D. Glenn Butner, Jr.
There has been much recent discussion of the appropriate Christian way to think about systemic injustice, be it in the area of immigration, race, or the economy. Prompted by political debates, major public events, grassroots movements of various forms, and increasing exposure to academic disciplines focusing on the remediation of systemic injustice, many students and clergy I have encountered feel disoriented. Others jump to simplistic conclusions.
In this context, it would be helpful to acquire some familiarity with a variety of Christian models to analyze systemic injustice beyond questions of the direct guilt of those intentionally building unjust systems. Four seem most helpful to me: social sin, corporate vice, complicity, and responsibility.
Though there are certainly other models worthy of attention, and though other treatments of these models are far more extensive than I will put forward here, I intend to offer a brief introduction to these models,1 a cursory survey of where they find warrant in Christian Scripture and tradition, and a preliminary analysis of their strengths and weaknesses. My hope is that these four models can prompt clarity in discussing systemic injustice—and, more importantly, in acting toward the pursuit of justice.
Model 1: Social Sin
One of the more common models for thinking about systemic injustice is that of sin—or, more properly, social sin. The relationship between social sin and individual sin is twofold. First, it is a relationship between the individual and the group. A personal, interior sin like greed is not easily called “social sin,” but a corporation set up by greed which is unjust in the payment of its employees and vendors could be an example of social sin.
Second, the relationship between individual and social sin is a relationship between cause and effect. Strictly speaking, social sin is derivative of individual sin(s), since institutions cannot sin.2 Pope John Paul II, who did much to advance Catholic discussion of the concept of “social sin,” wrote in Reconciliatio et Paenitentia that “cases of social sin are the result of the accumulation and concentration of many personal sins.”3 Bryan Massingale puts it another way: “sin becomes embodied in public life and institutions.”4
For example, out of bigotry or the intent to discriminate, a group of individuals may help establish a policy that produces unjust outcomes. That rule may persist for years to the point that the current individuals leading the institution governed by this policy may no longer intend discrimination and may be completely unaware of the unjust outcomes caused by the policy. Yet, in such an instance, social sin remains as the effect of an earlier, forgotten individual sin.
One great weakness of the social sin model is that the language of sin implies an individual act. Often this leads to a defensive posture by those who insist that they have not performed any racist act (for example) after hearing accusations that their institution, society, or nation suffers from the social sin of racism. This communication breakdown is one reason of several to supplement the social sin model with additional models. However, those who would dismiss the social sin model because sin is something pertaining only to individuals go too far, a point which requires me to write briefly about the doctrine of original sin.
Those theologians and ethicists who speak of social sin tend to draw a connection between social sin and original sin.5 If social sin is the effect of a prior individual act, there is a ready comparison with original sin, which is traditionally understood to have two dimensions: Peccatum originale originans (“original sin as originating”), which refers to the individual sin of Adam and Eve, and Peccatum originale originatum (“original sin as originated”), which refers to the effect of Adam and Eve’s sin on all subsequent human generations. We see this later scholastic distinction latent in Romans 5:19. “Through one man’s disobedience”—this is the individual sin, original sin as originating—“the many were made sinners”—this is the effect of the original sin, original sin as originated.
However, we must add one additional distinction here, this time between original sin and actual sin. Original sin (as originated) refers to the natural propensity within us to do evil (sometimes this is called original pollution), a condition that applies to an entire group—all of humanity. In contrast, an actual sin is a particular sinful act that a person commits. Thus, we see that within Christian tradition there is precedent for speaking of aspects of sin that are an individual cause and a more corporate or social effect.
