Thread by @lymanstoneky

I like David French but this is clearly wrong.

https://twitter.com/DavidAFrench/status/1480198660239540235

There has been progress on racial justice, yes: but most of the progress occurred while religiosity was still very high and fairly stable. As religiosity has declined, progress on racial justice has clearly faltered, and we're now in a place were it's not even clear...

What anybody means by a phrase like "progress on racial justice." Without a shared pre-political moral landscape, statements like that are meaningless, and so unsurprisingly political discourse around them becomes irresolvable.

But the thing is, racial justice is probably the *best* example of progress in the US. In many places we've had clear backward movement, like income inequality, which has obviously become more unequal!

Nor have we become a more charitable society: by many measures, Americans give less as a % of income now than decades ago, so it's not like wealth is fueling great generosity to the poor or something.

Many will suggest that the changed status of LGBT people is a clear movement towards justice. I am not sure a political Christian like David French would be comfortable making that argument; indeed he doesn't mention it at all.

And if we broaden from "LGBT people" to "sexual justice" generally, I'm not sure that we can really argue that rates of e.g. cheating on spouses or sexual abuse actually fell over time, and those are clearly issues of justice!

Overall, I dislike saying that a society has become more or less "just" or "free" without first stipulating an explicit moral viewpoint which is being used to define "just" or "free" and thus to define *for whom* justice and freedom are being guaranteed.

Because while I do think of myself within the classical liberal tradition, it's clearly hopeless naivete to think that there actually exists some neutral and impartial form of justice-for-all and freedom-for-all, since perceptions of justice and right bounds of freedom....

.... are not universally shared, and in many cases are not even very broadly shared! This, when I say society became more just (if I say such a thing), it is only semantically meaningful if I first define justice in terms of a specific and non-neutral worldview.

"I am a Christian, and from my perspective, society became more just, and for my definition of freedom, it got more free." is a meaningful statement. And it's close to what French is saying! But not exactly.

More to the point, the idea that American society in 2021 is trending more towards what "Society rightly ruled by Christians" would look like is... oh man. Wow. No, it is not.

As of 2017 you could at least argue that abortion rates were in gradual decline, but 2019 and 2020 have seen considerable increases in abortion rates again, so you can't even point to that anymore!

Finally, I should mention that I think there is a real incompatibility between *in particular* the Evangelical/Reformed/Baptist/Calvinist tradition that I believe @DavidAFrench is coming from (I think?) and the classical liberal conception of justice.

Those coming out of this tradition are committed to a very specific theory of goodness, namely, that "things are good because God in His free sovereignty has proclaimed them to be good." The sovereignty of God is treated as logically prior to any conception of goodness.

And the "free gift" of grace as construed in this tradition is pretty much definitionally arbitrary: it is not given in view of any kind of merit, it is not given to all, atonement is limited.

In this theological tradition, which to be clear as a raised-Methodist-became-Lutheran I very much reject across multiple levels, "justice" is merely "the specific preferences of God." Saving an arbitrary chosen people is just because it is what God in fact does.

This is obviously not a conception of justice recognizable to classical liberals! So when it comes to talking about Christian ideas of justice, I think @DavidAFrench is somewhat off-base here in supposing that the classical liberal view of justice fits well with the Reformed view

And that Reformed view is the dominant strain by far within the broad swathe including Reformed, Presbyterian, Baptists.... Pentecostals are divided, Methodists reject this view, Lutherans are off doing our own weird thing....

... Now of course the intensity of expression varies and the extent to which people in this traditions are comfortable following the arguments to their conclusions varies even more, but this is the position the most well-informed exponents fall back to when pressed.

There are of course ways to create "something like" the classical liberal view within this framework, but it isn't quite the same thing and it bears noting that "justice" as a Christian describes it is not synonymous!