"You Don't Want Justice": Here Are the Receipts

Scene from "The Lion King" where Scar tells a mouse he caught "Life's not fair, is it?" Image source.

[content note: abusive Christian theology, hypothetical discussion of child death]

The "gospel" that I learned in evangelical Christianity said "you don't want justice." It said we are all sinners and therefore deserve to die and go to hell and never ever experience anything good- we don't even deserve to be alive right now, but God lets us be alive and occasionally happy because his mercy is just so huge and illogical. "Justice" means every single person in the world should die right now and go to hell, and wow, wouldn't that be terrible, no we don't want "justice." "Mercy" means everyone gets to at least experience some pleasure in their earthly life, and some of us get to go to heaven when we die (if we "accept Jesus") and wow isn't that just WILD how God would allow such good things for us when we all deserve death? The struggle between God's "justice" and God's "mercy"- that was the message of the "gospel" I used to believe.

And I got your receipts right here. Last week, I happened across two different articles teaching this abusive theology: If Your Kids Say This Phrase, They’re More Entitled Than You Realize (by Daniel Darling) and He Lets Us Live (by Trevin Wax). Let's take a look.

In Darling's article, the "entitled" phrase that kids say is "that's not fair."

The #1 Entitled Phrase Kids Say: “That’s not fair.”

It sounds innocent enough. Everybody wants life to be fair, right?

But this is an insidious phrase, revealing a sin so bankrupt it goes back to the very beginning, back to the Fall of Man. It’s essentially what Eve was told by the serpent. “You’re getting a raw deal. You’re entitled to more. God is holding out on you.”

Wowwwww THAT ESCALATED QUICKLY.

He gives 3 reasons why "that's not fair" is not a good thing to say. First:

First, you are right in saying that life isn’t fair.

Because it’s not fair that little children go to bed hungry this very night, having eaten nothing but a handful of rice, and here you’ve just had seconds on french fries. It’s not fair that some boys and girls grow up without a mother and father, orphaned by a war they didn’t start. It’s not fair that some children won’t even see many birthdays, succumbing to diseases we treat with immunizations and routine trips to the doctor.

Okay, this is called oppression olympics. It's when someone says you're not allowed to complain or advocate for justice on some issue when there are other issues in the world that are worse. Apparently, we need to imagine the worst possible suffering that someone in the world is experiencing, and ONLY THAT PERSON is allowed to speak up about how badly they are suffering. Everyone else doesn't get to complain; they should be grateful that their life isn't as bad.

Oppression olympics is just RIDICULOUS. I believe that everyone deserves to have a happy and healthy life- I believe that's how it is in the kingdom of God, and we want the kingdom of God to come on earth as it is in heaven. So that's the standard we should use to measure someone's suffering- if something is hurting you or damaging your mental health, etc, then it shouldn't be that way and it's right to speak up and advocate for yourself and take steps to correct it. For practical reasons, we can't always fix those problems, but that's the ideal we should try for.

But in oppression olympics, we use the worst example of poverty as the "standard", and everyone whose life is above that "standard" has no right to complain.

(I'd also like to point out: He says "you and me and all of us in prosperous, free America" have it so good compared to those poor kids elsewhere in the world- and I don't like this. Because there is poverty in the US too. When I was little, I was taught "well when people talk about 'poverty' in the US, it's not really that bad, like they have TVs and stuff so it's not like it's *real* poverty." Drawing a big contrast between the US and "third world countries" and then being heartless toward poor people in the US. Darling's article doesn't say anything like that, but I am very uncomfortable with his assumption that everyone in the US is just fine in terms of getting their basic needs met.)

Note, however, that unlike me, Darling very much does NOT believe "everyone deserves to have a happy and healthy life." In the second point of his argument, he says:

Second, you really don’t want life to be fair.
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Listen to the words of the prophet, Jeremiah, “It is of his mercies we are not consumed” (Lamentations 3:22).

In other words, because of our sin against Him, it is overwhelming mercy that we are not immediate targets of His judgement. Instead, we are beneficiaries of His grace. We really don’t want God to be fair, but to be just.

What’s unfair is Jesus’ assuming our wrath and guilt on the cross on our behalf so we could be restored to a right relationship with God.

