Justice and the Christian - Part 2

This is part 2 of a series of justice and Christianity.


In the last article I talked about a protest movement called "the 99 percent" that's finds its ground zero in the geographical epicentre of a corrupt, greedy, capitalist system: Wall Street. The name refers to the 99% of people who share a proportionately smaller amount of wealth than the top 1%. So, being the vast majority of the human populace, there are obviously quite a large number of Christians among them.

And what exactly are they doing about it? Well, it could be anything really.

The ideas of ethics, inalienable rights, fairness, justice and responsibilities owe so much to the foundations of Christian thought. It's difficult to argue for human rights without grounding them in something outside ourselves. So it's no surprise then that Christians are often amongst the forefront of social justice.

In fact, Christians have been involved in social justice in at least two significant movements within the past century. One of those saw the rise of liberation theology in Latin America through the middle of the 20th century. It arose mainly as a response to the growing injustices against the poor in that region, arguably similar to the movement we're seeing today.

Liberation theology, although frowned upon by the Vatican, was mainly a Roman Catholic response. The 99%, on the other hand, seeks to involve anyone earning less than the top 1% of the world's earners. But if the occupy Toronto movement is indicative of the movement at large, it's far less monolithic than liberation theology.  The protests were not simply against the growing economic hardships of the middle and lower class, but against wars, the prohibition of drugs, gay marriage, and even bad grammar. One sign read, "Emancipation proclation." I think he meant "proclamation." With no clear message it's difficult to see whether there's really a message at all.

If I could see one thing, however, something that is both implicit and occasionally explicit, is the growing marxist interpretations of the societal problems, and that has definite similarities to the liberation theology movement in Latin America. For them, cooperation, not competition, is the only way to bridge the gap between the rich and poor, to promote justice and dignity for the individual, and opportunity and fairness for all.

To be perfectly fair, nowhere does Jesus, or anyone else in the Bible for that matter, give us a blueprint for political and economic systems. Neither marxism nor free-market capitalism bears God's proverbial stamp of approval. But that's not to say there haven't been forms of either one that have been influenced, at least in some part, by Christian thought. Christian socialist parties continue to exert influence throughout the world as well as more right-of-centre parties. Churches in America have congregations where both Republicans and Democrats in good conscience sit next to each other in the pew, sharing the same cup and loaf in the supper.

Marxism will not be the saviour to those whose misfortune has been blamed by greedy capitalism. Nor is  capitalism the beacon of freedom for those under the tyrannical rule of a communist government. But whatever sort of society you find yourself, good theology forces you to think seriously about how you relate to your neighbour and how you can positively influence the world around you. People like Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King Jr., William Wilberforce, and Abraham Kuyper probably all had differing ideas on political and economic systems. But each of them, driven by their theology, brought about significant change.

More on this later...