Conservative Christians and Social Justice

Mark Schmitt asks this thought-provoking question:

We are clearly in the middle of one of the great periods of Christian revival in American history, the third or fourth of the "Great Awakenings" in American Protestantism. Each such period has begun with a change in the nature of worship itself, essentially a private phase, and moved onto a public phase where it engaged with the political process. These have been significant moments of progress for this country. The Second Great Awakening led in it public phase to the Abolitionist movement. What some historians consider the Third Great Awakening beginning in the 1890s led to the Social Gospel movement, settlement houses, and the beginnings of the progressive era idea of a public responsibility to ameliorate poverty.

The right question, I think, is not whether religion has an undue influence, but why it is that the current flourishing of religious faith has, for the first time ever, virtually no element of social justice? Why is its public phase so exclusively focused on issues of private and personal behavior? Is this caused by trends in the nature of religious worship itself? Is it a displacement of economic or social pressures? Will that change? What are the factors that might cause it to change.

To which Tim Scanlon, a philosopher of some note, responds:

But a concern with justice is not merely a concern with alleviating suffering but a concern with changing unjust social institutions. There is little or none of this concern even at the level of rhetoric in the Christian movements. Your question asks, rightly, why this is so. In answering, we should distinguish between what may be true of the Christian revival you mention and what is true of the use that is made of it in our current politics. As far as the latter is concerned, it is noteworthy that the appeals to moral values almost never require any sacrifice on the part of those to whom these appeals are addressed. They are invited to feel good about their superiority to gays, righteous about their opposition to abortion, satisfied about their devotion to family and so on.

I want to address the bolded text, because it is utterly false.

The exact opposite is the truth. Whether you look at the broadcasts of James Dobson, or the many family-oriented Christian books, or the Promise-Keepers movement, you'll find the same thing: Moral exhortations addressed to other Christians, preaching to them about the many ways that they likely fall short of being a good parent or spouse, and urging them to put their families ahead of career, friends, etc. Far from "never requir[ing] any sacrifice on the part of those to whom these appeals are addressed," the whole point of these appeals is to hector Christians into sacrificing their own desires, if need be, for the sake of their families.

I could well imagine someone criticizing Christian pro-family materials for being too harsh and perfectionist in making demands on other Christians. But the opposite criticism is bizarre. It's as if someone said, "The problem with environmentalist literature is that it never makes any demands on its readers; it just encourages them to feel satisfied about their own consumption of natural resources."