It's in the Code ep 163: “Social Justice Is Justice, Pt. 3”

Dan Miller: Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus. I am, of course, Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College, and your host. Pleased to be with you as always, and as always, want to begin just by saying thank you for listening. Thank you for joining. Thank you for supporting me in this series. Thank you for supporting Straight White American Jesus and all the things we do—Axis Mundi Media and all the different contributions that it makes in so many different ways. We can't do this without you.

In particular, this series is driven by you and your ideas and your topics and your interests, so please keep those coming my way. danielmillerswaj@gmail.com—really, really welcome your thoughts, insights, input on new topics, upcoming episodes, upcoming series, and what have you.

Want to dive in today. We are concluding a series we've been doing for a number of weeks now, a deep dive into the right wing assault on empathy. We've been looking at Allie Beth Stuckey's book Toxic Empathy. And after today, we're done with it, folks. We're done with it. We'll be through the final chapter. And I've just, frankly, had about all of Allie Beth Stuckey's book that I can stand, so we're going to move on to some other things.

But what we're going to look at today is—again, we're in the final chapter—her chapter on social justice, her critique of calls for social justice. And we're going to tackle what she gives as the biblical and theological basis for her opposition. And true to what we saw in the last chapter, her prior chapter was on immigration. This is one of her very weakest treatments in the book, and that's saying something. It's not a book that I respect. It's not a book I think is strong or intellectual or anything like that, but this is one of the weakest treatments.

But it's also—this topic, on her own account, is one of the most important for her, and it is one of the most impassioned and misleading chapters in her book. And folks, I say this a lot, but this chapter—God, we could spend episodes and episodes on it. It is just rife with misinformation, with bad reasoning, with fallacies, you name it. Okay, we're not going to spend weeks and weeks. We're going to spend today.

But essentially, kind of summing up her views, she says that the issue of social justice is the one where empathy is the most weaponized, meaning that it has had some of the greatest effects on the white evangelical community. And she had a similar response to the issue of immigration. In other words, she thinks that, you know, white evangelicals are largely unified in opposing abortion and they don't support trans rights and so forth. But when it comes to immigration and racial justice—which is her focus on social justice, she ignores, as I said, you know, economic justice and things related to this—when it comes to racial justice, she says this is where it's been weaponized. This is where conservative Christians have been the most likely to fall prey to the temptation of empathy.

And I think it's worth pausing to consider why this is—that is, why do more evangelicals supposedly fall prey to empathy on these topics, and why does it bother her so much? On one hand, and why the answer to those questions matters for understanding where Stuckey and Uncle Ron and your parents' pastor and all those people—understanding where they're really coming from.

And so here's the issue. This is an issue I raised in the last chapter. I'm raising it again. There are dozens, probably hundreds, of Bible verses enjoining justice for the foreigner, the poor, the orphan, the widow, the dispossessed, and what have you. And there is no way, if somebody is playing the game as conservative Christians do of saying that they believe the Bible and the Bible is the literal word of God and everything they do is supposed to be what the Bible says, and they are enjoined to follow the teachings of the Bible and so forth—there is no way to make a compelling argument, in my view, that the Bible allows the positions that define the contemporary right, let alone that the Bible requires those policies and positions, that those policies and positions are, in fact, based on or drawn from the Bible.

And what does that mean? It means that when we confront these topics, and we're confronting somebody like Stuckey or Uncle Ron or your parents' pastor, we come face to face with the fact that high control religionists, when they claim that their views are based solely on the Bible, not politics or culture or race or whatever—we come face to face with the fact that that's just not the case.

Allie Beth Stuckey and everyone like her, they support these positions because their Christianity is completely assimilated into broader conservative positions on these issues. The two are simply—they're flip sides of the same coin. And so this is not a case, despite what she or anybody else would tell you, this is not a case of somebody saying, "Hey, we hold these positions because we're Christians." No. This is a case of "we understand our Christianity this way because we are conservatives and we are white." Our identity in other domains conditions our religious identity here. Okay? And I think that this is significant.

Because the vehemence with which Stuckey argues the positions in this chapter, it really reflects this—her general discomfort with any discourse that displaces the centrality of her white Christian perspective, combined with the fact that it is clear that this is not about viewing the world through a biblical lens, as she says at the outset of the book. It comes across with a degree of alarmism and vitriol and disinformation in these chapters. The degree of the vitriol and the misinformation, I think, demonstrates that discomfort. Why? White anxiety drips from every page of this chapter.