Yep, there it is. The idea that since we're all sinners, we deserve to die and go to hell, so nobody should ever complain about anything bad that happens, because really we deserve so much worse. I used to believe that.

This is spiritual abuse. How can a person cope, when bad things happen, when they believe they're not allowed to feel "this isn't right and I deserve better"? How can a victim stand up for themself when they're treated unfairly, if they believe they actually deserve worse?

Wax's article, "He Lets Us Live" is all about this, so we'll just go ahead and take a little break from looking at Darling's article and switch over to Wax's. He tells about when his 10-year-old daughter prayed, "Thank you, Lord, for letting David live another year" on her brother David's 5th birthday. Wax writes about how using the word "letting" there feels very strange because David hadn't been in any life-threatening situations that past year. Wax hadn't been thinking about the possibility that David might not survive to reach his 5th birthday. But, he says in his post, he should have been thinking that way. He should have been like his daughter, thinking in terms of God "letting" them live.

The assumption undergirding my daughter’s prayer was that David’s life wasn’t necessary. Things didn’t have to be the way they had turned out. David didn’t deserve another year of life, and neither did we deserve another year of that little boy lighting up our home. The fact he lived to see his fifth birthday was just as much a gift of God’s grace as the day we brought him home from the hospital.

Now, it's one thing to say "hmm, a few hundred years ago, most children didn't even survive to adulthood, and now isn't it great we have vaccines and modern medicine, we should be thankful for those things," but that's not the angle Wax is taking in his post. This is not a post about advances in medical technology. It's about how, apparently, his 5-year-old son doesn't deserve to be alive, and we should all be thankful that God performs acts of amazing mercy, day after day, in not just letting the boy die.

Like, holy hell that is abusive.

The next part of Wax's article says this:

Who knows how many accidents were averted in David’s fifth year? Who knows how close death was to our door? Who could count how many times God rearranged the flow of cells in the body to ensure that our son wasn’t struck by an illness that could take his life? Who knows how many accidents could have upended our family’s life and health? Every day, we zoom past hundreds or thousands of cars. Every day, our bodies could degenerate and die. Every day, we take our safety for granted. And every day, we are sustained by the hand of a good and sovereign God. Grace, when we deserve judgment.

All right, yeah I've heard Christians talking along these lines before. Imagining all sorts of hypothetical dangers that God "saved" us from and therefore we never ever realized we were in danger. In my opinion, it's absurd and meaningless because none of this is real. It's just our imagination making stuff up, and there's no evidence. There could never be any evidence, by definition, because these are things God prevented from happening. What's the point? You wanna make up a bunch of imaginary disaster scenarios and then thank God for stopping them all from happening? Okay, that's just a silly game in your head. None of it is real.

And then this, which is extremely bad advice in terms of mental health:

In my mind, I know these truths. I know my breaths are undeserved. I know that every moment I get with my kids is a gift and that their lives, like mine, are sustained by the sovereign ruler of the universe. Oh, but too often there is a gap between our theological knowledge and the assumptions we live with! Our theoretical knowledge doesn’t seep down deep into our hearts and then find expression in our prayers and in our words and in our gratitude for existence.
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Why not say something so beautiful every night? Thank you, Lord, for letting me live to see another day!

He's talking about how Christians say they believe this or that, but they don't follow those things to their logical conclusions. If we say we believe we don't deserve good things, we deserve to go to hell... well if you take that to its logical conclusion, you will literally end up thanking God every day, almost surprised you didn't die, on an intense roller coaster between fear and overwhelming joy. Living in a constant state of anxiety because you truly do believe that God would be well within their rights to just kill you at any moment.

Wowwww. And here is Trevin Wax telling us that's what we should strive for.

(Note: I would like to point out that Wax never actually gives a reason to support his assertion that we don't deserve to live. I assume it's because he believes we are sinners that deserve to die and go to hell, but he doesn't say it explicitly in this particular post.)

All right, let's get back to Darling's article, because he still has a bunch more to say:

And on a more personal, pragmatic, earthly level, we should ask ourselves: Do we really want God to even out the score? For us in wealthy, rich America, that might mean taking some things away from us and giving them to the less fortunate. Or someone more appreciative.

