Something has long bothered me about the way those of us invested in a better world often talk about our commitment to social justice. I think it's because it feels like a battle mentality, like we are good soldiers waging war against the evil of injustice. Maybe that is what we are doing. It certainly feels like that's what generations of good soldiers have done — fighting for civil rights, human rights, justice for poor people, liberation from oppression, and more, against powerful forces that sought to maintain the status quo or, as in our current moment, to turn back the clock.
This narrative of struggle has deep historical and theological roots in many of our traditions, of course. For example, the Black Church in the U.S. has been deeply entwined in the African American struggle against slavery, segregation, and mass incarceration. The Jewish tradition has borne witness to the struggle for identity and place since Moses led the exodus from Egypt. Our sacred scriptures offer plenty of stories and wisdom to support this narrative.
In addition to their historic role in shaping our faith communities, these struggles remain disturbingly real. But sometimes I wonder if we're still granting primacy to narratives that may no longer serve our communities and the world. We live in an era of unprecedented change and complexity, where social problems and moral and ethical questions have the potential to outrun us because of how fast things move and evolve, where the gray area between right and wrong has ballooned. In this context, faith communities have a significant role to play, but may need to claim their power in a different way.
Within the struggle narrative—even when tied to a historic arc that ultimately and definitively, because of who God is, bends toward justice—we have already ceded our power to some extent. At least in this world. We have positioned ourselves as defenders rather than creators. We may have the power of God with us, but vis-a-vis the world, we are the underdog, the resistance. If we believe we are people of God, though - in the Christian tradition, for example, that we are imbued with the Holy Spirit - then we are not just powerful in an eschatological sense. We are powerful here and now in this world. And I don't mean power in a political sense but in a creative one. Yes, we are people of struggle, and we do struggle well, and the need for struggle remains real. But we are also people of creation. The Creator God lives in all of us. Nothing is more powerful than that.
A new book by professors Michael Karlberg and Derik Smith, Rethinking Social Justice: Theory and Action in an Age of Transition offers language, along with an academic and historical foundation, for precisely such a new understanding of power. They provocatively—yet humbly and persuasively—challenge the status quo narrative of social justice as primarily distributive justice and of contentious politics as the most effective means to achieve it.
Adopting a term first used by Catholic intellectuals in the 19th century and referenced briefly again by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in the 1980s, Karlberg and Smith propose "contributive justice" as a positive construction of the ends toward which modern social justice movements aspire. Rather than focusing on justice as a fair distribution of social goods, contributive justice, by their definition, means "a set of social conditions that enable every individual and group to develop their latent potentialities and thereby contribute to the flourishing of the entire social body, from which their own flourishing ultimately derives." In other words, a just society is one in which everyone can develop and use their own capabilities to contribute to the flourishing of society.
And if that is the ends toward which we aspire, then the means to get there does not look like contentious politics but instead, "radical constructive agency." Rather than fighting against an unjust status quo, radical constructive agency (where "radical" refers to root causes) creates a new one. It builds new narratives, norms, practices, and structures for society's flourishing, ones that ultimately address the root causes of injustice and that enable all people to contribute. The authors deconstruct the assumption that contentious politics is the only real way to achieve social justice and argue that it is a strategy that has "reached a point of diminishing returns."
Karlberg and Smith, who both practice the Baháʼí faith, provide a sweeping yet concise review of contemporary social justice movements and discourse, with particular attention to spiritual conceptions of justice and religious contributions to this history. They then propose contributive justice as a positive and expansive conception of justice that allows us to get past us versus them narratives, to explore spiritual principles and ways of knowing alongside scientific ones, and to reject formulaic conceptions of a just society in need of engineering in favor of commitments to learning and building together.
This formulation brings us back to the question of power. The authors note that almost all of Western social theory is rooted in "competitive and conflictual conceptions of power." This conception gives rise to the notion of "resistance" — citizens resisting oppressive powers. But as author and activist Michelle Alexander has written, "resistance is a reactive state of mind" that can "restrict our field of vision." The authors point to Gandhi's bidirectional understanding of power and resistance in which those engaged in creative, cooperative, constructive efforts for transformational change hold moral and mutualistic power that those upholding oppressive regimes themselves seek to resist. In other words, what happens if we see those marshalling the forces of love, creativity, imagination, and collaboration as the ones with power and those seeking to stop them as the resistance? What if we see ourselves as powerful? Not capable of power, not building power, but already powerful.
The authors go on to show how our economic, political, and legal systems make up a tripartite system of contest, which inherently privileges those at the top of the social hierarchy, thus driving and sustaining injustice. They point to movements that have taken the approach of radical constructive agency, including tracing an interesting but often ignored thread of Gandhi's strategies. According to the authors, Gandhi's first aspiration in the pursuit of India's self-rule was a program to construct a new social order. He turned to the contentious strategy of civil disobedience only as a supplement to this first strategy when he couldn't get the support he needed from allies.
The authors also present the religious movement of the Baháʼís as a glimpse of a different possibility. The Baháʼí faith emerged in Iran in the 19th century. Baháʼís believe in the oneness of all humanity and diversity as a source of human flourishing. They do not have clergy, instead holding non-competitive elections for the leadership of their spiritual assemblies, and are committed to processes of long-term social transformation. They build—and invite others in to building—new, just "patterns of community life and the institutional structures to support them."
Faith communities shine best when they cultivate not just moral courage, but creative courage. We open up possibility when we approach social issues not with a battle mentality rooted in righteous anger but a collaboration mentality rooted in sacred possibility. Our calling surely still requires us to fight the good fight against people and institutions that propagate harm when necessary, but maybe the greater (and more creative and fun) aspiration is to liberate ourselves and others from the mindsets and systems that have constrained us by building new norms, institutions, and systems that enable the just society we desire.
Rethinking Social Justice is available for purchase or downloadable for free.
Author: Danielle Goldstone