When the US decided to recently separate immigrant children from their parents, the world lost it’s mind, and so many Christians responded to the outrage with more outrage. “We are a nation of laws,” folks from my camp said, “These people dragged their children into this, it’s their fault, not ours.”
Simply stated, according to every child psychologist I’m familiar with, we caused a mountain of PTSD to a near generation of children. When kids are separated like this, and begin to wonder if they’ll see their parents again, it causes a “break” in their sense of safety, their understanding of the world, and their confidence in humanity.
Some kids didn’t recognize their parents when they were reunited.
In the name of “law,” “sovereignty,” and “authority” we perpetrated an injustice against children. And all God’s people said “hell yeah.”
In general, anytime someone outside of our camp cries “injustice!!” we turn a blind eye. Black Lives Matter advocates are terrorists, regardless of the legion of statistics that all but prove that our system is rigged in favor of whites. The US has the second highest child poverty rate in the developed world, which should outrage us.
But we have bigger fish to fry.
A Brief History of How We Got Here
Long ago, social justice, i.e., taking care of the poor, marginalized, and mistreated was big on our radar – it wasn’t seen as some Godless, pagan agenda. But around the early 70’s an interesting cultural shift happened. The hippies and Catholics were all about social justice, and for myriad reasons we felt the need to distinguish ourselves. We also felt strongly that the pro-social justice groups didn’t care much about the Bible and didn’t understand our God.
Enter the Bible movement, one of the most fascinating cultural shifts in church history. Continue reading Why Are Christians Afraid of Social Justice?