In the last chapter in particular, we get the typical—what reflects this—we get the typical accusations, not just from her but from others. And if you follow these discussions in society at all, these are going to sound familiar. We get the typical accusations that calls for social justice are, quote-unquote, socialist. Right? We're told—so when she makes this point that basically she talks about Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and basically says everybody who calls for social justice is as bad as that guy and all the bad things that happened. And then, sort of for good measure, she basically says that white South Africans are better farmers than Black South Africans. You can go and you can look up what she says. I'm not trying to mischaracterize that. That's what she says.

She says that social justice is not just, you know, not biblical. It isn't only that it isn't biblical. She says it is evil. The calls for social justice that we confront are evil.

When she talks about, quote-unquote, reparations—in other words, she, like everybody like her, is opposed to any idea of reparations based on racial injustice and so forth—but she's got this really weird place where she talks about reparations and she's not talking, folks, about, like, I don't know, land or money or, you know, sort of financial recompense or something like that. No, she highlights three things that white people should be unwilling to relinquish. I want you to listen to this list. Her three things are: yielding influence, decentering their own experience, and letting go of privilege.

Like, flip this around. She says these are three things white people should not have to give up. She calls them reparations. In other words, what she is saying is that white people should hold on to their influence, they should prioritize their own experience, and they should maintain their privilege—which she also, at the same time, denies as a real thing. Consistency is not her game. We get that.

My point is, again, to repeat: white anxiety everywhere in this chapter. Everything in this chapter and everything in the last chapter is about white privilege and normalizing a functionally white supremacist society. That is what it is about.

Yeah, she whines a lot at the outset—we talked about this in the introduction—about feeling like she was silenced as a white woman talking about social justice in the wake of George Floyd and so forth. Yet she creates this sort of sense in which, if we were to follow her model, it's one in which we can't even discuss notions of whiteness and white privilege or disadvantage that comes from racial identity, which is reflected in her carefully cultivated ignorance of white privilege or systemic injustice or the other things we've talked about the last couple episodes.

Okay, so that's sort of like background. All of that is there in the section where she ostensibly is talking about the biblical or religious basis for her views. This stuff is all there.

So let's take a closer look at sort of what she actually says about the specifically Christian defense of her positions and specifically the Bible. And again, we do this because that is her claim—that it should be biblical, that this is through a biblical lens, and what have you. Okay?

So she insists—this is one of the keys—that the hallmark of what the Bible says about justice is that it is to be impartial, that it should not play favorites. That's her term. Now, she also acknowledges that the Bible commands the care of and justice for different classes of people—the poor, the oppressed, the widow, and so forth. But on her logic, this always has to be understood against the backdrop of impartiality. Yes, God cares about those people, but not favoritism. It's never favoritism toward those groups.

Which means—and this is going to be a really important point—to treat people fairly or justly, for her, means to treat them all the same. So calls for social justice in the form of everything from DEI initiatives to police reform to affirmative action, what have you—calls for social justice are actually unjust because they call for the reallocation of resources in some way. They don't treat everybody the same. Okay? And that's her argument. She says that's the biblical position: impartiality.

Now, here's the key. Okay, if you've studied the Bible at all, you know this. If not, you can go look it up if you're not sure that I'm selling you a straight bill of goods here. But this is not how most people would read all those biblical passages that I referenced earlier—the dozens or hundreds. If we view all of those passages, okay—the vast, vast majority of which Stuckey does not discuss—if we view those passages without presupposing this norm of impartiality, they look very partial.

In other words, taken at face value, it is clear, as you read those, that God demonstrates a preference for the poor, the marginalized, the dispossessed, the widow, the foreigner, et cetera, in those commands for justice. A critic could look and say the biblical God absolutely plays favorites and favors the downtrodden and the oppressed and the marginalized. And this is a point that has been recognized by Bible readers for literally millennia at this point.

And for almost as long, this is also a point that those with privilege and power have tried to undermine. As long as people with privilege and power have claimed the title of Christian and have read the Bible and have read these passages, they have worked to minimize them or to say that they don't really say what they seem to say and so forth. They have always worked to undermine these commands for justice. And this is what we encounter with Stuckey.

Okay, and here's what I think is going on with this. She and other conservatives approach these passages—particularly as they relate to racial justice, that's the topic she's focusing on—they approach these passages from what I call the myth of the level playing field. Okay? And what do I mean by that?

