Social Justice and the Right

Matthew Yglesias is right to suggest that the modern Christian Right, despite some intimations to the contrary, does have some notion of social justice, and it’s not all bad. Certainly the following rhetorical questions

Who’s working to halt the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa? Who’s trying to help refugees in Darfur? Who’s trying to stop global trafficking in women? Why, that would be socially conservative religious movements.

Have a much broader answer than he gives–it’s actually lots of organizations, many of whom are on the left and some of whom are affiliated with religious conservatives. Many people mistook Bush’s 2000 pledge to increase anti-AIDS efforts in Africa as a sop to the left, to show that he really is compassionate and all that. Just as much, I think it was an effort to show the Christian right that he really is paying attention to them and their concerns. Of course, in this one rare case where pandering to the Christian right and good policy overlap, the promised funds (predictably) never came close to materializing. But that’s a side issue–the main point here is that yes, there are selectively applied social justice concerns on the modern Christian right, and while the narrowness and huge blind spots in that commitment deserve criticism, much of the work actually done deserves admiration.

But where I part ways with Matthew’s analysis is in the next question:

For that matter, who’s charged off on a neo-Wilsonian quest to spread democracy at gunpoint.

Um, well, the Bush administration, with his domestic supporters cheering him along. But not the Christian right. If memory serves me correctly, MY should have been in High School during the Kosovo campaign, and probably didn’t have much exposure to many elements of American conservatism at the time. My teaching career stretches back into the late 90’s, so I was in the classroom with young Republicans while all this was going on. They, along with almost everyone on the right, including some opinion leaders in the Christian right, shook their heads sadly and the foolishly ambitious plans of the naive liberal Clinton. They play-acted at being hard-headed realists and humble Burkeans, but anyone with a clue realized it was actually all about attacking Clinton no matter what he did. It would be a big mistake to assume that all, or even most, of the support for the Iraq war comes from a real and sincere ideological position. This is no doubt true for a handful of neocons, but most conservative wouldn’t have supported the exact same war if it had been lead by a Democrat, and the religious right is no exception. By and large, they supported the war because their guy did it, and he sold it in a way that appealed to them. But this support shouldn’t be taken as support for a (misguided) social justice mission in the way that the Christian right’s other activities mentioned above should be. The vast majority of support for the Iraq war is about partisan politics, and not much more.