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I've been following the movement for three decades now—I was an early subscriber to Sojourners and the now defunct The Other Side—and in my experience it has been the rare social justice appeal that grounds itself in the gospel of grace, in the Cross and Resurrection, in the miraculous gift of forgiveness, and in the immense gratitude that naturally flows from that gift.

This relative absence of the vertical—the redeeming work of God in Christ—in social justice rhetoric is matched by a focus on the horizontal. The rhetoric usually assumes that the problem is a lack of human will and that the job of the movement's leaders is to cajole people out of social indifference with whatever psychological tactic is at hand:

• Guilt: Look at others' poverty in comparison to our wealth.
  
• Fear: What will our world be like if we don't do something about x now?
  
• Shame: How can we call ourselves disciples of Christ and not do x?
  
• Moralism: Exhortations littered with should, ought, do, and must.
  

Sometimes the appeal is less oppressive, but nonetheless optimistic about the human will. A new curriculum designed to help churches love the neighbor—specifically in terms of social concern and social justice—uses this line in an e-mail marketing piece: "For most of us caught up in the hectic demands on our lives, the biggest problem is not desiring to be the Good Samaritan—it's acting on that desire! It's starting!" The curriculum promises to solve what it seems to think is a little problem.

The new emphasis on kingdom theology—an eschatological vision that will drive our concerns for social justice—is a helpful vertical corrective. Still, there is optimism in even this corrective that suggests we think all will be well once we get people to think rightly. But the stubbornness of the human will is anything but a little problem. It is, in fact, the problem of fallen humankind, of deep-seated desire gone awry. As Willard put it in a Christianity Today interview, as Christians we are "learning to do the things that … Jesus is favorable toward out of a heart that has been changed into his" [emphasis added]. We cannot simply harangue people to change their wills; our wills need divine attention first.

The more mature leaders of the social justice movement know this spiritual reality all too well. They've watched too many activists burn out because they knew not the vertical dimension of social justice. But the language we use to describe our goals and to persuade others can so easily degenerate. The transformation of many liberal churches into social service agencies with a religious veneer is one result of fixating on the horizontal.

Another wonderful development is our increased awareness of the variety of races and ethnicities that make up our world. We're still figuring out what a multiethnic evangelicalism looks like, but no one is arguing that we shouldn't figure it out! For this we can thank not only America's changing demographics but also the prophetic voices and examples of men like John Perkins and Rudy Carrasco.

Yet here too we see a constant horizontal temptation. A leading Asian evangelical has just released a book that seeks to "free the evangelical church from Western cultural captivity." He begins with what everyone recognizes as entrenched problems: our individualism, consumerism, materialism, racism, and cultural imperialism.

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October 2009, Vol. 53, No. 10