Amos: a root text for social justice

Part 6: Conclusion


What do UUs think of when they say "social justice"?  

Almost every UU seems to support it on some level.  But what is it?  Why 
should we care about it?  What do people mean when they say we should
support it?

Let's look at some of the diversity of answers to these questions.  I
make no pretense of having surveyed the field extensively, but only of 
reporting some of the ones I've heard.  Many of the answers are implicitly
or explicitly opposed to each other, or incompatible with each other.
Much of the agreement on social justice may be illusory; caused by UUs
meaning different things by the same phrase.

What is "social justice"?  Some beleive that it only includes the poor,
some do not.  Some treat it as "everyone should get what they
have earned."  Some view it as being concerned with fairness of
process, which may include a concern with unjust discrimination.
Some are concerned with assuring that each person is given
the support of a certain level of resources, or a certain standard
of treatment.  Some are concerned with the equal or equitable division of 
society's resources.  In the context of Amos, it's often defined
somewhat vaguely as fidelity to the relationships between people and each
other, society, and God.

And why should we care about it?  Mostly, it's said to be because we
feel for "those people", the poor, discriminated-against, or otherwise 
victimized.  On occasion, it will be because we care about "our own people".
Sometimes, we declare, it's because we are individually damaged or
diminished by living in an unjust society or by failing to struggle
against it.  And sometimes we fear the social consequences of widespread 
injustice.

Lastly, what do we actually do about it?  Avoiding the short and biased
answer of "mostly nothing", we act by:

* Charity: feeding homeless people, providing shelter at the church, etc.
* Self-education.
* Personal actions on behalf of individuals: helping people charged with 
    crimes, for instance.
* Church-wide collections or campaigns for individuals.
* Distribution of issue papers and the like.
* Attempts at directly changing non-governmental organizations by
	- boycotts
	- letter writing campaigns
	- protests
	- disinvestment of church monies
* Attempts at directly changing government or the legal system by
	- lobbying
	- protests
	- participation in court cases
	- organization of the dispossessed
* Organization for its own sake, so that people can respond to whatever
  issue seems most important to them.
* Taking official UUA or church positions on issues.

In practise, the diversity of action is not quite as wide as I have
described.  If we talk about actions *of* our churches rather than actions
undertaken by individuals *within* our churches, it is mostly limited to
taking policy positions, self-education, charity, and some support for 
community organizers outside the church.

Often UUs will talk about "spending money on" social justice or 
"volunteering" for it, as if it's a luxury item that isn't really
a core need.  If we take either money or time as a measure or our
commitment to doing something, an examination of our church budgets
and activities lists will reveal it as a minor concern.  That may be
in part because it is a contentious activity, one that is hard for our
diverse members to agree on.


Does Amos have anything to tell us about social justice in practise?

Amos was a poet and prophet who cried out "This is unjust!" rather
than a social theorist, reformer, or revolutionary.  Many great writers 
have addressed social justice since his time.  In addition, society
and its problems have greatly changed since when he wrote.  Is
there anything we can learn about what social justice should be from Amos?

Let's review my own summary of Amos:

Amos condemned social injustice in the form of cheaters, profiteers, corrupt 
and grasping rulers, in short all those who use their position of 
power to treat the poor unfairly, and who take the necessities of life 
from them so that they might be rich.  He focussed especially on
injustice within the legal system.  He made no distinction between private 
and governmental injustice.  He didn't specifically talk about 
redistribution of wealth, but may have thought that just enforcement of 
the laws of his time would lead to redistribution of farming land.  

He spoke about crimes committed against those of other nations, as well 
as the poor in his own country, and his emphasis on fairness makes his
message universally applicable to all those who are treated unjustly.
His message can not be restricted to the poor alone.

The result of social injustice, in Amos, is the punishment of everyone in
society, powerful and weak alike. While he criticizes some people
specifically for injust actions, he said everyone will suffer for those 
actions.  He didn't think that the day on which retribution came for 
injustice would be a good day for the poor.

He condemned hypocrites who participated in injustice and tried to make
up for it with acts of charity.  He especially rejected the 
traditional, feel-good forms of worship as offensive to God when 
injustice was being done.

I beleive that there are many positive aspects of Amos' vision that
could serve us well in our attempt to act for social justice.


Positive aspects of Amos' message

One of the great aspects of Amos' message is its fierce insistence 
on the widespread consequences of injustice.  People act unjustly;
therefore society will suffer.  The only hope of averting the
consequences lies in just actions, not in gestures of hypocritical 
worship or charity.

