In the Christian obsessed with “social justice” it isn’t easy to discern whether charity is flourishing or faith is expiring. Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Glenn Beck is being criticized for telling folks to leave churches in which “social justice” is casually mentioned as a tenet or principle of the faith. News Hounds says that Progressive and Conservative religious groups are upset with Beck.

Beck is a very religious person. He talks a lot about God and Jesus on his show. The problem here, seems to be an assumption and a misunderstanding.

The assumption:

Beck has also done a lot of reading. He’s read modern and historical documents which outline Progressivism, the cancer of American politics. Anyone who has done this or similar reading, or knows the ins and outs of Progressivism, is well aware that “Social Justice” is a term used pretty much synonymously with “Socialism.”

For example, here’s a taste of how the Green Party of Canada construes ’social justice’ (I’ll embolden key points):

We assert that the key to social justice is the equitable distribution of social and natural resources, both locally and globally, to meet basic human needs unconditionally, and to ensure that all citizens have full opportunities for personal and social development.

…

This requires:

a just organization of the world and a stable world economy which will close the widening gap between rich and poor, both within and between countries; balance the flow of resources from South to North; and lift the burden of debt on poor countries which prevents their development.

In other words, ’social justice,’ here stands for redistribution of wealth under the guise of protecting the environment.

Wiki describes ’social justice’ as

a concept that some use to describe the movement towards a socially just world. In this context, social justice is based on the concepts of human rights and equality and involves a greater degree of economic egalitarianism through progressive taxation, income redistribution, or even property redistribution, policies aimed toward achieving that which developmental economists refer to as more equality of opportunity and equality of outcome than may currently exist in some societies or are available to some classes in a given society.

In other words, ’social justice,’ here, is one of the key components of Progressivism.

Beck is very excitable and often things spring from his mouth that are factually inaccurate or could be construed as such. But that is not the case here. Beck merely assumes that the sense in which he uses ’social justice’ is understood by the constant warnings he gives about Progressives and Socialists on his show. I think this is a reasonable assumption.

But there is also a misunderstanding.

Consider this, from Restoring Social Justice:

We’re troubled by the extent of social breakdown today.

We’re troubled by how it afflicts individual lives and how it affects our society in general.

We’re troubled by the fact that a teenage boy going to school in one of our major cities may learn more about a life of delinquency than he does about a future filled with hope and opportunity.

We’re troubled that four out of 10 children and nearly seven out of 10 black children in America are born to unmarried mothers, a fact that will cast a long shadow down the course of a child’s life.

We’re also troubled by welfare state responses to problems like these. It’s not only that welfare state responses discourage independence and self-sufficiency and that costly programs have proven ineffective at stopping social breakdown. We’re also troubled because some of these approaches actually make people and society worse in the process. Welfare state programs have sometimes hurt the very people they were intended to help.

This group is using the same term, ’social justice,’ not as a means of promoting Big national and, indeed, global Government, but as a the goal which a free society can achieve without becoming a welfare state.

Concerning religion, you have to determine whether or not the ’social justice’ your religious institution advocates resembles that of the former examples or that of the latter example.

Cross-posted at my blog