Hardwired for Justice

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, which basically means that if summer temperatures exceed 85 degrees, I think I’m melting. My tolerance for the heat leaves much to be desired. My husband grew up farming in California, so he pretty much thinks I’m a wimp, but my personal feeling is that I routinely subject myself to a litany of other types of discomfort, so I reserve the right to turn on the air conditioning and stay inside when the temperature heats up.

My other survival strategy includes frequent trips to the area’s many spray grounds, and this seems to work out pretty well for my 2-year-old, who thoroughly enjoys stomping around in puddles and pushing buttons to turn the water features on. This past summer, I joined a friend and a few of the families she knew from her homeschool co-op at a small spray ground by our house.

I watched the kids’ dynamics with keen interest. Not much seemed to have changed since my own playground days. Same rough and tumble boys, same socially advanced girls, same battles between the sexes. It was pretty fun to watch. At one point, though, my friend’s son approached us in exasperation. He came to report that the girls, including his sister, were not upholding their end of the previously agreed upon treaty. They were messing up whatever project the boys were trying to build, and they had promised not to, so his righteous indignation was provoked, and he was appealing to the management for assistance.

His mom is a wise woman, so she encouraged him to try to be the mature one and work it out with the girls without her interference. We thought nothing of it for another five minutes or so until we noticed her son carefully saturating full sized bath towels in the park’s water features. “Sammy!” she called out to him. “What are you doing?”

He looked sheepish as he explained that the girls were still not upholding their end of the bargain.

“That’s not what I asked you, though,” his mom continued. “What are you doing with those towels?”

“Well I need to get them back. They lied. That’s not right.”

It was then that we realized we had intercepted a plot for vengeance. Sammy was still young. He had no idea just how much it would hurt the girls to be whipped with those wet towels, but he wasn’t going to find out either. His mom quickly put the kabosh on that plan and intervened in the situation, redirecting the girls and administering justice.

It really got me to thinking, though, that this scenario provided a pretty poignant illustration of our culture’s present relationship with the pursuit of justice, namely that when justice is delayed or withheld by the people who should be responsible for administering it, we should not be at all surprised to discover the people who are deprived of it turning to alternate, maladaptive methods to achieve it.

Last week I blogged about two women in the Bible whose fathers ignored their rapes. The absence of paternal intervention in both these scenarios led the brothers to pursue destructive routes to justice, ultimately culminating in the ruin of the family. When the people with power don’t care enough to exercise it on behalf of the wounded, some really bad things can ensue. Like my friend’s son showed us, people can end up proposing solutions that make the problems infinitely worse.

That’s how we end up with things like critical race theory in schools that teaches white kids to be ashamed of their skin color. It’s how we end up with DEI trainings where people are punished for refusing to use vanity pronouns. It’s how we end up with people who sincerely believe BLM is a righteous organization instead of the misogynistic Marxist indoctrination center that it is.

It’s how we end up with vengeance instead of justice and conflict instead of peace.

When I oversaw the Member Services team at the YMCA, employees would often grumble at some of the solutions I proposed to common problems in our workflow. When they would complain, I would always say, “It’s fine if you don’t like my suggestion, but it’s the one we are going to adopt until you can propose a better alternative.”

The problem that I’m seeing in much of today’s culture wars is that we on the right are shooting down a lot of the (albeit deeply flawed) solutions without proposing meaningful solutions of our own. Our apathy registers as indifference, and that only serves to intensify the conflict.

Our primary strategy seems to be to dismiss or minimize the problems altogether. It’s not a strategy that’s working. We are too quick with the knee-jerk reactions to absolutely everything.

How can we have meaningful discussions about racism and sexism on the right without being accused of indulging identity politics?

While the left may be guilty of seeing oppression under every rock, I'm increasingly realizing that the right is guilty of pretending it's not under any rocks at all.

"All lives matter" is often a dismissive, unintelligent response to complaints of a racism that remains all too real in this country. There are thousands of people alive today who know what's it like to be forced to sit in the colored section of the bleachers. Why is it so very hard to understand that their experience might be uniquely difficult? Why do we refuse to acknowledge that racism still hurts some people a whole lot more than it hurts others?

Similarly, when women speak up about epidemics of harm their sisters have experienced at the hands of men, why do we insist on accusing them of "man bashing" or indulging a "victim mentality?" It is objectively true that thousands, even millions, of women in America alone have been sexually traumatized and forced to remain silent.

Why are we so quick to post memes about how men are under attack but so slow to require godly repentance in leaders who enable decades of sexual trauma to go unchecked on their watch? Why are Doug Wilson or Dean Curry still behind a pulpit? If you boycotted Gillette for hurting your feelings, did you also boycott Target for actually physically endangering girls?

I’m a Christian. This means I think true solutions to the problems that plague the world are ultimately found in Jesus, not government programs.

Identity politics have created unspeakable amounts of harm and division rather than the healing they promised, and I emphatically reject the vast majority of “solutions” proposed by intersectionality enthusiasts, who often seek revenge rather than justice.

But there's real cost in denying people the right to specifically name patterns of harm suffered and inflicted. It looks a lot like whitewashing and denial, and it only makes the problem worse and the backlash more vicious. Dr. King rightly named that "Riots are the language of the unheard."

We cannot fix what we refuse to name. As I often tell my kids, "If you don't hear my requests the first time, I'm going to use a louder voice until I can be certain you've heard me."

I think we've entered a phase in our history where both sides are screaming at the top of their lungs about wounds the other side refuses to acknowledge. I can’t control or really even influence what the left does. That’s not my camp. But I can use what little influence I have to invite my own team to be more thoughtful, more nuanced, more genuinely compassionate than we often are.

Just because many of the left’s proposed solutions are loony doesn’t mean their diagnosis of problems is wrong. Can we start there? Can we learn to care about true biblical justice without immediately dismissing every invitation to it as woke Marxism? Can we acknowledge that we have work to do in bridging the gap? If we don’t like the answers they’re suggesting, can we be a little more proactive about providing solutions of our own?