That word “justice” seems to have drawn them to it. With some people it has a mesmerizing quality. Tell them that justice requires this or that, and they rush to do it without further thought. There is such a desperation to be “on the right side of history” or “part of something bigger than oneself,” such a poverty of meaning and purpose with so many people that they rush headlong into any movement that purports to offer it.

I said previously that it is advantageous for believers to publicly “compare notes,” as it were; that is, to write from experience rather than in typical polemic or authoritative fashion. That idea admits of recurrent action, and so consider this article to be in the same vein. In my sundry scribblings at this outlet I have labored mightily, if inconsistently and perhaps incompetently, to prevent politics from having a prominent place.

That has been difficult, for politicization is a mark of the present climate of opinion. Temporal concerns are constantly invading Christian forums and demanding the attention of Christian people and of the church as institution. Sometimes this has an overtly partisan aspect, as in the many professing evangelicals who have stumped for the current president, or in the vastly fewer who have done so on behalf of his electoral opponents. Often, however, the invasion has been less straightforward, and those involved have either been less scrupulous (if responsible for the intrusion) or less aware of what is going on (if they have gone along with it). Nonchristian ideas have been put forth with such force, frequency, and guile that many professing Christians tacitly assume that they are part and parcel of the Christian faith, and even suspect or disparage those that disagree of being poor Christians—or none at all.

Justice is the watchword of many people at present, and it is bandied about thoughtlessly on behalf of so many different and even contradictory ideas that I have nearly tired of hearing it. We are all the time hearing about justice being applied to questions of economics that are not moral in character. I remember when the local school board proposed to consolidate two elementary schools in the county seat (population ~15,000) in the post-2008 era when unemployment was over 10 percent and the schools were sorely short of funds. Many locals were enraged and regarded it as a moral matter of utmost importance, an opinion I discovered in a meeting of pastors. It’s understandable that people would prefer having a local school and the relevant teachers not being laid off, but when the schools have a multi-million dollar shortage and the students in question are all going to be funneled through a single middle school and a single high school anyway, it’s hard to see how Christian duty requires one to be up in arms. Being broke due to a recession is an economic matter, not a moral or spiritual one.

Or again, people are up in arms now about housing justice, by which they mean a program of reform intended to alter current housing laws. Some of these are understandable concerns that invite review and possible action. How long should a past eviction remain on your record, for example? But some of it is unwise or actually wrong, as when people say housing is a right and wish to make it much harder to evict someone. Much of it is an affront to the rights of property and carries with it the notion that tenants have absolute claims on their landlords’ property (as the ability to get far behind on rent without being evicted). The Christian faith has terms for the act of desiring someone else’s property as though it were one’s own and for failing to meet one’s obligations under a mutually agreed contract. The former is covetousness and the latter is a species of dishonesty, all the more if one entered a contract knowing he would be unable or unwilling to meet it.

My own reading in economics and observations on civil affairs have led me to the conclusion that there are few better ways to make something scarce and expensive than to declare it a right, especially when “right” means ‘something other people are required to give you.’ But that question of economics notwithstanding, my point is only that Christian people are going along with this idea that justice requires legal reforms that make it harder to evict people for nonpayment of rent and other breaches of trust and agreed contract (e.g., allowing residence to people other than the agreed lessee; that grounds for eviction is ranklesome to the would-be reformers, notwithstanding that owners have a right to know who is living in their property.)

Or again, on the criminal justice front, the whole world is full of clamoring for reform. But some of the ideas put forth are not at all Christian. Opposition to the death penalty, for instance, is anti-Christian and entails one in rebellion against God’s command: for “whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image” (Gen. 9:6).

If one says that no longer applies, let him produce proof. Where did Christ or the apostles say that is undone? When Paul said that “the one who is in authority … does not bear the sword in vain” and is “an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer” (Romans 13:3-4)? No, the thing is never overturned, but occurs in the covenant with nature, which is “for all future generations” (Genesis 9:12) and endures still. For as God has upheld his promise in that covenant and withheld judgment by flood (v. 11), so is man to uphold his part by shedding the blood of murderers, as the Law also affirms (Num. 35:31); of which Law Christ said “do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matt. 5:17). More than that, the command to slay murderers is based in Man’s creation in the image of God. So long as Man is the image of God, he is to punish the unjust destruction of the bearers of that image with death. And as Man never ceases to be the image of God in this world (however much theologians may differ as to what that imagehood involves) neither does the command to punish certain crimes with capital punishment cease. At the present time, that movement against capital punishment is part of a larger movement against punishment at all.

