Countercultural Justice.

More in the "Counterculture for the Common Good" series. This time from Rodolpho Carrasco of Harambee Ministries.

"Not so long ago, evangelical Christians who served the poor often found themselves on the defensive among fellow believers. Now it's the rare church that doesn't engage in works of mercy and justice. Watching this evangelical wave of concern and action, I've been greatly encouraged. Yet as I listen to my fellow justice-impassioned Christ-followers, whether they are newbies or grizzled veterans, I often hear only part of the message of justice.

There is no shortage of protest across the political spectrum. Some promote fair trade over free trade and argue for turning the minimum wage into a living wage; they seek to strengthen immigrant rights and oppose racism. Others object to activist judges, family-hostile state laws and school curricula, and porous borders. But increasingly, all these concerns are framed in terms of concern for the most vulnerable members of society. These issues rouse people out of their living rooms, out of the pews, and into society to work for change.

While I celebrate this development, I worry that we are perilously weak at walking alongside the poor, at investing directly into the lives of individuals to give them what they truly need—not what we believe they need or what our policy statements tell us they need. I've found that it's relatively easy to raise a voice in protest, but unfathomably hard to invest in a life."

Here's the whole thing. I think "justice" is generally the wrong category under which to consider the plight of the underclass. See, for instance, Michael Novak's "Defining Social Justice":

"The trouble with “social justice” begins with the very meaning of the term. Hayek points out that whole books and treatises have been written about social justice without ever offering a definition of it. It is allowed to float in the air as if everyone will recognize an instance of it when it appears. This vagueness seems indispensable. The minute one begins to define social justice, one runs into embarrassing intellectual difficulties. It becomes, most often, a term of art whose operational meaning is, “We need a law against that.” In other words, it becomesan instrument of ideological intimidation, for the purpose of gaining the power of legal coercion."