Well, on the analogy of a level playing field—everybody's heard the analogy—the idea is that everybody is playing by the same rules. They're subject to the same limitations. They're literally on—you know, the field is the same, what have you, the conditions are the same. On a level playing field, yes, fairness or justice is sameness. It is fair that everybody be treated the same, that it be impartial.

But let's stick with that analogy for a minute. Okay? If people haven't been competing on a level playing field, simply recognizing that is not sufficient. And here's my illustration. My illustration is an athletic contest. Let's say a football game, because that's my model.

And let's say that somehow or another, one team is systematically cheating, and there haven't been flags thrown. They've gotten away with it, what have you, for the first half of the game. They've been cheating. They jump out to a 21-point lead because they're cheating. And then it somehow comes to light that they have been cheating. They're called out on it. Okay?

So even if they acknowledge—they say, "Oh man, you're right, you're right, we've been cheating. We're not going to do that anymore. In fact, we're going to pull all the players that were cheating. We're going to vote players into the game who weren't cheating, who didn't know that it was happening, who didn't do it themselves. We're done. Okay, we're done." And you say, "Hey, the playing field is now level. We're going to start playing fair." And okay, cool. Thanks. Problem solved.

So here's the issue. Obviously, even if the players on the other team recognize that things have been unfair, even if they start playing fair, even if you swap out all the players, the damage has already been done and the lasting effects moving forward are still in place. You're still down by 21 points. Like, those are the lasting effects.

And to sort of push the analogy further, if you're behind by a lot in a football game or a lot of other sports, it changes the strategies you're going to use. It kind of closes out which plays you're going to use. It changes everything. It affects everything. It closes off options moving forward. Okay?

So what does that mean? It means that if you say, "Okay, well, we're going to play fair now. We're going to start playing fair now in the second half of the game," that doesn't mitigate the damage of the half that was played unfairly. Everyone on the cheating team, even again, if they weren't on the field doing the cheating, even if they hate the cheating, even if they themselves would never have cheated, they continue to benefit from the fact that the cheating occurred. They still have a 21-point lead with everything that comes with that.

Now, I hope the points in the illustration are clear, but what am I trying to illustrate? That's how notions like systemic racism or systemic inequality and privilege work. The ongoing effects of that cheating and the ongoing benefits that accrue to one team because of that cheating—they illustrate how systems and privilege work. And it highlights what I brought up last episode: how privilege is not a matter of intention. Again, even if it's different players and they don't intend to cheat anymore and so forth, they still reap the benefits of what happened before.

So it's pointless there to simply, quote-unquote, level the playing field. "Hey, hey, second half, we're all playing fair. We're going to play by the rules. We're not going to cheat anymore." It's pointless because it's not enough to just treat everybody at that point the same to make the game fair. Something would have to be done to mitigate the effects of the prior cheating. Just, you know, quote-unquote, moving on doesn't fix things.

So here, treating everyone the same becomes profoundly unfair. I think anybody would recognize this. So you're like, you're going to have to do something. You're going to have to replay the first half, or you're going to have to give them some points or some extra downs, or maybe they forfeit the game or something. Something has to happen.

And that is why, to apply our analogy here, to mitigate the ongoing effects of historical systemic disadvantage and privilege, it's not enough to start treating everybody the same now. Now, I recognize—I know I'm going to hear from folks, and I should want to throw this out there—I know this analogy is incomplete for a lot of reasons. But one is, I don't actually think that we treat everybody the same now. I don't think that we're currently on a level playing field and so forth. But for the sake of argument, I'm going to assume that we are, because that's what Stuckey thinks. Okay?

In this analogy, the ongoing effects of prior injustice—they have to be remedied. And until they are, there is no level playing field, even if everybody on the field, so to speak, would like it to be and plays by the rules and so forth.

Now, what does all this have to do with Stuckey? It has to do with this. Remember last two episodes, she denies that privilege and systemic injustice are real things. She reduces every form of injustice to individual intention. And this means that for her, injustice is something in the past. And her work is rife with this logic. Okay, here's the logic.

She says, "Okay, okay, there were broad racial injustices in the past, but that's the past. We're on a level playing field now. We have, like, the Civil Rights Movement and things like that, and we recognize racism is bad and so forth. So moving forward fairly means that we have to stop talking about race, and we just need to treat everybody the same. So calls for justice are actually injustice."

