What Is the Meaning of Justice?

Why the Political Insights of Christianity Matter

I realized, as soon I first attended the local precinct meeting of my preferred political party, that practical politics was no place for me. I thought that since I had long been interested in the “big ideas” animating political contests, I would of course like to play a role in that effort. So I dredged up where and when my local party chapter was meeting, and I attended wrapped in the gauzy notion that I was putting my principles into action.

I was bored utterly out of my skull.

Vote getting and practical policy efforts are exercises in extended tedium. If you are not fascinated by legal and policy minutia, punctuated by infrequent popularity contests, you are not cut out for politics.

I confirmed this impression when, years after his presidency, Ronald Reagan published excerpts from his personal diary. It is fascinating to read and I highly recommend it. But one of the things that struck me from his diary was that he was not only interested in “big ideas”, but he was also fully engaged with the tedious nuts and bolts of legislative minutia. That level of tedium is not the kind of thing that makes it onto the network news. Nevertheless, his interest in legislative detail was a critical facet of his overall political success.

I mention all of this to make the point that none of what follows is designed to advance a particular policy, party, or agenda. My tolerance for monotony is just far too low for that. What I do want to suggest, however, is that there are fundamental things which precede questions of practical politics, such things as the meaning of justice, and how that manifests itself in governments and in law.

For at least a few hundred years, laws and governments in the West have been predicated on a particular understanding of what constitutes justice. Over the last 40 years or so, while we have continued to use the word “justice”, the meaning has been hollowed out and replaced by something else. So though we may still talk about “justice”, the essential meaning has largely been replaced by something that, for most of history, would have been actually understood to be injustice.

The picture at the top of this post is a picture of Lady Justice standing outside a United States Courthouse. You will notice that she is blindfolded. Throughout most of history, her blindfold has expressed the longstanding notion that “justice is blind”. The blindness of justice is a way of expressing, interestingly enough, the essential facet of how justice is described in both the Jewish and Christian biblical texts. In Judeo-Christian thought, the essential attribute of justice was its evenhandedness. It does not put its thumb on the scales - hence a blinded lady justice is always holding scales. When people talk about “the rule of law”, and complain about a “two-tiered system of justice”, they are suggesting that everyone should be equally subject to laws - even judges and politicians, but also that the law is applied without regard to anything other than the standards of the law itself. The identity or status of the one standing before the judge is irrelevant to the application of the law. If judges and politicians are not themselves subject to the law, then justice is not blind. If, say, BLM protestors and Antifa thugs are not prosecuted with the same vigor and severity as J6 demonstrators, then it calls into question whether our justice system is “two-tiered”. “Two-tiered” is shorthand for saying that, rather than being blind, our justice system is showing partiality to one group or another. Is the law itself normative, or do we fudge things based on some characteristic of the alleged perpetrator? These questions, acknowledged or not, swirl around any notion of what justice means.

The question of justice is also inextricably intertwined with the question of morals. Some people will say, “You cannot legislate morality.” But as the late U.S. solicitor general and appeals court judge Robert Bork observed, “we legislate little else.” Every law is a codification and assertion of a moral obligation. Every law implicitly distinguishes between what is considered right and what is wrong. If failing to pay one’s tax is penalized, it is an implicit statement that failing to pay taxes is wrong, and conversely, paying taxes is right.

Where this gets awkward is in regard to how distinctions between right and wrong are ever to be made. The ancient Christian texts say that governments are ordained by God to execute temporal justice - specifically by protecting the righteous and punishing evildoers. (e.g. Romans 13) But the obligations of temporal justice placed upon governments presuppose, of course, that such governments are capable of distinguishing between good and evil. Also inescapable, from a Christian worldview perspective, is that governments are subsidiary and derived. They are not self-originating, nor are they self-defining. The essential principle is that just governments operate by using force against those who do evil, in support of those who do good. Also, that governments are acting as God’s agents, which means that God himself is the source of any legitimate distinctions they make between right and wrong.

You can see these very ideas encapsulated in the rationale offered by Thomas Jefferson and the other signers of the Declaration of Independence. Rights precede governments, and they derive from God rather than from governments, which governments are themselves superintended by God.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Of course, many people are ignorant of these ideas - including some who have a tight grip on the media microphone.

Honestly, if our rights, the definition of justice, and the distinctions between right and wrong are not transcendent, we are well and truly screwed. We have all become subject to the caprice of fashionable opinion. Cancel culture will have been just a mild precursor to the devastation of innocent lives headed our way.

