Worldview and the Modern Culture War - #2: Christian Worldview E-book Series, #9

Introduction

MarketFaith Ministries is a worldview discipleship ministry. Our purpose is to provide resources and training to help Christians become more knowledgeable and effective as they live out their Christian faith.

We have been providing resources and training since 2006. Over that period, we have produced many books focused on the topic of worldview and its practical implications for Christians. You can find them in various places where books are sold, as well as on the MarketFaith Ministries website (www.marketfaith.org).

But in addition to the books, we have written scores of articles. This e-book is part of a series that we are making available that feature many of the articles that have been published. Each e-book contains articles that focus on a specific area of worldview knowledge.

You will find the knowledge contained in this resource to be valuable beyond imagination. It will give you the ability to understand and effectively interact with the people who have different views  – some that you may consider truly unimaginable.

Social Corruption

The word social has generally been considered a rather innocent and inoffensive word. The dictionary gives three different definitions, and each of them simply describe some kind of community relationship.

1. Relating to society, its organization, or hierarchy.

2. Needing companionship; suited to living in communities.

3. Relating to or designed for activities in which people meet each other for pleasure.

However, in recent times this word has come to be attached to other words in a way that reflects a specifically Marxist connotation. In this usage, rather than merely expressing a simple community relationship, it is asserting some expression of political collectivism or the beliefs underlying it. Let’s look at some examples:

Social Darwinism – Social Darwinists believe in the concept of the survival of the fittest, where the fittest rise to the top of the social ladder. It specifically expresses the idea that certain people become powerful in society because they were born with better genes than the people they come to dominate. Additionally, it sees human beings as nothing more than natural animals, and acknowledges no moral imperative for the fittest to show any kind of deference or respect to those who are lesser creatures.

Social philosophy – Social philosophy is the philosophical study of the social world. It uses the social sciences to study and interpret the various elements of society and its social institutions in terms of ethical values. It attempts to answer such questions as:

1. How should we live together in society?

2. How do we come to know about each other, and to know about things together?

3. How do our social practices work to create categories of people, and why does this matter?

While most social philosophers like to think that they begin from a neutral foundation, nothing could be further from the truth. When they try to answer the above questions, the various social philosophers have to make their evaluations based on some predetermined set of values – and the values used by virtually all of them are naturalistic (atheistic) values. For them, there is no such thing as values based on an objective foundation. It is a completely relativistic approach based on the particular preferences of individual philosophers.

Now the two examples above certainly have real world manifestations, but are mostly philosophical expressions. The next two have the same worldview underpinning, but the expressions tend to play out more in real life.

Social compassion – Social compassion begins with the belief that individuals have an internal drive that compels them to seek accurate self-evaluations. The idea is that people attempt to do this evaluation by comparing themselves to others. This theory recognizes two basic types of social comparison. The first is upward comparison, where people compare themselves to others that they consider better than themselves. With this, they end up with a rather negative view of self. The second type is downward comparison, where people compare themselves to others that they consider lower than themselves. In this case, they end up with a positive view of self in comparison to others.

Like the other social concepts mentioned above, this one is also based purely on a subjective evaluation of people’s relative standing in society. There is no objective criteria for determining who is better or lesser than oneself. Those doing the evaluating determine this for themselves based on their own personal preferences and prejudices. Once again, it is a purely subjective naturalistic approach to understanding and valuing people.

Social justice – In a nutshell, social justice is the belief that there should be equal rights and equitable opportunities for all. It is based on three core beliefs:

1. Equal rights

2. Equal opportunity

3. Equal treatment

The only problem is, social justice warriors don’t make their evaluations concerning who should receive this equal treatment based on any kind of objective criteria. Rather, they identify, in advance, some oppressed groups that they believe are not getting equal treatment, and the privileged groups that they believe receive more than they deserve. They then make evaluations based on their own personal value preferences.

Once the various groups are identified, the social justice warriors advocate for and promote political and economic policies to even out the disparities by redistributing wealth. They take from the privileged and give it to the oppressed – mostly through government edicts. Once again, we are dealing here with a purely subjective naturalistic approach to addressing social issues.

Naturalistic Social Policies Are Corrupt

Of course, the people who