In the wide spectrum of attitudes and behaviors that fulfill God’s commands to love your neighbor as yourself, justice is at the top of the list. Several times justice is equated with righteousness, lovingkindness and equity. And several times God commands doing justice. It is impossible to overstate the value God places on justice. It could be said, in fact, that doing justice is the overarching, composite, summary description of what it means to love your neighbor.

Despite God’s clear and frequent commands about doing justice, Jews and Christians make feeble efforts to integrate the principles of justice into their religious doctrines or daily lives. This is because they interpret justice as a corporate responsibility executed in the public sphere instead of religion — not as a personal responsibility practiced in relationships with their global neighbors. As a result, some religious groups reference justice in their doctrines and make efforts to pursue social justice on a broad scale for issues like human rights, poverty, homelessness, and hunger. And some religious individuals engage in volunteer and charitable activities that address a wide variety of social issues through political activism and the criminal justice system. While these efforts are commendable and achieve some good, they do not satisfy God’s expectations for doing justice as listed below in this page.

It is good that both religious and nonreligious people organize to overcome contemporary  justice issues because their efforts do make the world a little better. But progress is slow and new issues emerge as Christian Nationalists keep raising up new ways to oppress marginalized people. Not only do injustice, they also actively and aggressively militate against anyone who disagrees with them as being guilty of being “woke.” When investigate the motives of woke individuals and organizations, we find that they — not the Christian Nationalists — are the ones who try to make the world better by doing justice.

While there are some professional social activists doing good work to combat the organized, well-funded Christian Nationalism monolith, doing justice is at best an incidental, more-or-less religious pursuit for most Christians. Christians who do not identify as Christian Nationalists are the people who need to learn God’s commands about justice, apply those commands in their daily lives, and do whatever they can, wherever they can, whenever they can to expose the truth of God’s commands to Christian Nationalists who are actively working to spread hate — not love — in the world.

Unless someone challenges Christian Nationalists’ claims about loving God and obeying his commandments, they will not change their ways. Who knows, perhaps some will respond to these truths and turn from their wicked ways to do justice as God defines it.

Micah 6:8