Even a growing number of atheists have started to realize that you cannot avoid tyranny in the absence of a Judeo-Christian vision for justice and morality. Tom Holland wrote an entire book about the importance of Christianity. James Lindsay has lately been giving advice to Christians about how to improve their cultural impact. Others have been doing the same. Even the likes of Richard Dawkins has figured it out:

The ancient Christians even offer us a perspective for how things can go completely off the rails. They said that as soon as you abandon your presupposition that God is real, and that you owe him a debt of gratitude, your ability to think well - your rationality itself - begins to erode. That kind of makes sense. If God is real, denying his existence necessarily puts you out of kilter with reality. The long-term effects of delusional assumptions can’t be good. Interestingly, the ancients go on to say that one of the ways this mental erosion can manifest itself is in…wait for it…same sex attraction. I’m not making this up - read the first chapter of the epistle to the Romans for yourself and see if I’m not telling it straight.

Governments are inevitably going to pursue something. There is something that every government reveres. Every system has a god. Laws will inevitably codify some notion of morality. The question that obtains is, from whence is the agenda and moral framework going to come?

It’s possible to continue having elections, even after the loss of any cultural consensus regarding the meaning of justice, or the distinction between right and wrong. But, I confess I have grown increasingly haunted by the sense that our elections have begun to resemble Miss Havisham’s wedding dress - a threadbare and ragged reminder of something that has long since been lost. I’m not [necessarily] saying our elections aren’t real. Only that in the absence of shared understandings of justice and morality, they can never be the panacea of yummy goodness that hungry politicians would have us believe.

The importance of Judeo-Christian insights is that they can foster a recovery of the true meaning of justice, and the telos of human nature, from which all moral insights are downstream.

It’s hard not to suspect that the emergent energy surrounding “Christian Nationalism” is, in some ways, a kind of immune response within the body politic to the loss of a societal consensus regarding these critical ideas. Some might even say it’s an inflammatory response. Haha! The revulsion with which Christian Nationalism is met by the Left is, I fear, motivated by at least two things.

First, the Left intuits that the vacuum created by hollowing out the idea of justice means that rule inevitably accrues to those who amass the most power. There are no transcendent or principled limits on government power in the minds of the Left. The Left, in classic projection, suspects that Christian Nationalist are just like themselves (i.e. that their motivation is all about the amassing of power). The Left darkly assumes that Christian Nationalists hope to do to the them as the left will do to the Christians, if they can manage to consolidate their power. The conflict is startling reminiscent of the lust for the Ring of Power in The Lord of the Rings. Though Gandalf, in his wisdom, perceived a way out:

“But the only measure he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it, that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it. If we seek this, we shall put him out of reckoning.”

The irony is that widespread acceptance of a transcendent standard of justice and morality always has the inevitable effect of constraining the power of governments and individuals alike. Implicit in the acceptance of transcendent standards is that there are limits to any power one human can wield over another. In such a context, all authority is delegated by the creator and is necessarily circumscribed for any of his deputies. The Christian Nationalists, whoever they are, would do well to ensure that their motivations are not the accumulation of power but the benevolent administration of true justice.

The second factor that alarms the Left is that the most radical fringes of their movement, having thrown off all moral constraints, are loathe to return to a government of blind justice or the equal application of laws. They’re living large right now - some might even say running amok - and they are unlikely to be willing to relinquish the two-tiered system of justice they are enjoying.

I don’t have a happy program to offer to make everything peachy, or any quick fixes. We didn’t get here over night and life is not a TV show I’m afraid. Anyone who loves what is good and true needs to accept that the horizon is far in the distance.

I suspect that the aftermath of the upcoming national election is going to be traumatic no matter who wins. That’s because even honest elections, if such things still exist in 2024, can never facilitate a shared cultural consensus on the meaning of justice, or agreement on transcendent standards for morality.

What elections can do is buy some time, so by all means people should vote. Time creates space for cultural ferment. And that’s important, because a cultural consensus on justice, and the transcendent basis of morality, can only be planted and grown. It can never be conjured by fiat.

Serious Christians need to make themselves seriously useful by seriously planting. Perhaps we should have more conversations with far more people about things that matter. Also, we need to devote ourselves more thoroughly to praying - I do at least - for God’s mercy and intervention. Whatever the value of votes and of voting, God himself will have the ultimate say.