Many of the people who rail against capital punishment also don’t like imprisonment and would prefer ‘alternate sentencing’ schemes, all of them built on the utterly anti-Christian idea that criminals are victims rather than perpetrators, and that they commit crimes because of their circumstances (ignorance, poverty, unemployment) rather than because they have bad character and freely choose to do evil. That view holds that crime is actually society’s fault and that the key to preventing it is not through punishing perpetrators, but through social programs that increase access to education, employment, and good housing. It is noteworthy that this view, clothe itself in science as it might, is actually a philosophical-religious one at core, and that it involves ideas of Man’s nature that are hostile to Christian faith, regarding him as good or perfectible by nature, and as tending to evil only due to societal and environmental reasons. Actual experience has time and again disproved the effectiveness of such a view of Man and of crime, yet its proponents return to it like a dog to its vomit. (And little wonder: there’s a lot of money in crime reduction programs via government grants, and rent-seeking knows no authority but its own desires).

Lots of Christians are caught up in demands for criminal justice reform, and in so doing have exposed themselves to doubtful company and doubtful ideas. That word “justice” seems to have drawn them to it. With some people it has a mesmerizing quality. Tell them that justice requires this or that, and they rush to do it without further thought. There is such a desperation to be “on the right side of history” or “part of something bigger than oneself,” such a poverty of meaning and purpose with so many people that they rush headlong into any movement that purports to offer it.

We have seen that in our own midst. In 2020, there arose the feeling that justice in racial matters required a social revolution of sorts. Monuments were torn down, things renamed, and the police subject to suspicion, public castigation, and demoralization, all of it in the name of racial or social “justice.” In the Presbyterian Church in America prominent agency heads, though they had not the courage to share their names, yet put forth a statement denouncing “heinous killings,” and in so doing allowed themselves to be caught up in the tide of the cultural moment. As far as I am aware, no one has ever publicly recanted that statement, nor apologized for it, and that in spite of butchering scriptural exegesis in light of the childishly simplistic ethnic classification scheme that divides all people into “white” or “people of color,” and in spite of it putting forward some wrongheaded notions. It proceeded on the assumption that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” i.e. that what happens in any one locale is the business of the whole world.

I have never visited, worked or resided in, paid taxes in, or otherwise had anything whatever to do with Minneapolis, Minnesota, where George Floyd died, and being a complete outsider am at a loss as to how it is any of my business what transpires in that place. The term for involving oneself in the affairs of others is “meddling,” and scripture informs us to avoid that sort of thing (“aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs,” 1 Thess. 4:11). Yet if I follow the spirit and claims of the statement in view, I am responsible for caring and doing something about affairs in strange places hundreds of miles away. By what scriptural warrant, may I ask, am I to do so?

Meanwhile, actual justice is routinely trammeled, goes unprovided, or, worse, is actually forbidden. Case in point. If a man breaks into one’s house, he can be shot dead and the law will deem the action justified. But if a man seduces another man’s wife or attempts the same, there is nothing he can do to defend the integrity of his household. The most he can do is ask her to avoid him, and if the seducer succeeds, try to get the better of things in the divorce proceedings against the faithless spouse or, in only a few states, sue the seducer for “alienation of affection.”

In other words, he can expend great amounts of money, time, and angst making lawyers rich in the far from certain pursuit of justice after the offense has done its damage. And even that is primarily aimed at the faithless spouse. Meanwhile, although adultery is a crime, such laws are not enforced because of that shameful desuetude that often reigns in American jurisprudence. To sum up, the state will neither deter nor punish the offense, nor will it allow potential victims to do so.

I believe I speak for many when I say that I had rather my physical domicile be plundered before my eyes a dozen times than a man violate and destroy my legal/covenantal house (i.e., my marriage), which is a vastly more evil thing for me and my offspring, and, viewed from the standpoint of societal order and peace, the whole of our society. We allow the lesser evil (housebreaking) to be defended against with lethal force and call a man justified if he takes such action in defense. Meanwhile we will punish the more personally and socially-disruptive offense not at all; and if a man finds another man flirting with his wife and would repel him with blows or threats it is he, not the man that threatens the sanctity of another’s marriage, whom the state will indict and punish for a criminal offense. Such are the ways of our laws and our so-called system of justice, which is really a system for enriching lawyers and allowing wicked judges to draw nigh God’s wrath upon themselves.

Tom Hervey is a member of Friendship Presbyterian Church in Laurens County, SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name. He is also author of Reflections on the Word: Essays in Protestant Scriptural Contemplation, and helped modernize Volume I of James Hervey’s classic dialogue on evangelical faith, Theron and Aspasio, available now at Monergism.