of your repentance. And of course, the more white you are, the more male, the more heterosexual, the more that you have to lament, the more you have to repent of.

And so it's more than just feeling sorry that something happened. It's taking a sense of responsibility for it. So number one, listen, right? Don't take responsibility for the information that you're about to adopt.

Let someone else do all the thinking for you. Number two, lament, take responsibility for the horrible things that you were just told in your listening session. And it's very similar. I was just reading a biography of Mao Tse Tung.

This is kind of like what struggle sessions were all about. Honestly, if you read the struggle session, read what happened during struggle sessions, it's kind of the same kind of thing, which is really scary.

It's the kind of thing that's actually happened in a lot of totalitarian regimes. And you must admit generally that the state is correct and you are wrong and submit to the state. The state becomes God.

And you are ascribing in the social justice movement today, a God-like status to certain ethnicities and their thinking. Really, it's what sociologists say about certain ethnicities. So that's the two-step.

That's the social justice two-step. And I thought that that was a helpful thing, hopefully for you. And you'll start to recognize it now everywhere. And it's so simple. You can remember that. You can remember, listen, and lament.

And then realize when you hear those buzzwords that, oh no, what's coming? Are they gonna try to demean my critical faculty so I can't really analyze this rationally? Are they going to then say that someone else is superior because of their oppression and I just need to submit to the narrative that that person's gonna give me?

Are they, I mean, that's the postmodern element, right? And then the lament part, that's the Marxism element of it. And then are they going to make me bear the weight of some kind of social sin and then look for remedies to this sin, to get the guilt off of me?

And so you're bearing the weight of this guilt that's not your own. And that's what social justice warriors want. They want you to bear guilt that's not your own. And there's so much freedom in Christianity when there is a real guilt that is our own, but Jesus took it on the cross.

And if we repent of our sins, put our trust in him, he promises to put us back into a right relationship with God, give us a new heart in the Holy Spirit. That's a better deal, guys. So wanted to just share that with you.

Hope it's helpful. God bless. Until next time.