Social Justice Goes to Church Book Trailer

The Rise of Social Justice Language in Evangelical Churches

If you're like most Christians in 2020, you were living a normal life, going to church, and all of a sudden, terms like critical race theory, intersectionality, social justice, white privilege, white fragility, things you had never heard before became part of the vocabulary you heard at your church or your missions organization or your denomination.

I've heard these words for a few years now in seminary and then in Christian institutions, and I wanted to know how in the world did the social justice movement, a neo-Marxist movement with a different gospel, it's a gospel of grievance, not a gospel of grace, how did this get in to the evangelical church?

So I started doing some research, and what I found was quite interesting. Evangelical social justice warriors from the 1970s like Richard Mao and Ron Sider and Jim Wallace and others were raised in conservative evangelical homes and ended up picking up ideas in high school and college that were social justice driven.

At that time, the term used was the new left. They picked up new left ideas, neo-Marxist ideas, and they brought them back into their churches, and they made a lot of headway, especially with the Chicago Declaration of 1973 and the Lausanne Covenant in 1974, and then something happened.

Jimmy Carter, the Religious Right, and the Hidden Evangelical Left

Jimmy Carter became president, and because of the failure of Jimmy Carter's presidency with evangelicals especially, a populist movement called the Religious Right rose in American society, and the media covered it, and they made great political gains, and you never heard about the evangelical left, but they were still working.

They were still working behind the scenes in academic circles in places that you may not have been familiar with in your normal everyday life. Well, we are familiar now because this movement is affecting our normal everyday life.

We hear the terminology. We hear it coming out of the mouths of even pastors that we once respected, and people like Ron Sider and Richard Mao and Jim Wallace have influenced a new generation of evangelicals.

People like Tim Keller and David Platt and Russell Moore and others have picked up these ideas, but they didn't just pick up these ideas from neo-Marxists in the secular world. They also picked them up from the original progressive evangelicals, and so for me this has been a very beneficial study, and I think it will be a beneficial study for you in trying to understand why in the world did neo-Marxism come into the church?

The Logic Behind the False Social Justice Gospel

What kind of logic was used to justify this false social justice gospel? I explain it. I show you the history of it. The book comes out October 6th. It's called Social Justice Goes to Church, the New Left in Modern American Evangelicalism, and I hope it blesses you as much as researching and writing it has blessed me.

You can order it there or pre-order now. God bless. Thank you for watching.