Hidden Foundations for Seeking Justice (part 1)
Over the last month we’ve seen a dramatic shift in our national conversation around racism and justice. Online, in print, and on the streets, coalitions of women and men across ethnic, demographic, religious, and even political lines are taking up the call to work for racial justice. This is good. Christians can and should engage in marches, share articles, sign petitions, and raise our individual and collective voices for a better world. We can and should engage in principled debate around key issues.
And yet… with so much of our default engagement leaning toward speaking, acting, demanding, challenging, or arguing, we miss a deeper and more foundational work. Justice is what we do with our relationships, resources, and responsibilities, not just what we demand others do. While there is a place for dramatic confrontation and deconstruction, the pursuit of justice requires personal, relational and systemic stability, creativity, and connection. When the pursuit of justice is unmoored from constructive activity the most likely outcome is communities retreating into their own groups violently opposed to one another. When the pursuit of justice is focused on what we say or how we say it, our activism is likely to be performative rather than substantial.
Here are 3 crucial, if non-cathartic, foundations for Christians seeking to do justice. Intentionally practicing these disciplines will develop our character and capacity to pursue justice in a spiritually and emotionally healthy way.
1. Practice Listening – In a world anxious to say the right thing and to be seen saying the right thing, we desperately need to practice listening. What happens when we’re in a conversation passionately sharing your ideas, but no one is really listening? We tend to repeat ourselves and get louder. Or, if we’re less self-aware, we can feel really good about the thing we said, because we said it. In either case no real communication is happening.
The book of James, a book both confrontational and combative when it comes to seeking justice in love, exhorts readers, “You must understand this, my beloved: let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; 20 for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness.”
We practice listening when we ask; can you say more… what do you most want me to remember… what’s most important to you…Listening well enables us to connect and communicate. This is vital in a context where much of what is considered communication can be better described as communities shouting slogans to one another.
2. Participate in Worship – Justice is a way of talking about goodness, which, together with truth and beauty, are the transcendentals of classical thought. For centuries, our minds have been drawn to wonder and contemplation in relation to goodness, truth, and beauty. This is good when contemplation of these virtues leads us to wonder, joy, and praise in the contemplation of our triune God of grace. When we are not drawn to worship God, but become enamored of beauty itself, goodness itself, or truth itself we are often disappointed. I’ve seen students pursue beauty and become perfectionistic and joyless.
This came home to me personally when, earlier in ministry, several people I closely mentored in faith abandoned their Christian commitments. I taught these young people to love justice and to think critically, (they still do both of these things). I sat heartbroken as dear friends used their passion for justice to cause them to become increasingly distant from the church and then from a life with God.
Worship together in a local community focuses our attention on the beauty and goodness of the one true God. As we remember who God is and what God has done, in Jesus, by his Spirit, we are liberated to work for justice without worshipping our ideas about justice.
We worship when we connect with other people (even online) and remind ourselves of who God is and what God has done. I love the words of former bishop William Temple, “To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God.”
3. Learn Systems Thinking – Too many conversations about justice and racism dead end because we have not learned to be good systems thinkers. Most of us are adept at understanding relationships. We conceive of justice and fairness in relational terms. This is good. But, understanding the attitudes and values that influence personal relationships is a very limited way of understanding things like racial justice. We can agree it’s not good to treat people with suspicion, fear, superiority or prejudice, and even work to eliminate these in our own hearts, without even beginning to engage the challenges that create the context for those tendencies to exist in the first place.
A slogan like, “Black Lives Matter,” is an example of group thinking. Understanding group dynamics, including the distribution of resources, perspectives, and power is helpful. Strategies that have been born out of group identities have been effective at creating social change. But, like the relational thinking above, group identity is a limited way of understanding racism or justice.
Systems thinking is the practiced ability to see a whole interconnected set of resources, relationships, and responsibilities and appreciate how the actions of one part impact another. Racism is a systems problem, not just a relationships or group problem. You remove White people and still have racism because people have been socialized. Interventions at the relational or group level, even if they are successful, may not address or impact the larger system. There is nothing cathartic, or immediately gratifying, in learning systems thinking skills. It’s a bit like learning a foreign language, or like practicing formal logic. But unless we disciple ourselves to think in systems our justice efforts are likely to stall at the relational or group level.
Listening, worship, and systems thinking are hidden foundational disciplines. On their own they will not lead to meaningful change, healthy relationships between racial groups, or greater accountability in the face of injustice. However, they do have the ability to shape us into the kind of people who pursue justice, not because of the burning intensity of a moment, or by being carried along by the energy of a movement, but with the integrity of a life hidden in Christ. And then the justice we seek truly becomes possible because we have the character and capacity to embody what we long for. (Colossians 3:3)
Look out for next week’s Hidden Foundations for Seeking Justice. (part 2)