A young brother and sister walk home from their elementary school playground to spend another long evening alone. A homeless man stops university students on their way to class to ask them for twenty-five cents for a heart operation. A single mom puts her toddler in the back seat to go get a payday loan at 500% annual interest to pay the rent.
Social justice. It's a loaded term that should pull some sort of response from each of us. Is that a not-so-subtle guilt trip I'm laying? I guess it is. There are hundreds of ways to care, but zero exceptions to the fact that we should.
And then our values, what we consider right and wrong, mix in hundreds more ways with how we feel communities, churches and governments should respond to the overwhelming need. I want to encourage that conversation. Even though we disagree and have approaches as different as night and day, we need to continue to talk, and to care.
This email dropped into my box today from Focus on the Family's CitizenLink. Good hearts across the political spectrum would have to agree, in my opinion, that Ryan Messmore's group is trying to care. I'd love to hear whether you believe they're making a positive difference. For the record, I think they are.
I've highlighted a few quips in blue if you want a condensed read. Then there are a number of helpful links at the articles original site if you want to link over there.
Ryan Messmore, the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and a Free Society at The Heritage Foundation, is dedicated to examining how religious charity affects public policy – and politics.
Messmore challenges the liberal vision of “social justice,” which says that government is the solution for all societal ails. And, his efforts are helping reframe the public debate – and change hearts and minds in the process.
1. The Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center is focused on bringing attention to real social justice. What does it look like, and what have you learned?
Our focus in the DeVos Center is to help shine the light on the good work that faith –and faith communities – can play in meeting social challenges.
We’re trying to make a positive argument that religious faith and local congregations have a positive role to play in the fabric of our social order. They can tackle some of the large challenges that we often turn to government to meet.
For the past two years, I’ve been working on a project on this whole conversation surrounding social justice.
A lot of young people today have a passion to help people in need. But, oftentimes they try to pursue approaches that end up doing more harm than good.
What we’re trying to do is take that good passion and steer it in a way that really brings effective help to the people who need it.
So, we’re looking at: What really works to bring people out of poverty? What really works to help people get employed and hold down a job, so that they can provide for their family?
What we have learned are many of the principles that make ministries and churches so effective in those sorts of arenas –in helping people out of situations of need, getting their feet on the ground and helping them to thrive as humans.
2. You mentioned that millennials sometimes approach social justice in a way that can cause more harm than good. Would you give us an example?
A lot that is being told to college students and young people today – who are passionate about serving people in need – is a narrative about:
- The “inequality” between the rich and the poor,
- To care for somebody who is poor is to figure out how to redistribute money from those who have it to those who don’t,
- The government is the means that is often presented as the most effective way to do that.
A lot of young people that I’ve talked to have gained the sense that to care about those in poverty – and from a position of faith – means I need to advocate for government redistribution of wealth. They equate serving people in need with almost a Marxist approach to economics, using the government as the main mechanism.
We’re trying to tell a different narrative of helping people: Human beings, who are made in the image of God and were created to thrive in certain relationships – first and foremost with their Creator God; but also their relationship with their family, their neighbors, their church and the physical environment around them.
So, if we’re serious about caring for people, we need to care about the relationships that they’re thriving in – or the relationships that are broken.
We feel that the best way to restore broken relationships is through face-to-face interaction –the types of relationships that are fostered through families, churches, and nonprofit organizations, rather than impersonal government.
We’re trying to help young people, who are interested in serving people in need, look toward smaller, local institutions to tackle some of those bigger problems, because they can do so through a more relational approach.
3. So what you’re basically doing is taking a very real and present public policy concern and making it both personal and biblical. Are there resources that help communicate this approach to social justice?
About a year ago, we came out with a resource called “Seek Social Justice: Transforming Lives In Need.” This is a six-week DVD, workbook and small group study guide.
The idea is a small group – at a church or a Bible study or a dorm study – would sit down and work through this guide. It’s six DVD lessons, each about 15 minutes long. The stories are of people who were in real situations of need: poverty, addiction and imprisonment.
It’s narrative-driven. We even have a story of a girl who was trafficked into the country and made to live as a slave in the garage of a gated community in Orange County, Calif.
These people tell us, in their own words:
- How they were helped out of their situation.
- What was the approach that really worked?
- What was effective, not just in theory, but brought them out of that situation of need?
Then, we provide a workbook with discussion questions to get the group who is watching this DVD to talk about what they saw. What worked? Could this work in our town and on our campus? If so, what would that look like?
Too often, what we found is that so many approaches taken out of good intentions end up actually having a negative impact on the very people they were trying to help; and this is counter to that.
We’ve been overwhelmed with the response. This is the first of this genre of resource that we’ve put our efforts into. We didn’t know how it would go over or who would be interested. But, we’ve found such a need for it.
We’ve really found a welcome audience for our material among young people, college campuses, professors, churches and small groups. It’s even been used in high school courses, as well as home-school environments.
Professors have come to us and said, “Our students are so interested in this topic of social justice, but we haven’t found anything yet that we’ve felt comfortable recommending as reading. Thank you for this product. Now we can assign it in our classroom.”
4. There appears to be an unspoken disconnect between the pro-family generation and that of the social justice. What’s the best way to bridge that divide?
There is such a divide these days. The narratives that are being told today are that on one side there is family values and a certain narrow range of issues that fall within that.
On the other side, there’s something hard and concrete –social justice – that deals with financial and unemployment issues.
And, “never the two shall meet.”
What we’re trying to do is:
- Help people look at examples that work, and what lies at the heart of those approaches.
What we’ve found is that the people that have been most effective at dealing with financial problems, drug addiction, unemployment, and prison are usually ministries that come out of a faith-based vision of who the human being is (made in the image of God), and their own sense of responsibility to care and to love those people.
- Change the way people talk about those issues.
So often, the language we use already brings with it these categories that we’re fighting so hard to get out of. We’re trying to talk about justice in terms of right relationships, which biblically is what justice is boiled down to.Justice has to do with treating God –and others and the rest of creation – in the way that God intended when He created all of us.
We feel that if we can get people to think and talk about it in terms of relationships, then it will be much more apparent the good that can be done through families, local neighborhood organizations, churches, and small groups.
All of a sudden they have a large and effective role to play in tackling justice issues.
One of our efforts is to go to different conferences where there are young people who are trying to figure out how to apply their faith to all of life – conferences that focus on social justice or on responding to these large social challenges. We’ve presented the resources there and given workshops.
At a Campus Crusade for Christ workshop, I was in a room that was designated by the fire marshal to seat about 65 students. So, we put in the program bulletin that we were offering a workshop on how to think through this issue, how to help people in need, and how to serve others. We had a 135 students come! They were sitting on the window sill and they were sitting on the floor.
They were hungry to hear a biblically informed vision of an effective approach to human need.
5. What’s next on the horizon?
We do have a lot of video clips lying on the cutting room floor, and we’ve a lot of other stories to tell.
But, right now we’re focused on getting the word out about this vision “Seek Social Justice” right now.
We’re looking at creative ways to get this vision –this way of thinking, this way of speaking – into the hands, the minds, and the mouths of young people who could benefit from it.
We’re always looking to build new relationships.
What are other organizations out there that young people are going to for their ideas and information?
Somehow, we hope to partner with those organizations so that we can be more effective in presenting our message to that audience.
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