You Can't Buy Your Way to Social Justice

Christianity Today: You Can't Buy Your Way to Social Justice

I'm afraid of some American Christians.

I am an American, but I haven't lived in the United States in a while. I live in Djibouti, a country in the Horn of Africa, and when you pick me up at the Minneapolis airport, I might invite you to coffee and suggest the wrong place—you know, one that doesn't serve fair-trade coffee. I will arrive wearing the wrong jeans—ones sold by companies that don't offer fair wages. And I won't use the right vocabulary—the language used by Western bloggers to talk about social justice. ...

... If my generation cares so deeply about global issues of justice and poverty that they are willing to change eating, clothing, and living habits, where are they? A significant challenge for nonprofits and ministries remains recruiting people who will commit to serve long-term outside the United States.

I know there are a plethora of good reasons that concerned American Christians can't just uproot and leave the States, from family to health to finances. I know I simplify. But I have a theory about what is partly contributing to the dearth of young Americans willing to spend their lives on behalf of others.

They think they already are.

They think that with their pocketbooks and food choices alone, by sewing their own clothes and purchasing fair-trade coffee, by boycotting Wal-Mart and preaching that as gospel, they have already done their part to address global injustices. ...

... Consumer activism comes with the inherent danger of separating us from the very people we want to serve. To buy fair trade coffee, for example, we might need to drive across town instead of sitting in the corner café where people in our neighborhood mingle. We can buy that fair trade coffee and never know the family in Burundi who grew, harvested, washed, and roasted the beans. And still we can feel that have done our part. ...

... While remaining passionate and continuing to gently educate the ignorant (like me!) about how our purchases affect the world, we also need to ask whether current trends are becoming a convenient excuse not to delve into the complexities of social justice. We need to ask whether our consumer choices distort the words of Jesus, and whether they help us enter relationships or separate us from others.

As Matthew Lee Anderson notes in his recent CT cover story, Christians begin to fulfill the command to love our neighbor as ourselves "not when we do something radical, extreme, over the top, not when we're really spiritual or really committed or really faithful, but when in the daily ebb and flow of life, in our corporate jobs, in our middle-class neighborhoods, on our trips to Yellowstone and Disney World . . . we stop to help those whom we meet in everyday life, reaching out in quiet, practical, and loving ways." ...

There are some people who are deeply committed to social justice but go about it in ways that I think misunderstands the issues involved. I do not doubt their commitment or their sincerity. But there are also wide swathes for whom identifying with a social justice cause as a fashion statement, an identity signifier, communicating to the world how enlightened and moral they are. Digging into the economic intricacies of fair trade coffee to see how ineffectual it is (even damaging) for the poor, or realizing that Wal-Mart's ability to keep the staples of life inexpensive in our society is probably the single most important factor in keeping the cost of living for the poor manageable, or the reality that it is the poor who clamor for a Wal-Mart while their moralistic economic "superiors" block construction, does not sit well with the social justice crowd they seek solidarity with. And that is what too much of this is about -- solidarity with the social justice crowd, not with the poor. It is moralistic elitism from outside and above the poor, not action and contemplation in community with the poor.

Comments

[MSimon]

If you are interested in social justice become an engineer. They have done more for the welfare of humanity than all the politicians and "social justice" types combined. And made a profit at it to boot.