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Abstract My thesis is that modern social justice, which can be defined as a philosophy and movement to combat systemic injustices such as racism, has strong parallels with the Christianity of the Roman Empire. In particular, both serve a similar function of creative destruction of existing social systems in pursuit of a more "just" society through a new morality. Both arose during the decline of their respective empires and address the needs of the most disenfranchised in society. Both proposed radical changes to family structure. Both look to martyrs as their heroes. Both propose a transvaluation of values, or that is to say a different way of looking at good and evil that advantages particular social groups over others. Finally, social justice and Christianity prophesize apocalyptic visions of the future. My definition of social justice I want to avoid making a strawman out of social justice, and I do not mean to conflate it with leftism or socialism. To get absolutely specific on the definition of social justice, it is a philosophy that: - systemic racism, sexism, and anti-queerness exist in Western society in multiple dimensions of economic wealth, environmental justice, health, and so on. - Western society was built upon a history of exploitation including slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. There is a certain white, wealthy strata of society that has privilege which they have unfairly earned through this exploitation. In the individualist strain of social justice, acknowledgement of this privilege by these individuals is seen as good and denial is bad. - there are two strains in terms of solutions to these injustices. One is that they should be addressed by enacting governmental policies, usually of a social democratic or democratic socialist in nature (do we want black capitalists or no capitalism at all?), and responsibility largely rests on society at large because the problems are systemic and don't belong to individuals. Another strain is more like an individual lifestyle and pushes for individuals and private enterprises to become aware of their biases. This lifestyle strain seeks to promote black culture, latin culture, and queer culture as an alternative to "white", hetero Western culture. Christianity as a revolutionary force in Roman society  After the sack of rome by the Visigoths, some Romans argued that Rome had been led astray by Christianity and that they should return to paganism. Augustine of Hippo in his City of God argues why Christian values had helped Rome succeed instead of pagan ones. Similar to Christianity in the Roman Empire, this lifestyle form of social justice seeks to undermine the culture and mores of the existing society which it sees as corrupt. On paper, Christianity is an elaborate attempt to explain why it is that when the Jewish people were struggling against Roman rule and sought the return of David the king or the Messiah to vanquish their oppressors and return them their kingdom, they were instead met with a martyr in the form of Jesus Christ. As Nietzsche might say, instead of exalting aristocratic values of a king, Christianity promoted the values of a slave or a "loser" in society. Instead of gaining an earthly kingdom and earthly power in the world, Christians seek to show themselves as morally superior - denying what the world values - to gain entrance to God's otherworldly kingdom. Christianity rapidly spread across the empire as a religion of the disenfranchised, and threatened Roman rule by denying worship of the emperor for which they were the target of persecution. Eventually as the Roman empire went through crisis and the old Roman values stopped working, Christianity was adopted as the state religion. Christianity would transform Roman society and make way for feudalism. Remaking the family  Lucius Junius Brutus, founder of the Roman Republic and the Junia gens. His more well-known descendant Brutus would help kill Caesar to save this republic. Christianity eroded away the traditional Roman gens that divided Roman society into great families descended from a common ancestor, and that decided if you were a patrician or a plebeian. Christianity dictated certain rules about who you could marry and promoted the nuclear family before capitalism even did as Marx and Engels argue. Without kinship societies to bind people together, the former subjects of the Roman Empire sought protection from feudal lords giving way to feudalism. European kingdoms would then go through a Darwinian process of selection through war that eventually gave rise to modern nation states. Eventually these nation states born through blood sought to expand and conquer the world. Social justice similarly erodes the concept of the nuclear family, and encourages a broader variety of family and relationship structures - polyamory, gay marriage, and perhaps even doing away with the idea of a "family" being tied by blood at all (see Cuban family code). Capitalism has already swept away many traditional social bonds (see Bowling Alone), and the dissolution of the family may be the pretext for entirely new forms of social organization. Martyrdom  Kehinde Wiley, Femme Piquée par un Serpent (Mamadou Gueye), 2022 This almost goes without saying. There are many leaders in civil rights, feminism, and the LGBT community that are not martyrs, but the people that inspired the most movement in recent years