That's what I call the myth of the level playing field—that we have acknowledged evils of the past, and therefore, by acknowledging that, everything's on a level playing field moving forward. We acknowledge that there used to be racial injustice, but now we're all equal. So moving forward means that we have to treat everyone the same.

And this is the reason why not acknowledging systems and history and privilege as a problem—it licenses this utterly simplistic approach. It's also why people like Stuckey have such a vested interest in remaining ignorant or otherwise denying these realities. And the end result is the ongoing imposition of a white supremacist society. That is the end game.

And all of this, folks, is typical of right-wing thinking. And it explains why Stuckey reads the Bible the way she does on this issue. It's why she can, in a chapter talking about the Bible and social justice—a topic that the Hebrew Bible certainly talks about far more than any other issue she has talked about this entire book—she spends like two paragraphs talking about it. Because she can read it this way. Her presumption is that everyone actually is on a level playing field, and that therefore what we need is impartiality. Okay?

So then she says, "We have to be impartial. We have to treat everybody the same. Here's a couple Bible verses about impartiality." And the dozens and dozens and dozens that seem to say something different, we're now going to read them in terms of these verses.

It also, by the way, overlooks the fact that these commands for impartiality, if you read the Bible—like, okay, so why did God in the Bible give these commands? Because it wasn't in place. He commands impartiality because those in power were not acting impartially. She also has this weird assumption that, I don't know, that God is sort of affirming the status quo in these societies, and that's clearly not what the text would suggest.

So what is typical of Stuckey—a pattern we have seen over and over and over, it's a pattern I expected coming in, it's a pattern that has played out—is she takes a couple of Bible verses completely out of context, no background, no discussion of them, a couple Bible verses that accord well with her social and political identity, and then she imposes those as the mechanism for essentially disregarding everything else the Bible has to say on this topic.

So just as we saw last chapter, just as we saw in the chapter on immigration, her discussion of the Bible in this chapter is essentially an extended argument of why Christians who say they follow the teachings of the Bible can ignore what it says. She is basically working to say, "Yes, the Bible says all these things about social justice, but we don't have to worry about them because it says to be impartial, so don't do anything to help disadvantaged people. We need to just hold the course." The myth of the level playing field. And you add to the fact that we are not actually on a level playing field, and it just affirms a racist status quo.

Okay, could go on on that. That's like—you could literally do a full course on that. Okay, but there's one other topic in this chapter that I really want to get at. And this is another thing that governs Stuckey's discussion. It's another thing—again, we're reading Stuckey because she is typical of so much discourse—this is another thing that is not limited to her.

She makes a mistake in thinking about race that is common for many, many Americans, and that is this: she assumes that racism is literally about skin color. That is, she assumes that calls for social justice involve just basically focusing on melanin levels. That's what race is about. And she says this. She says that calls for social justice involve, quote, "placing blame on one group because of their melanin levels, while alleviating responsibility of another group because of their melanin levels." It is only skin color. It is literally melanin, melanin levels. That is all that this discussion is about.

And this is a common rhetorical device on the right. What you do is you make racism look silly. It's just about skin color, so that you can make combating racism look silly. Oh, you're just swapping one focus on skin color, which would be silly, to another focus on skin color, which would be silly. And that does sound silly, because it is. And it's because it's not how racism works.

So what is racism really about? Racism is about the allocation or denial of social resources, whether those are material or immaterial. I say social resources—this is everything from concrete things like money or land to other things like, you know, what we might call sort of soft concepts like social influence or access to social networks or sort of soft skill development, all those kinds of things. It is about the allocation or denial of social resources on the basis of perceived ethnic identity.

And we know—and can't go into all of this, it would be a whole other thing—if people don't know this and want to learn more about it, let's talk about this. There's nothing objective about that perceived identity. Race can be constructed in different ways within different cultures, and it has been. But within our culture, given our history, this identification is heavily coded to skin color—primarily, but not only, but primarily white and Black.

Which means that the categories of white and Black—they are not just about melanin levels. Whiteness and Blackness is not just about skin color. Rather, it breaks down on that axis because resource allocation has been coded with skin color. In broad brush strokes, if you have lighter skin, you have tended to be allocated greater social resources than if you have darker skin.