Though there are parallels between original sin and social sin, and though modern theologians have often pointed to the corporate and social dimensions of original sin (for example, consider Karl Rahner’s treatment of the doctrine), it is a development of medieval doctrine to apply the term “sin” to institutions and systems—a defensible development, I think, if carefully explained, but one that may confuse. Furthermore, though “in its broadest sense social sin encompasses the unjust structures, distorted consciousness, and collective actions and inaction that facilitate injustice and dehumanization,”6 the tendency seems to be toward applying the term more restrictively to institutions. Both of these circumstances suggest the need to supplement this model with additional terminology, including a model that can speak of the way that systematic injustice can shape the character of an individual.
Model 2: Corporate Vice
A second helpful model for considering systemic injustice is that of corporate vice, a concept developed by Katie Walker Grimes and Daniel Daly. Grimes suggests that “antiblackness supremacy…lives within [bodies] just as habits do.”7 Grimes highlights how “antiblackness supremacy conditions bodies to act, think, dress, walk, and occupy space in accordance with its prerogatives.”8 However, Grimes suggests that this conditioning is not just on individual bodies but also on the body of the church, which possesses “a self-perpetuating momentum…for racial stasis.”9 Once a church body has been habituated toward racialized action, its innate tendency is to perpetuate the systemic injustice.
Dan Daly clarifies this tendency by pointing to the dialectical relationship between institutions and individual moral formation. On the one hand, individuals help to build institutions, and (intentionally or not) they contribute to cultural assumptions and social norms. On the other hand, such institutions, assumptions, and norms “have the capacity to form the moral character, and the conscience of the individual agent.”10 Daly is careful to recognize that this is not deterministic, as “the free moral agent has the capacity to resist his given culture’s structures,”9 but nevertheless it would be a mistake to ignore the formative role of culture, institutions, and social norms on our habits, which include virtues and vices.
The model of corporate vice is helpful in that it shows how institutions, laws, social norms, or, more broadly, systems can influence the dispositions and default behavior and thinking of individuals and groups within such systems. The Bible is filled with warnings that bad company corrupts (e.g., 1 Cor 15:33) while good company contributes to moral formation (e.g., Prov 27:17). Further, there is a clear sense that immorality tends to permeate through larger groups as suggested by such language as the “the leaven of the Pharisees” (Mark 8:15, CSB), where “a little leaven leavens the whole batch of dough” (1 Cor 5:6; Gal 5:9). Paul uses this metaphor to explain how small amounts of wrong ideas or immoral acts can quickly spread through the entire church body, shaping the form of the whole group just as a little yeast causes the entire lump of dough to rise.
We can also note the ways in which authorities like kings and institutions like idolatrous cultic worship can “cause [Israel] to stray” (2 Kgs 21:9), and we see a recurring theme in Proverbs of condemning unjust judicial and economic standards as corrupting the wise (Prov 11:1; 16:11; 17:15, 20:10, 24:23b). The model of corporate vice fits with and develops such strands of Scripture while providing a clear conceptual framework.
Nevertheless, even the two models of social sin and corporate vice are insufficient when taken together. While corporate vice speaks to the formative nature of systemic injustice where social sin had merely considered systemic injustice as an effect of an individual or group’s actual sin, neither model can fully clarify who has culpability and to what extent they are culpable of a given systemic injustice. The effects and formative nature of systemic problems are indispensable for moral analysis, but culpability also needs to be addressed, which prompts us to turn to another concept: complicity.
Model 3: Complicity
Jemar Tisby’s 2019 work The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism brought the idea of complicity to the center of much theological discussion of racism. Early in the text, Tisby writes, “It is accurate to say that many white people have been complicit with racism,” which he immediately qualifies with the claim that “there have been notable exceptions, and racial progress in this country could not have happened without allies across the color line.”11 Tisby continues his book by exploring the long history of the white American church’s involvement in racism. As a historian, Tisby unfortunately does not develop the notion of complicity with the nuance and detail that an ethicist like myself might desire. Nevertheless, there are several categories of sin from Scripture and the Christian tradition that help us begin to see the various ways that we can conceive of complicity.