have been the victims of police violence such as George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Everyday people from disadvantaged communities that suffer modern-day crucifixions. Crucifixion was a punishment for the lowest of the low in society, and Jesus was crucifixed with criminals. However his crucifixion became a story of redemption. Jesus's suffering and their suffering most be atoned for, through acknowledgement of sin or privilege, professing the faith and good works to redeem our broken and unjust society. Like the list of martyred saints, we have a list of the victims of police brutality, say their names. Transvaluation of values Social justice seeks to empower those from disadvantaged communities, and one weapon to accomplish this is by redefining what is good and bad and what is to be valued. As stated before, Christian mores about the family are challenged. Gender constructs and heteronormativity are to be challenged. The narratives of American exceptionalism and America being a good country are challenged by a narrative of the settler state and imperialism. The American Dream and meritocracy are myths, why try when even a comfortable middle class life with a house and retirement is impossible. Seizing property of the privileged and the rich is seen as justifiable by law or by force. The culture of your ancestors is to be cherished over white Western culture. Apocalyptic Visions  Jesus gave apocalyptic visions of the destruction of the Second Temple and his final return. Christianity's answer to the apocalypse is generally an individual one - save yourself to avoid eternal torment, although some fundamentalists want to accelerate the apocalypse by supporting Israel. Ask any fundamentalist Christian when they think the rapture will happen and they will say "within my lifetime". Social justice also predicts apocalyptic disaster in the form of climate change within our lifetimes, and the pressing need for action at the systemic and individual level. Climate change is an environmental justice issue, as the people who will suffer the most are poor nations, and the people who need to help the most are rich nations. Climate change can be seen as the direct result of the capitalist need for infinite growth in a finite world. Takeaways To get white wealthy people to hand over their wealth, you must either convince them by appeals to morality or produce a critical mass of people to make them do it. Social justice, through a philosophy to produce a new morality and a political movement, seeks to accomplish both. Like Christianity, what social justice does not have in power it has in morality. The rise in social justice movements in the past decades is reminiscent of the fervor of religious awakenings (which generally occurred among the most downtrodden in American society) as a means to give people a narrative or explanation for the world, a chance at redemption, and a collective movement to be a part of. Is it any surprise then that the "Culture Wars" are between two philosophies of dying empires - one of social justice and one of fundamentalist Christianity? It remains to be seen if there will be a new society forged out of this movement, if it will be toned down into a more equitable "woke" capitalism that addresses wealth gaps at best or turns social justice into a brand at worst, or if it will be crushed by reactionary forces. E: I want to be clear I am saying this all in good faith and it's not mockery or saying "social justice and Christianity are bad". This is simply my observation of the similarities, feel free to critique. As they say, history repeats itself. America Inc. fucked around with this message at 02:40 on Jun 16, 2023 |
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Jun 14, 2023 18:23
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Christianity was swiftly tamed and transformed into a useful tool of power. Has not the same been happening with "social justice" since the very beginning what with Raytheon employees walking in Pride Parades, the infamous pepsi BLM ad and a million other examples. If you really care about social justice you had better hope it does`nt follow the path of christianity.
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Jun 16, 2023 16:37
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Baudolino posted:Christianity was swiftly tamed and transformed into a useful tool of power. It already has. It's called "corporate social responsibility"
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Jun 16, 2023 17:52
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Lib and let die posted:It already has. It's called "corporate social responsibility" Keeping in mind, most of the companies do CSR because the investors told them they have to.
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Jun 16, 2023 23:26
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Jaxyon posted:Keeping in mind, most of the companies do CSR because the investors told them they have to. A queer colleague of mine turned me on to the term "rainbow capitalism" and it's just perfect imo
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Jun 17, 2023 02:10
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OP Read this work by the theologian R. Niebuhr. It’s Moral Man and Immoral Society. http://media.sabda.org/alkitab-2/Re...0Study%20in.pdf Then look into his role in sending folks from Union Seminary to study non-violence under Gandhi.