So seeking to redress racial injustice—to again stay with the focus that Stuckey has—if you seek to redress racial injustice, it's necessarily going to play out in terms of skin color, because those are the patterns. That is how ethnic identity and the resource allocation has been constructed in our society. But it's incorrect to say that it's taking place just because of the color of the skin of those involved.

So this is not about identifying melanin levels and then persecuting somebody or rewarding somebody. It is about reallocating social resources in a more equitable way to redress long-standing patterns of disadvantage. And yes, given our history and culture, that will break down along the lines of skin color. Again, these are the background assumptions that allow Stuckey to mount this very, very thin, very weak argument for a supposedly Christian view of social justice.

Deep breath. As always, there's a lot more we could say about this chapter. There is more that we could say about Stuckey in general. But it's time to move on from Allie Beth Stuckey.

So kind of winding this down, I think it's worth just summing up a couple unifying points from where we've been, what we've been doing the last several weeks. As we dig through this book, first is that, you know, Stuckey says—to repeat at the outset—that what she's presenting represents a perspective through a biblical lens. That's a claim that she makes. That is a claim that conservative Christians always make—that what they are putting forward is a, quote-unquote, biblical perspective.

But we have seen throughout her text that that biblical part is pretty thin. She never leads with it. She doesn't spend much time on it. She doesn't do it consistently, and she doesn't do it well. And folks, this is typical of those who claim to be mounting a, quote-unquote, biblical perspective.

In my view, we should always be skeptical when someone assures us that they're just saying what the Bible says, because nobody is ever just saying what the Bible says. They're always reading it from a particular perspective. They're always prioritizing some passages over others. They are always making interpretive decisions, and all of that has to be acknowledged and explored. And I think that is especially the case when there's no daylight between their own views and those of a particular political party or social group.

Routinely, in her book, Stuckey positions herself as a conservative, and she castigates liberals and progressives—not Christians and non-Christians, but conservatives versus progressives. That identity, that political identity, is foregrounded. So don't let her or anybody else kid you. And if they somehow try to say that this isn't about politics at all, or they differentiate—say, "Well, this is a religious view, not a political one"—it's not. It's both at the same time. Okay?

I think this brings up the second point, which is that Stuckey illustrates the way that for millions of Americans, there is an absolute equivalence between conservative Christianity and cultural and political conservatism. They go together. You can't be one without the other.

And if there are issues where that doesn't seem to be a good fit—and I've talked about this—conservative Christians have opposed abortion for quite some time now, and that's one that most people recognize as a, quote-unquote, religious issue. We talk about the history of it and so forth. But in general, that's a recognition. But immigration and race are a different game.

And what you're going to see is that those conservative Christians, if there's a position that the political and cultural conservatives affirm, they will always find a way to make it biblical. Always. The same way that the conservative Supreme Court justices on the bench right now will always find a way to make anything the Trump administration wants to do—they will find a way to make it legal. It's the same thing.

And third, and I think this is an important point about Stuckey's discussion throughout, it's clear that her real issue isn't empathy, despite what she says. It's empathy for the wrong people. This entire book is aimed at preserving the privilege of straight, white American Christians. It is not aimed at overcoming that. It is not aimed at undoing empathy. It is not aimed at, quote-unquote, not playing favorites. It is aimed at preserving favoritism.

And this, again, is typical of the discourses on the right. They are not about fairness and justice. They are about maintaining the privilege of those who benefit from unfairness and from inequitable social distributions and so forth. And that is all clear in this text. Again, we're reading Stuckey not because she's unique, not because she's special, but because she's typical. And she is. And I hope I've had a chance to show that.

We're moving on from Stuckey. We're moving on to Josh Hawley's book Manhood. We're going to start talking about manhood. We're going to see what the right can tell us about manhood. I guess I'll have to confront whether or not I measure up as manly, according to those on the right.

But we don't have to be done with Stuckey. If you're like, "I'm done with Stuckey," good. Good for you. And welcome further comments. Keep the emails coming. Keep the Discord comments coming. Feel free—if you are a subscriber and our bonus episodes that we record live—if you want to throw some stuff in the chat that we can talk about there, would love to do it. If we need to spend more kind of spinning out of some of the topics that we've talked about in this series, let me know. danielmillerswaj@gmail.com.

For now, let me say again, thank you. Thank you for the support. Thank you for the kind and encouraging words that I hear from so many of you. I apologize, as I always do, that I just don't respond to everybody in a timely fashion, but I do the best I can. Your support means so much. Thank you, and please be well until we have a chance to talk again.