To my mind, Amos also provides a welcome change from our society's 
overwhelming individualist motivation.  The reason to care about 
social injustice is that, because of it, everyone will suffer, not 
because you are guilty and you might suffer, or because you are 
guilty and your soul will suffer.

Nor it there any condescension of the form that is common to a
middle class denomination.  Let's try a sample quote from a Roman Catholic
book on social justice, as an alternative to finding something from
our own lesser-known works.  This is from "Preaching the Just Word",
Walter J .Burghardt, S.J, 1996, Yale University Press, pg. 81.  In
a passage that talks about the "evangelizing potential of the poor",
he says  "How do the poor actualize that potential?  Challenging the
churches by their overwhelming numbers, by their ever-worsening misery, 
by their Christlike endurance under domination and persecution, by
their underlying gospel goodness, by their simplicity and solidarity,
by their openness to God and what God permits, they have in some measure
turned the churches around, compelled us to look within ourselves,
stimulated profound conversion."  Hogwash!  That kind of thought
presupposes a great separation between "us" and "the poor", and ends
up sanctifying the poor as especially good (and childlike) people who we 
must protect.  The whole point of social justice in Amos is that we are 
all in this together.  No one is innocent, no one is guaranteed to be 
saved, no one is exempted from the demands of acting for justice.  If 
"the poor" aren't going to act on their own behalf, then they are going 
to be in just as much trouble as everyone else.

Amos doesn't provide a guide on tactics of social justice, but he
does provide an underlying principle; justice must be *lived*.  We
must be just in our own dealings, in our organizations, and
in our governments and legal systems.  No pious
gesture can make up for the lack of action when action is needed.

And the basic principle of action, in Amos, is fairness.  People can
and will disagree about what that means.  But whether the question asked
is "Is it fair that people should be cheated in business dealings?"
or "Is it fair that people should be treated badly within our legal
system?" or "Is it fair that some should go hungry in a society of 
unparallelled wealth?" a certain degree of agreement can be reached.

This focus can't tell us what to do, but it can suggest certain things
to examine.  Should the social justice of our churches be relegated 
to a Social Justice committee?  Or is the place where we really need 
justice the Membership or Finance committees?  Should we really 
be spending effort on yet another symbolic GA resolution?  How
much should the church as a whole be involved with these issues?


Negative aspects of Amos' message

Lest I should be accused of suger-coating Amos, there are some 
troublesome aspects of his message.  Some of these are, I beleive,
misunderstandings.  For instance, Amos is not suggesting that all
religious celebrations need to go -- he's not like one of the religious
leaders who condemn "frivolity" because it leads you away from God.
Rather, he's saying that you can't feel good about your celebration
if you aren't doing justice first.

A more serious problem with Amos is that, like many religious texts,
it can encourage people to become zealots who demand an impossible
level of perfection.  There are some who think that living social
justice means endless thought about the consequences of every action,
or that as long as there is any injustice we shouldn't celebrate at
all, or that if someone doesn't agree with their issue or their particular
vision of justice then they're part of the problem.  I don't think
that any of these are helpful readings of the text; to my mind, they
can be self-defeating.  To my mind, you work for justice for as long
as your strength holds out, then you should stop.  Knowing when to stop
and rest is the key to avoiding burnout.

And then there are the perversions of social justice that can occur.
In rhetoric, at least, Amos was willing to declare all sorts of
punishments in the name of justice; when that rhetoric is merged with power
you can get a French Revolution, or for that matter a Russian one.
One of the hazards of reading this social justice text from a non-theist
point of view is that one may be tempted to make the punishments
that God was supposed to deliver happen by your own efforts.  Those
punishment decrees work well as metaphors for the social effects of
injustice, but very badly when turned into a program of human action.

Finally, a common problem of social justice activists is that they get
snooty.  If you read Amos and agree with it strongly, you may start
to condemn charitable actions the church takes, or celebrations.  
Condemning celebrations just for the sake of doing so is a good way to
become the type of zealot that I referred to above; if people are
getting too complacent that's one thing, but if you make a regular
habit of it that's quite another.  And it's very common for activists to 
look down on others who are "just doing charity."  I think that's a bad 
mistake.  Charity is often needed, and has its own justifications that 
are separate from social justice ones.  If it is the *only* thing that 
is done, that's bad, but until our society becomes more just than it 
is, someone is going to have to give out charity when it is needed. 

I hope this series was valuable to people.

Rich Puchalsky