Uhhhh... wait.

Isn't this what we should be doing, though? Those of us with more money and privilege should use that to help other people. We should give what we're able to give- counting the cost, of course. I find it extremely weird that Darling says it like it's a threat. As if we should be properly grateful while we hold on tight to the money and privilege we were born into, and that's just fine because we have the correct feelings of gratitude toward God.

Also, God taking away things from the rich and giving to the poor is literally what the kingdom of God is- at least in my understanding. Like, has Darling read the bible? There's A LOT in there about how rich people who hoard their wealth should WATCH OUT because God is going to come and set things right some day. In Darling's post, he writes it like a threat that we can avoid by not ever saying "that's not fair", like something that's not real, just a thought experiment to prove that we don't *really* want things to be fair- but, umm, this is what is ACTUALLY GOING TO HAPPEN AT THE RESURRECTION.

Like... have you read the bible?

(To be fair, later in the article he does say we should have "a healthy sense of justice" where we take action to help those who have less than us.)

On to Darling's third point:

Third, an ungrateful and entitled heart is evidence of a deeper problem with God.

This is what worries me most about entitlement. It is saying to God: I do not trust you to be my Father, to take care of my needs, to love me and care for me.

Worse, it elevates self to a god-like position. Ingratitude says: I know better what is good for me. I’m a better god than God.

Umm. So no matter what's happening to you, you're not allowed to point out "hey, this isn't right"? You're not allowed to ever be unhappy, because that would be telling God that you don't like the way they're supposedly taking care of you? In this ideology, there's really no such thing as "bad things happening" because all of it is in "God's plan" and if you don't like it, you're saying "I'm a better god than God."

Policing emotions- yes, this is spiritual abuse.

Let me back up a bit and talk about children saying "that's not fair", which is the specific situation Darling's article addresses. Usually if children are saying this, it's because they see another child- maybe their sibling or friend- getting something that (they believe) is better than what they got.

Now, when I was a kid, I thought a lot of things "weren't fair", but now that I'm an adult I realize parents are flawed human beings who sometimes don't really know what to do and are just making it up as they go along, so that's why the rules end up being inconsistent from one sibling to another. As a child, I imagined my parents were always confident in their parenting approach, like they had decided on firm rules and were applying those rules differently to me and my siblings. But it wasn't like that.

When I was treated differently than my siblings, it was because the situation was different, or what I needed was different, or my parents realized that some rule they used to have wasn't actually a good rule so they changed it, etc. They weren't trying to making things "unfair." And I think that's what little kids need to understand when they say "that's not fair." Instead of having adults just dismiss it and tell them it's wrong for them to speak up when things are "not fair."

Because, even if kids don't realize that their situation differs from their siblings' and nobody is actually trying to treat them worse, their natural drive to stand up for themselves is a GOOD THING. But Darling is saying we should teach our kids that it's wrong for them to speak up when somebody mistreats them.

You should be glad that your kid is strong and confident and won't accept it when they're being treated unfairly. Even though sometimes that righteous anger is misdirected because the kid doesn't understand you're in a situation where it doesn't make practical sense to give every kid the exact same treatment.

I'm only learning now, as an adult, to advocate for myself. How to have boundaries. How to know my own needs, communicate about them, and take steps to make sure those needs are met. Because as a child I learned in church "Jesus first, others second, myself last." And that it's "selfish" and sinful to focus too much on getting what I want. That I could be "making it an idol." I shouldn't care about my own needs; I should just "put God first" and it will all work out.

And it feels like teaching your kid "it's wrong to say 'that's not fair'" is setting them up for this same I-only-just-now-realized-my-mental-health-actually-matters process I went through.

So. To sum up: As a kid, I learned in church that "you don't want justice" because "justice" means we all die and go to hell- that's what we deserve because we're sinners who don't deserve anything good. And look, I got the receipts, I got two articles on it. Conservative Christians really do literally teach this. It's spiritual abuse, and I'm so glad I don't believe it any more and I can see it for how harmful it is. Now I believe in the kingdom of God instead. In the kingdom of God, everyone deserves happiness.

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Related:
I Deserve God's Love
Yes, I Want Justice (A post about white evangelicals and #BlackLivesMatter)