Wednesday, September 22, 2010

What the "Gospel of social justice" means or, if you don't like my Marxist theology I'm going to call you a racist.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, "The gospel of social justice", or what many call "Liberation Theology".
I've heard noise about "Social Justice" quite a bit recently mostly I think because we have a president that was a community organizer in Chicago before he became a Senator, and those that elected him president believe in the same type of "Gospel" that the presidents former pastor of decades Jeremiah Wright preaches.
"Liberation Theology" is a thelogical belief that we, as christians must work to free the poor, the oppressed, the underpriveledged, and anyone that claims to be disadvantaged or in an oppressed minority to rise up and resist, even to the point of using violence if necessary to set the captives free.
Any Christian worth his "salt" (sorry), believes that oppressed groups or the widow and orphan should be helped and brought closer to mainstream society's economic level.
Where most evangelical christians disagree with those who preach "social justice" is how we lift up the poor and disadvantaged. Liberation Theologians like Jeremiah Wright and possibly his former congregant, our current president, think that the "Game" is fixed so that the disadvantaged cannot rise up to the same economic level as mainstream America and so we must realign the social construct to help the disadvantaged.
Another way of putting this is "Wealth distribution", changing the game so that in the liberation theologians way of doing things wealth is taken from the wealthier members of society, large corporations, those that have done well in business or investing and redistribute the wealth to even things out some. The problem with this line of theological thinking is that in redistributing wealth you start taking freedoms away from people, freedom to start a business because there's too many taxes, freedom to raise capital because you know that the govt. looks down on such entrepernurial thinking, freedom to disagree with those that redistribute wealth (government) because they are powerful.
And who is to decide how the wealth is redistributed?, who makes those decisions?, surely it's not the voting population but an elite group of people in the government and thus you have classic Marxism, or communism.
A musician friend of mine started debating with me on a social networking site saying that "Well, the christian thing to do is to help the poor, and if I'm guilty of that, so be it". My argument was not that we should not help the poor, but how we do that. My friend believes like many marxist Liberation theologians that we must redistribute wealth through taxes on the middle class and wealthy and fund programs for the poor and needy. I believe that we definitely need to help the poor and needy but I choose to do it by donating through charities of my choosing, playing music for an inner city ministry (most of the time for no pay), and donating time and money in an unseen way ( do not do your works before men as the religious hypocrites do). This debate with my musician friend brought to the surface the difference between Americans that seek to help the widow and orphan, but are miles apart about how to do it.
In the words of one of my favorite columnists, Thomas Sowell. "Liberals have no problem with people that violate the standards of the society at large, but crack down on those that dare to violate liberals own inklings and fetishes". In other words, people that like to redistribute wealth are usually uber control freaks that don't like it that some have acheived success through hard work.
Remember, I'm just the sax player...

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