Glenn Beck Wants You to Leave Your Church – If you hear the words “social justice,” run!

“I’m begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them . . . are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words ‘social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!”

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Richard Clark

Richard Clark is the Founding Editor of Christ and Pop Culture. He is also the managing editor of Gamechurch and a freelance writer for Unwinnable, Paste, and other outlets. He lives with his wife in Louisville, KY and has a MA in Theology and the Arts from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
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17 Comments

  3. I couldn’t get the link to open to anything but a headline, so sorry if my observations are way off in the context. If it is social justice in the original, Social Gospel sense, then it might not be the worst idea. The Social Gospel (originating about 80 years ago) essentially taught that Jesus was a good example but not Divine, that sin was social evil and had no real personal element, and that salvation was from poverty and political and economic injustice, not from Christ’s vicarious sacrifice for sin. I don’t know how many of these problems Beck has (being Mormon), but people like Tim Keller (who I really like) using the term is more of an attempt to steal vocabulary for orthodocy than to assert anything that was originally orthodox. J. Gresham Machen was dealing with these same kind of people in the 1920s.

    Beck is likely focusing on the link of social justice to the Progressive movement that existed at the same time as the onset of the Social Gospel movement and their intertwined leftovers in contemporary society. Neither, I think, got it anywhere near right or near Christianity.

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  4. I think Beck is more concerned with social justice as the by-product of a “liberal” mindset than he is with the 19th century theological phenomenon. I’m also not sure there’s any necessary connection between social gospel movements and Christian social justice movements (as they seem to have different pedigrees, the former stemming from theological liberalism and the latter stemming, whether rightly or wrongly, from conservative-friendly concern over Christ’s teaching).

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  5. What Glenn Beck was talking about was denominations that support abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia, racism, laws like healthcare that pay for abortions and sex change operations and other unAmerican values like redistribution of wealth all in the name of “social justice”. One example would be denominations like United Church of Christ that Obama belonged to: http://www.ucc.org/justice/issues.html
    or pastors like Jeremiah Wright (he married the Obamas) at Obama’s old church Trinity United Chrurch of Christ, the same UCC.org denomination above, who spew racism and curse America: http://www.trinitychicago.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=114
    Go to Youtube and search Jeremiah Wright and you’ll find racist comments like this:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3wh2XT4e8M&feature=related
    THESE are the churces Glenn Beck is telling Christians to leave

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  6. A pulpit is a great place to start when you have an agenda. People trust their pastors too much and when a pastor of certain political views pushes his views, there is a problem. If a pastor make a comment here or there about our government, or states a common sense fact about our government it is one thing. But to have a pastor teach socialism, and (christians have been doing it for decades) teaching that we should “love” everybody, you have problems. Not that loving people is really wrong, but you get christians who don’t fully understand what discernment is. You get christians who willingly put their life in danger to “love” someone they don’t know…..thats a different subject…. As far as social justice goes, yeah that is a problem too. We can’t get moral justice, and people are wanting social justice?
    I can understand Glenn’s reasoning on this, but unless your preacher is just outright pushing an agenda, most people won’t notice, yet others will fear that maybe thier pastor is preaching it, when in fact the pastor is not. His statement above is not wrong, social justice and economic justice are nowhere in the Bible and such words are of political descent.

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  9. No Rich, read the comment more closely. He’s talking about Christians, not Jesus. Clearly there’s a difference. While Jesus may have given his life up in love Christians are not suppose to act like him.

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  10. What if churches are more about social or economic justice than the gospel? Should people leave those churches?

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  12. I don’t know. It depends on the circumstance. I wouldn’t like to join a church that focused on anything more than the gospel, but once part of such a congregation, one does have a certain duty to other believers in the church to effect what positive change one is able. I’ve stayed in churches before in order that the balance of gospel to other concerns might not be nearly so poorly balanced.

    Oftentimes, by encouraging believers to leave churches that are not up to their standards of what a church should be, you may be encouraging them to break their vows of membership. These are not the kind of things that should be taken lightly and they are not the kinds of things that propose a simple binary solution.

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  13. @ Rich

    I don’t know if David was being sarcastic, but he got it. We are Christians and we should act like Christ but if all of us went and died for what we believed was a good cause, then there would be very few Christians indeed.

    On the other hand I suppose, dying for Christ would be considered a good thing. And shouldn’t we all be looking forward to death? So in a sense Christians should be committing suicide, so as to get to see God sooner and be in Heaven.

    Some Christians herold such feats as martyrdom, to some lost it may move them to come to Christ, and then to other lost, feel such a foolish religion that gets you killed is not a religion they want to follow.

    The point there is, now you have one less person sharing the gospel.

    Jesus didn’t put his life in danger, he came to die, also he knew, and knows who everybody is.

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  16. Um…yeah sarcasm can be hard to detect sometimes online, but we aren’t called “CHRISTians” because we smell like Jesus, but because we’re suppose to live like Jesus.

    In fact our savior himself said, “Anyone who loves his life will lose it, but anyone who loses his life for my sake and the sake of the gospel will live though he dies.” Furthermore Jesus said we are to love our neighbors and that true love is when a man lays down his life for another.

    I could go on and on I think pointing out how everything that you’ve written is totally contrary to Scripture, Jason, instead I’ll just leave it as is and say, “Yes I was being super sarcastic!”

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