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Jun 19, 2023 02:59
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America Inc. posted:
I’ll start off by noting that for all that Marx and Engels had good ideas, they were working with an understanding of Roman History that is now over a century out of date, and modern understanding of various forces in Roman society are now wildly different from how 19th century philosophers understood it. For example, even by the late republic, the patrician/plebeian dichotomy was no longer particularly meaningful, and by the imperial period that saw Christianity spread it was functionally wiped out altogether, replaced by new classes. The development of manorialism in Europe is a complex topic, but if we’re simplifying a bit, constant civil war within Rome’s borders alongside frequent raids from across the empire’s borders led to disruptions in trade networks and logistics that encouraged a deurbanisation of particularly the western empire. At the same time, a constant problem for Rome throughout its history was dealing with the power of large landowners in the countryside crowding out the ability of smaller farming families to own land. As civil wars eroded the state capacity of the empire, these landowners became powers unto themselves, leading to many of the rural romans ending up in the situation of being tenant farmers on the lands of these estates. It was Diocletian, a pagan emperor (who was responsible for some of the bloodiest persecutions of Christians), who passed the law forbidding these tenant farmers from breaking their tenancies and leaving their lands, which is often seen as the beginnings of serfdom in Europe. While all this is happening (the third and early fourth centuries), Christianity remains a minority religion, practiced chiefly among the remaining urban population, and in the eastern empire, where full-blown manorialism will not develop until hundreds of years after we see it in the former Western Empire (if indeed it develops at all, which depends on how you view the magnates of the late Eastern Roman Empire). So the first people entering into these “feudal” relationships would likely have been non-christians, not because of some shake-up in the social order caused by the “nuclear family”, but by very real physical insecurity caused by internal strife of an economic and political nature, while the Christians are, if anything, less likely to be caught up in these relationships, living largely in areas where manorialism just didn’t develop. By the end of the fourth century Christianity has spread out to these areas, but I don’t think it’s correct at all to suggest that one caused the other. So I guess my question would be, from where are you drawing the idea that this is connected to Christianity? I’m by no means an expert on Roman History so I may be just unaware of the evidence here, but based on this I think I’d question to what extent your account of Christianity in Ancient Rome is based on modern research vs what’s based on pop-history and a vision of Rome that’s almost two centuries out of date.
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Jun 19, 2023 04:27
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This feels like a mess and it's just noticing some parallels between two movements that originated from oppressed groups. Families are where I think I disagree the most because I don't think Christianity has the impact you think it did and I don't think what you describe in social justice is what's happening. Most Romans were plebians who lived in nuclear families with households that may have included elderly or extended family. But the great families lost power before the rise of Christianity. And social justice isn't eroding the nuclear family, it's challenging its supremacy by returning to traditions from cultures assimilated into the western one. It's eroding cultural supremacy of one specific way of organizing kinship. I just don't get your point about the apocalypse and the parallels. Are you talking about Jesus claiming a great disaster would come and he would be a returning King? Because that's common in religions, cults are full of figures who promise future destruction followed by a divine return and rescue. Or are you jumping from Rome to modern Evangelical movements? And how does that connect to the hard scientific fact of climate change? It is not apocalyptic preaching if your message is that your car is going to go over a cliff if you are literally in a car moving towards the edge of a cliff.
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Jun 19, 2023 05:20
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If you have to specify that you're saying something in good faith you should probably think over whether to say it in the first place.
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Jun 19, 2023 13:48
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A lot of this is very reminiscent of fearmongering by chuds like Niccolo Soldo, N.S. Lyons, and the UnHerd set about "woke religion" or "the successor ideology" but reframing it as "woke religion is good, actually." Do we really gotta hand it to reactionary substacks?
