By Robert Hoyle
You know that justice is the one thing you should always find; you’ve got to saddle up your boys, you’ve got to draw a hard line.
~~ Willie Nelson and Toby Keith; 2002
There is a lot about the world today that rubs real men the wrong way. Ever had that icky feeling where some over-intellectualized mumbo-jumbo about how loving your home town is bad just didn’t sit right in your craw? If you find Toby Keith and Willie Nelson’s song about horses drinking beer to be a better ode to justice than the pleas of Stacy Abrams or Gavin Newsome for reparations it could mean that you have not been completely perverted by the modern malaise.
Forces are afoot in today’s world to convince the common man that the inner pull which he feels towards the familiar and near-at-hand is latent racism and xenophobia which must be stamped out if he is to be properly refitted as a useful part of the modern society. Certainly the rise in political correctness has led to less airplay for Toby Keith songs about publicly hanging thieves, and the voluntary secret police work of militant social justice warriors seeks to ensure that no such future infractions of the official code of conduct are tolerated. In the midst of this dystopia I have come here today to dispel social justice perversions and display traditional Christian teaching on the topic: fortunately for the reader I am running short on neither.
Unfortunately for the average Christian his intuition may be telling him that the great mass of ordained clergy are acting as rearguard for the liberal world order which is busy undermining everything good in our once great civilization but he probably lacks the specifics with which to dispel the tropes that beset him on every side. The problem is made worse for the man who believes that he should have his family in church on Sunday but doesn’t sign off on the idea that his grandfather who taught him how to fish was a horrible racist. The fact of the matter is that this simple man, with his convictions about worshipping God, his intuitions, and his reverence for His grandfather, is much more a just man than all the fifth column intellectuals whose job it is to lead us into communism, all the while waving the banners of Christianity and conservatism.
Men, and I mean real men (not these mamby-pamby knock-offs you see at the urban hipster café), have an innate sense of justice which sets off little red flags in their soul when they believe that their hearths, homes, communities, and traditional institutions are under assault. Despite the fact that today’s knock-off urban hipster Christianity wants to convince these real men that this sense of justice is a redoubt of sinful inclination in their hearts and that the work of Christ will supposedly aid them in letting go of these animal reactions, such was not always the case. Even as the skinny jean and neck beard wearing moderns proclaim the advent of a more enlightened age, cracks open up in the stage upon which they stand. Through those cracks may be heard the condemning testimony of our ancestors. Allow to me help make those condemnations more audible to the reader.
Before social justice, there was justice. Just justice; plain and simple. No moniker or prefix needed. This was a day when the preacher preached the gospel (not the social gospel) while the jurists and princes of our European homelands studied—not how many Syrian refugees they could pack into rural Swedish villages—but rather how they could defend the interests of their people and further the glory of their native lands. Lord willing those days will come again but if we are to have them we must first regain our plain and simple understanding of justice and the duties which it entails.
Ambrose of Milan, that illustrious 4th century churchmen whose immense labors furthered the cause of Christ in both the civil and ecclesiastical realms, helps us in this when he teaches:
Justice then, has to do with the society of the human race, and the community at large. For that which holds society together is divided into two parts—justice and good-will.[1]
A little further on Ambrose applauds justice in these words:
Great, then, is the glory of justice; for she, existing rather for the good of others than of self, is an aid to the bonds of union and fellowship amongst us.[2]
What is it in justice that moved Ambrose to speak so highly? What about justice makes its disappearance in our day so damaging to us, and why must we work to retrieve it?
Stated simply, justice is that whereby men render unto others that which is due them. At a glance this may seem mundane, obvious, and a little irrelevant to our current predicament. But there was a reason why classical statesmen, from Cicero[3] to Ambrose—and indeed the entire Christian world up until the 20th century—believed justice to be indispensable for civic life. That reason is that not only does justice serve the end of guiding men in their dealings one with another, it also points out the men and groups of men with whom we are to conduct our dealings and establish first relations. Justice, in the rendering of our ancestors, reached further than the court decisions of a judge or jury. On the contrary, it was a guiding principle which served to direct the overall course of a man’s life.
At a preliminary level the Apostle Paul speaks of justice in Romans 13:7-8 when he says, Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom is due; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor. Owe no many any thing, but to love one another; for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. Paul here is defining justice as rendering unto each that which is his due, and simultaneously upholding the same connection which Ambrose made between justice and charity. Failing to render unto men their proper due is to incur a debt. When Paul says, owe no man anything, he isn’t speaking about falling behind on the mortgage but rather giving honor to those whom we owe it, tribute to whom tribute, etc. This is justice and when combined with charity (love one another) it is the fulfilling of the law. Throughout human history this concern with justice (rendering unto men that which is their due) has colored not only understandings of law and jurisprudence but also family, community, and nationality.
Traditionally this idea of justice has underpinned the interpretation of both the fifth and sixth of the Ten Commandments.[4] In the 17th century, when the leading pastors and theologians of the English people came together to produce their system of Christian doctrine at Westminster Abbey in London, they interpreted the commandment to honor father and mother in this way:
Q. 126. What is the general scope of the fifth commandment?
A. The general scope of the fifth commandment is, the performance of those duties which we mutually owe in our several relations, as inferiors, superiors, or equals.[5]
Although out of popularity today (like so many other good things), the past practice was to give the Christian community positive instruction from the corpus of Biblical law. In keeping with this, the English pastors assembled by parliament taught that the fifth commandment enjoined justice towards all men by the performing of our duties towards our several relations. For these men justice carried with it a sense of duty and that duty was not universal. Men do not owe the same obligation to all other men. To honor a stranger identically to the honor that ought to be given to parents would be an injustice; a failure to render properly to each man his due. Similarly, to fail to recognize that the claims of justice confer a certain level of duty towards even strangers is also an injustice. In this way justice serves as a sort of guardrail, directing men’s actions and affections towards a certain community.
