Utopian Thinking, Social Justice, and Immigration

A recent mailing from the Episcopal Diocese of Upper South Carolina focused more on "Social Justice" than sharing the Gospel of Christ. How do I know? I searched and searched for Jesus' name and could not find it anywhere in the E-DUSC News.  Instead, there was a prominent photo of Bishop Waldo gazing Jesus-like out a window with the title, "Door of Return: Racial Truth and Reconciliation Pilgrimage to Ghana" set beneath his countenance.

I don't think the Bishop had to go all the way to Ghana to find "racial truth", whatever that means, or reconciliation for that matter. All he had to do is walk a few blocks from his office in Columbia, SC, and he could have found plenty of opportunities for both.

At least in Columbia, African Americans and Euro-Americans for the most part share a common belief in Jesus. That is an excellent starting point for reconciliation. I am not sure that the Episcopal sect's version of Christianity has a lot in common with African American Christianity however. Bishop Waldo might have a harder time reconciling his version of Christianity with his neighbors than he will with reconciling the racial truth that his diocese is largely made up of aging lily white, upper income liberals whose zeal for social justice is tepid at best and misguided at worst.

In Europe, social justice warriors welcomed waves of Muslim immigrants which has created all kinds of problems. In America, our social justice shills would also embrace such an incoming tide. Is it any wonder that American Muslims "constitute a strongly Democratic constituency. Three-quarters of Muslim voters say they cast a ballot for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election" according to a Pew survey.  The major problems with the American Left accepting Muslims into their party are that Islam is not a reconciling religion, and the Islamic vision of social justice as well as the Islamic vision of Utopia stand in stark contrast to the visions of the both the secular and religious Left and the visions of conservative Christian believers.
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From Crisis Magazine comes this, 

"Europe’s utopian experiment in immigration isn’t working out because Europe’s leaders never took sufficient account of the extreme differences among cultures. They never understood that many of the migrants were traveling not just from different lands but, in effect, from different centuries. Moreover they seemed to be ignorant of what the Catechism says about man’s “wounded nature inclined to evil.” Still living off the accumulated moral capital of Christendom, they couldn’t envision a London that would become the acid attack capital of the world, or an England where the term “Shropshire lad” would conjure up an image not of late nineteenth century rural youth, but of a Pakistani gang rapist (Telford is in Shropshire)." - Are the Vast Majority of People Moderate? by William Kilpatrick

Thankfully, our Latino immigrants share with us a Christian worldview and heaven-view, and while illegal immigration is still illegal, reconciliation is possible, unlike the situation in Europe. Our immigrants must however learn that America, while an improvement from their lawless countries, is not Utopia.

It is natural for us to long to fix the world through social justice crusades. It is also natural for us to desire Utopia.

The problem is that due to our fallen nature, everybody has their own unique idea of how to go about creating Utopia. We have forgotten that God is the only one who can and who will will make the world right again for us just as He has promised.

C.S. Lewis pointed this out very well in "Mere Christianity" when he wrote,

“The Christian says, 'Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or to be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that country and to help others to do the same.”― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

We all desire the same thing, that heavenly country to which Lewis refers, but we have to realize that we are not going to be able to create God's kingdom on Earth no matter how many social justice movements we support.  And if anyone tries to create Utopia, they will probably be merely less than Christian, following their own vision, and they will probably have to impose their ideal through the use of force in order to get the rest of us to go along.

And of course, all man made attempts to create Utopia fail.

"When misguided longings for heaven or Eden enter the public square, there is a utopian overreach that results in deleterious consequences in the political, economic, and social spheres of life. Utopian overreach results in dystopian outcomes." (Crisis Magazine, Why The Left is So Seductive by Jonathan B. Coe.)