Complicity in a biblical context can be parsed in various ways. One might be complicit for inaction when a good act is known but not taken, for “it is a sin to know the good and yet not do it” (James 4:17, CSB). Similarly, if an individual has knowledge of an evil, responsibility over some property or state of affairs causing the evil, and occasion to prevent that evil, the person is guilty and subject to punishment even if they did not directly cause the evil. For example, if an ox “is in the habit of goring, and its owner has been warned yet does not restrain it, and it kills a man or a woman…[the] owner must also be put to death” (Exod 21:29). The fact that the owner of the habitually goring ox has the opportunity to pay a ransom instead of facing the death penalty (Exod 21:30), while the one who intended to kill a person does not have such an option (Exod 21:12) suggests a different level of moral responsibility for the owner of the ox, something akin to the idea of complicity.
In the tradition of Catholic ethics, in particular, several distinctions of complicity were common.12 One could formally or materially cooperate with evil, where formal cooperation involved consent but material cooperation did not. Such cooperation could also be mediate, as when supporting an action that was secondary to the evil act itself, or proximate, where support was directly given for the evil action.
Taken together, we might develop Tisby’s language to suggest that one could be complicit with a systemic injustice if one has knowledge of a needed good action to help someone who has been victimized by injustice but does not act, or if a potential injustice is known and one has power to prevent it but does not do so. Complicity might be formal, where one actively supports an injustice even if not directly perpetuating it personally, for example by electing a sheriff whose platform was to enforce Jim Crow. If the sheriff intimidates or harms black residents of the community, those voters bear some formal complicity even if they did not undertake the acts themselves.
Complicity is material if one does not wish to support the injustice and perhaps cannot even avoid doing so. For an example of material complicity, consider someone who believes certain economic policies of a government unjust. The individual cannot avoid paying taxes to the government, which would simply seize assets if taxes were unpaid, so is materially complicit. However, such complicity often (depending on the case) does not entail guilt.
Further distinctions must be made, but the several I have suggested provide a helpful starting point for thinking about complicity. Even with a clearer vision of complicity, however, it may not always be possible to identify who is guilty of a certain systemic injustice and what sort of guilt they possess. In such circumstances, a final model is necessary: responsibility.
Model 4: Responsibility
Serena Parekh points to our current global refugee regime as an example of “structural injustice.” The expectation of the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention was that refugees would either be resettled or repatriated after a short stay at a refugee camp. This expectation has not been fulfilled, and only two percent of refugees in camps will actually be resettled or repatriated by legal means.13 A considerably larger percentage will give up waiting and will cross borders illegally in pursuit of asylum or work. The average length of a stay in a refugee camp is seventeen years.14
Parekh explains that many refugees remain trapped without protection because of states exercising the morally legitimate right of protecting their citizens and determining who is admitted to a national community.15 In other words, Parekh considers it morally legitimate to restrict entry into a nation. However, when the majority of nations exercise these rights in “uncoordinated” decisions, the outcome is that no one is protecting the rights of refugees, who spend years in camps lacking basic necessities and prohibited from working or legally entering another country.
Our failure to protect refugees demonstrates that even good actions may inadvertently produce problematic results. Yet, instead of seeking to place moral blame where it may not be easily assigned, Parekh insists on a “forward-looking, not backward-looking” account of our moral duty. “The focus of a judgment that something is structural injustice is not to blame someone or some entity for something done in the past. The focus is on how to make things more just in the future.”16 Here Parekh relies on the concept of responsibility. “I am not responsible because I am guilty,” Parekh explains, but because I “participate in diverse institutional processes that produce injustice.”17
Shifting away from Parekh’s language, we might think about structural injustice as a problem of collective action: individual actors may not intend harm and may even be making ethically defensible choices, but when an entire community acts in this manner collectively, some group may be inadvertently harmed. In this case, when every nation fails to admit refugees or allow them to work in the name of the right of self-determination and self-defense, refugees are left without support, protection, or economic opportunity. When such harm occurs, those who benefit from the system have a responsibility, Parekh insists, to “make the outcome less unjust.”18
Parekh does not explicitly appeal to any religious concepts to make her case, but it strikes me that certain features of her model fit well within biblical ethics. From the earliest chapters of Genesis, where Cain asks, “Am I my brother’s guardian?” (Gen 4:9), the Bible regularly explores the responsibility that God’s people have toward others.