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Jun 21, 2023 02:32
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Gumball Gumption posted:it's just noticing some parallels between two movements that originated from oppressed groups. I would say so yeah, I've been going to church and reading the Bible and I notice some similarities. E: I notice at church that they're not so keen on social justice or LGBT rights. I see myself as an ally, so I wonder how I could get them to see common cause. I'm trying to take those similarities and make a general point about morality. I'm not the first person to notice similarities between Jews and black people. Groups like the Black Hebrews claim black and Latino peoples to descend from the original 12 tribes of Israel, and it leads to this weird kind of antisemitism where they say they're the "real Jews". Every other rapper is religious or talks about God, and they're not conservative fundamentalist types - Kendrick Lamar, Killer Mike, GZA. In regards to eschatology, my point is that beyond the factual reality of climate change, there is also a larger moral argument that this disaster has been caused by the immoral system we live in. Climate change is the ultimate externality, a product of short-minded capitalists valuing profit over the future or human life. I don't think we disagree that it will be very hard to fix or handle climate change in an equitable way if we keep the system we currently have. Reveilled posted:So I guess my question would be, from where are you drawing the idea that this is connected to Christianity? I got the idea from Kraut: https://youtu.be/H03H73tdh6s When I look at the wiki page on Gens it corroborates with what you're saying about the disintegration occurring before the rise of Christianity. I appreciate this kind of deep insight, it's what I was looking for even if it disproves my point. America Inc. fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Jun 23, 2023 |
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Jun 23, 2023 04:17
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Like literally it's a black church and I can't compute how you would want to better conditions for black people but, actually, no homo.
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Jun 23, 2023 04:45
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There's a lot that i can say here, but that's something for the weekend, to really explain what the American church "is".
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Jun 23, 2023 13:52
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AsInHowe posted:There's a lot that i can say here, but that's something for the weekend, to really explain what the American church "is". What do you see it as? E: there's a lot to criticize modern Christianity for, but from another perspective modern liberal secular society is a complete and total dumpster fire that leaves its people to the wolves. I understand why people feel compelled to turn to religious institutions which are far from perfect. America Inc. fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Jun 25, 2023 |
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Jun 25, 2023 00:57
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AsInHowe posted:There's a lot that i can say here, but that's something for the weekend, to really explain what the American church "is". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_religion This, probably
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Jun 29, 2023 06:44
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America Inc. posted:from another perspective modern liberal secular society is a complete and total dumpster fire that leaves its people to the wolves. Would you care to explain what this means or are you just going to drop something that sounds like it came from a Twitter "Independent Thinker" and leave for another week?
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Jun 29, 2023 16:40
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I think I get where OP is going but I don't thinkv they've made it a lot more complicated than it is. Pretty much they've landed on the idea that to motivate a large group of people towards a goal you need to tap into their belief and spirituality. Diversity and stopping climate change make logical sense but most people will not support or oppose them in logical ground but on belief. So they're seeing all these similarities because religion is also something that binds people together through belief. But the connections they're seeing are not really unique to Christianity or "woke" progressives. Humans are not rational actors
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Jun 30, 2023 04:06
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Gumball Gumption posted:I think I get where OP is going but I don't thinkv they've made it a lot more complicated than it is. Pretty much they've landed on the idea that to motivate a large group of people towards a goal you need to tap into their belief and spirituality. Diversity and stopping climate change make logical sense but most people will not support or oppose them in logical ground but on belief. So they're seeing all these similarities because religion is also something that binds people together through belief. But the connections they're seeing are not really unique to Christianity or "woke" progressives. Humans are not rational actors Essentially yeah. I would say almost no one really tries to do a complete rational justification of all their beliefs, and some beliefs just hang around in our minds like old clothes. For some people it's just a friend circle, for other people it's a deep belief, nostalgia or a big grift. I wonder if we will ever see an outspoken atheist president. Not the annoying edgy kind, just like "I don't believe this, let me swear on something other than a Bible". The honesty would be refreshing. America Inc. fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Jul 27, 2023 |
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Jul 27, 2023 23:48
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It has been said that polls say Americans are more hostile to the idea of an atheist President than a Muslim one. But really wanna see an answer on this first.America Inc. posted:but from another perspective modern liberal secular society is a complete and total dumpster fire that leaves its people to the wolves.
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Jul 28, 2023 00:19
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America Inc. posted:What do you see it as? I’ve been reading a lot of german philosophy lately and I think Nietzsche has a good point with God is Dead idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_is_dead A bunch of people (including Zizek) have mentioned being a Christian Atheist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_atheism From my perspective, I am jewish. There’s definitely a stronger sense of community that I can see in Israel than I do see in modern western society.