It is in this way that justice binds men together into communities and nations, and it is justice, when obeyed, which serves to hold these groups together. Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest thinkers of the Medieval world, teaches that we owe a certain reverence, or worship, towards our blood kin and our native country stemming from the duties of justice. He teaches:
Man becomes a debtor to other men in various ways, according to their various excellence and the various benefits received from them. On both counts God holds first place, for He is supremely excellent, and is for us the first principle of being and government. In the second place, the principles of our being and government are our parents and our country, that have given us birth and nourishment. Consequently man is debtor chiefly to his parents and his country, after God. Wherefore just as it belongs to religion to give worship to God, so does it belong to piety, in the second place, to give worship to one’s parents and one’s country.
The worship due to our parents includes the worship given to all our kindred, since our kinsfolk are those who descend from the same parents… The worship given to our country includes homage to all our fellow-citizens and to all the friends of our country.[6]
The worship to which Aquinas here enjoins us towards our kin and our country should not be confused with that which is owed unto God. In the Medieval sense religion and piety are two separate subsets of justice, religion being justice towards God, and piety being justice towards the family and land which gave us life. It would be an injustice to confuse the two but it would be equally unjust to withhold or refuse the honor due unto that which is nearest unto us in the human realm.
It is here that I firmly believe that the common man has an innate sense of justice which leads him more aright than the great class of modernists who set upon him with designs to remake him in the current fashion. It is popular to hear men today speak of universal commitments and the obligations which we have towards all men and all lands. The end result of such talk is usually to lay great burdens upon the common man, asking him to allow his own land to be overrun with foreigners or fund foreign wars of supposed benevolence. In exchange for this sacrifice the common man is told that his dissatisfaction with this arrangement is proof of his own sinfulness and backwardness. The court intelligentsia tell us that we deserve to have our lands overrun and our traditional priorities subverted because we have previously sought out our own welfare and this was wrong.
For all of this overwrought moralizing the common man still feels the tug of justice within his breast. He doesn’t believe that his native soil should have its institutions altered by our supposed universal commitments and he thinks it is dopey when he is told to think of Ukrainian Christians as more his true kin than his unbelieving uncle. Again, the common man is closer to the truth and again is vindicated by our nobler past.
In commenting on the order of charity, Aquinas touches upon the preference which men feel for their blood relatives. We read:
We ought out of charity to love those who are more closely united to us more, both because our love for them is more intense, and because there are more reasons for loving them. Now intensity of love arises from the union of lover and beloved: and therefore we should measure the love of different persons according to the different kinds of union, so that a man is more loved in matters touching that particular union in respect of which he is loved. And, again, comparing love with love we should compare one union with another. Accordingly we must say that friendship among blood relations is based upon their connection by natural origin, the friendship of fellow-citizens on their civic fellowship, and the friendship of those who are fighting side by side on the comradeship of battle. Wherefore in matters pertaining to nature we should love our kindred most, in matters concerning relations between citizens, we should prefer our fellow-citizens, and on the battlefield our fellow-soldiers. … If, however we compare union with union, it is evident that the union arising from natural origin is prior to, and more stable than, all others, because it is something affecting the very substance whereas other unions supervene and may cease altogether. Therefore the friendship of kindred is more stable, while other friendships may be stronger in respect of that which is proper to each of them.[7]
Here the traditional Christian teaching completely supports the popular suspicions of those who resent being told that they owe higher commitments to people in foreign lands than to a non-Christian relative. On the contrary we ought to love most those who are closest to us. Our love, our charity, and our hearts are not unlimited resources. Only so much caring may be extracted from any one human breast. Men who would place guilt upon the heads of those unwilling to overextend their commitments or consider all men to have equal claims upon his time are unjust. The problem with unjust men is that they pervert the proper order of charity and dissolve the bonds of civil society. What is needed today are men of justice who will render unto each their due, unapologetically love their families and their homeland, and take a stand for that which is necessary for the preservation of their inheritance.
Such an attitude is not contrary to the Christian spirit. Instead, it has been here demonstrated that for millennia Christianity has not undermined but enshrined the natural duties which we owe to our blood relations and our fatherland. Just as the Apostle Paul tells us to render honor unto whom honor is due, so in I Timothy 5:8 he tells us that if any provide not for his own, and especially those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.
The author is a research associate with the Pactum Institute.
[1] Ambrose; Duties of the Clergy, I. XXVIII.)
[2] Ibid.
[3] The Object of justice is to keep men together in society and mutual intercourse. (Tullius Cicero; De Officiis i. 7)
[4]“ Honour thy father and thy mother” is the fifth commandment and the sixth is “thou shalt not kill.”
[5] Westminster Larger Catechism question 126
[6] Thomas Aquinas; Summa Theologica, III., Q. 101, A.1
[7] Aquinas; III., Q. 26, A. 8