Often, this is manifest in calls to care for the orphan, the widow, and the stranger (Deut 10:18; 14:29; 16:11, 14; 24:19, etc.), a triad unique to the Old Testament among other ancient near eastern law codes that tend not to address the stranger.19 This triad represents those who were most likely to be excluded from the economy in a male-led, agrarian society because they were less likely to own land. Such laws do not intend to challenge an agrarian society, but they do suggest a certain responsibility to care for those who may be excluded by a given institution, system, or society, which in this case is the agrarian society. As such, the call to responsibility is beneficial because it strikes me as the least controversial ethical approach to structural injustice from a Christian perspective.
Despite the strength of the responsibility model, it cannot suffice on its own. While it is certainly true that there may be cases of systemic injustice where no guilt exists, or where guilt is impossible to assess, it does not take much effort to identify instances of structural injustice where there is culpability. For example, while inaction by a given nation toward refugees may be morally excusable, the persecution of refugees by their home-states that led to their flight certainly is not. Parekh recognizes this complexity, including the fact that some states may bear additional responsibility toward refugees if that state’s actions contributed to refugees’ need to flee, a principle which she calls the “you-break-it-you-buy-it principle.”20
The model of responsibility is helpful, but a full account of culpability in cases of systemic injustice requires additional categories like complicity, social sin, and corporate vice. However, with these four models taken together, I believe Christians have a workable starting point to consider the ethics of systemic injustice.
Glenn Butner is Assistant Professor of Theology and Christian Ministry at Sterling College (KS). He has written The Son who Learned Obedience: A Theological Case Against the Eternal Submission of the Son (Pickwick, 2018) and has several forthcoming books, including Trinitarian Dogmatics (Baker Academic) and Jesus the Refugee (Fortress).
Image: Peter Paul Rubens, The Flight into Egypt
- This brevity is found in several areas: 1) I will not address all possible objections to each model; 2) I will not necessarily address the most important representatives of each model; and 3) I will not address all models that are helpful from a Christian perspective—indeed, I do not even promise that these are definitively the most helpful.[↩]
- Kristin E. Heyer, Kinship Across Borders: A Christian Ethic of Immigration (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2012), 38.[↩]
- John Paul II, Reconciliatio et Paenitentia, December 2, 1984. Accessed online: https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_jp-ii_exh_02121984_reconciliatio-et-paenitentia.html.[↩]
- Bryan N. Massingale, Racial Justice and the Catholic Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2010), 103.[↩]
- Heyer, Kinship Across Borders, 37.[↩]
- Ibid., 37.[↩]
- Katie Walker Grimes, Antiblackness as Corporate Vice (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2017), 177.[↩]
- Ibid., 182.[↩]
- Ibid.[↩][↩]
- Daniel J. Daly, “Structures of Virtue and Vice,” New Blackfriars 92.1039 (May 2011), 353.[↩]
- Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2019), 16.[↩]
- A clear and most concise treatment of these distinctions is found in Daniel C. McGuire, “Cooperation with Evil,” in The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics, ed. James F. Childress and John Macquarrie (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986), 129.[↩]
- Serena Parekh, No Refuge: Ethics and the Global Refugee Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 3.[↩]
- Ibid., 5.[↩]
- Ibid., 165.[↩]
- Ibid., 164.[↩]
- Ibid., 169.[↩]
- Ibid., 170.[↩]
- Christiana Van Houten, The Alien in Israelite Law, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 107 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991), 34–35.[↩]
- Parekh, No Refuge, 80.[↩]