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Jul 31, 2023 17:53
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You can do anything in the name of any religion. Christianity specifically has been invoked to support slavery and played a pivotal role to forward the civil rights movement. People shape their beliefs to fit their material conditions, whether they are purely ideological or religious or both.
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Jul 31, 2023 23:09
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The only thing Christians agree on is that Jesus is important so it's a somewhat meaningless descriptor much like Atheist. It tells you nothing useful about their values or beliefs - they can equally well be nazis or anarcho-communists.
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Jul 31, 2023 23:30
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I agree, however, that one could put early Christianity as a liberation ideology. It promised salvation to everyone regardless of class.
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Aug 2, 2023 02:46
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I can see the argument you're developing but they're ultimately very different kinds of movement. The fact that Christianity has a cultic focus is unifying in a way that social justice has a really hard time aspiring to. My personal point of view is that modern social justice and the Marxisms and secular liberalisms that preceded it are attempts to repackage the basic Christian ethic without the cultic focus. In the West, our ideas of right and wrong are historically and culturally very tied to the Christian teaching, so any time we try to come up with a new ethic we end up restating the Gospel message.
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Aug 2, 2023 09:27
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Owling Howl posted:The only thing Christians agree on is that Jesus is important so it's a somewhat meaningless descriptor much like Atheist. It tells you nothing useful about their values or beliefs - they can equally well be nazis or anarcho-communists. This can only work if you take the position that everyone who calls themself a Christian is a Christian (ie there is no way to determine, even theoretically, whether or not somebody is a Christian). Maybe so, but it essentially torpedos the entire concept of ideology as a meaningful category of identification. If Marxist can also be a fascist, if an anarchist can also be a royalist, if an atheist can be a Muslim, if a trans ally can be a TERF, then what significance do any of these words mean?
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Aug 17, 2023 18:14
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Well, no, it means that "christian" does not map onto other ideological positions. A christian presumably believes in the salvific quality of jesus christ, and there have been many and varied interpretations of what that means going back thousands of years. It doesn't tell you very much about what they think about other things.
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Aug 17, 2023 19:40
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The vast majority of Christians belong to denominations that confess the Nicene Creed or Apostles Creed. About a third of world Christian's are Protestant, and in them, Lutherans, Anglicans, Methodists, and others also confess the Nicene Creed or Apostles Creed. Given the content of those creeds, Most Christians would appear to share a lot more in common than the importance given to Jesus. This doesn't cover everyone, but together with the idea of trinity I think there are common foundations.
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Aug 17, 2023 22:04
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From a faithful point of view, it's extremely useful to be able to define who is and isn't Christian, and the practical line tends to be the Nicene creed. That is the one I hold to. From a sociological standpoint, the line is much broader. For example, a non-Nicene religious movement like the Latter Day Saints is a non-Christian splinter from Christianity, because its theology is wildly distinct from Christianity. Nevertheless, they call themselves Christian. Sociologically, you might describe them as Christian. For less obvious examples, the Jehovah Witnesses have a pretty radical non-Nicene theology, but ground it in a particular reading of the Bible. Historical schisms like the Reformations have been extremely important to those on either side, to the point of calling the other side not Christian. What does this mean for a discussion about Christianity applied to modern-day politics? A particular person who calls themself Christian will have a specific idea of what that means, and what practical consequences it has for the way they live their life. A non-Christian will think it is an incredibly vague term to the point of meaninglessness. That's why you tend to see Christians be much more interested in discussions like this.
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Aug 17, 2023 22:20
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Dominant strains of it, sure, but if you go further back you have the gnostics who certainly seemed to think that jesus was the messiah and through his teachings you could achieve salvation, but from what, and how, was very different from what you would think of as modern day christianity, until the church started suppressing them they had just as much claim to being christian as anybody else and I don't really see how it could be argued that they have less legitimacy, their theology has just as much claim to authenticity as the modern forms. And even ignoring that, views about the spiritual nature of the universe still do not coherently map onto modern political positions.
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Aug 17, 2023 22:20
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OwlFancier posted:And even ignoring that, views about the spiritual nature of the universe still do not coherently map onto modern political positions. The idea that: to be is being-for-others maps onto modern politics.
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Aug 28, 2023 02:43
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