Christian Blogger: “Life Will Never Be Fair”

Yesterday I read a post by David Rupert, a Christian Patheos blogger, titled “I Don’t Use This F Word.”  The “F” word Rupert is referring to is “fair.” Rupert discusses his efforts to “scrub” offending words picked up at school from his young son’s vocabulary, and then writes this:

[T]here was one particular word that, even though it was banished, it still kept finding a way back in various forms. We called it the “F” word

“Fair.”

Among all the despicable words out there, this is the one that never seems to go away. You find it everywhere, from the Kindergarten class, to the demonstration on Main Street to the stage for the highest office in the land. It dominates the office, seeps into the marketplace and rotates in the cul-de-sacs of our neighborhoods.

As the mother of two young children myself, it’s absolutely true that “it’s not fair!” can sometimes seem like an almost constant refrain. But as annoying as it can sometimes be, I try to remember that cries of “it’s not fair!” are children’s attempts to work out weighty concepts like justice. These cries should not be ignored or silenced. They’re often completely reasonable, and when they’re not, they present teaching opportunities.

What problem does Rupert have with the word “fair”?

One thing I know — Life will never be fair

Can I just say how defeatist this sounds? The sad reality that life will never be completely fair should not stop us from trying to make it more fair.

Just think of the way the word dominates politics these days. The war on classes will continue to escalate, with fairness the rallying cry. We are told that there should be fairness in employment and housing and opportunity. I’m all for that, but I know one thing about life and that it’s really never totally fair.

We’ll always have someone who will slight us, who won’t like us for our faith, or our stand, or our adherence to principle. We’ll be overlooked, ignored and forgotten. We’ll get a sickness, or have a spouse leave, or get fired for no good reason.  We’ll be discriminated against for our skin color, our politics, or our weight. It’s going to happen to the best of us.

That’s why, in our home, we called it the “F” word. It was never to be used or inferred. I told my sons that life never has, and never will be, fair. 

You know, I actually think Rupert is eliding a whole bunch of concepts here without realizing it. Let me see if I can sort them out.

Yes, we can’t change the fact that some people will “get a sickness,” but we can ensure that all people have unfettered access to the healthcare they need. Yes, we can’t change the fact that some people will “have a spouse leave,” but we can ensure that single parents have access to childcare and that stay-at-home spouses have the resources and training to reenter the job force if they need to. Yes, we can’t change the fact that some people will “get fired for no good reason,” but we can ensure that there are unemployment and job training programs to tide them over and help them back into the workforce.

There is a big difference between the unfortunate things that happen to us as individuals—a sickness, a spouse leaving, a lost job—and structural inequalities that hold back entire groups. When Rupert mentions “the war on classes” and issues of “fairness in employment and housing and opportunity,” what he’s talking about is social justice. We can’t stop people from getting sick, having a spouse leave, or losing a job, but we can work toward a more just society.

Can we please stop equating individual misfortunes with structural inequality?

Mercy I’ll take. Grace I’ll cherish. But I really don’t want fairness.

Rupert is missing something from his lineup. Growing up in an evangelical home, grace and mercy were always accompanied with justice. And really, that’s all fairness is about—applying justice to society. Whether that is a child declaring that “it’s not fair!” that her brother got two pieces of cake and she only got one or a scholar writing about the way poverty contributes to educational inequalities—whether we call it “fairness” or “justice”—the end goal is the same.

Christianity actually has a bit of a divided record on whether (and how) justice should be applied to society. On the one hand are Christians like Mother Theresa who glorify suffering and praise the poor without doing anything to help them out of poverty. On the other hand are Christians who espouse “liberation theology” and work to end oppression and uplift the poor and disadvantaged.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that is really easy to say you don’t want fairness when you are not on the receiving end of the structural inequalities in your society. David Rupert is a straight white male. Rupert’s saying that he doesn’t want “fairness” is actually incredibly self serving. After all, more than any other group, straight white males benefit from the current inequalities in our society. Fairness would remove Rupert’s advantage.

We were never promised a fair society, or a world that had equal opportunity for all. And actually, such a world would defy our human nature. At our core we only think about justice when an injustice has been done against us. We only think about a level playing field when ours is disadvantaged. Most see life with a narrow scope, limited to only a very selfish perspective.

Since when did Christians like Rupert have a problem with things that “defy our human nature”? I mean good golly, Rupert believes in abstinence. Growing up in an evangelical home, I constantly heard that I needed “die to self” and put others first. The whole point was to “defy our human nature.” That’s what I was taught being a Christian meant! I am suddenly very curious what kind of church Rupert attends.

Rupert is also wrong when he says that “we only think about justice when an injustice has been done against us.” If that were true, I wouldn’t have found myself in tears multiple times last week while listening to news reports on the refugee crisis in Europe. Oh and guess what? I am white, and yet I very much want to see racial inequalities done away with in our society, so it is absolutely false that “we only think about a level playing field when ours is disadvantaged.” The only one I see here who sees life through a “narrow scope, limited to only a very selfish perspective” is Rupert.

We humans have a great capacity for empathy. My daughter Sally is only six, but she is aware of the efforts and goals of Black Lives Matter and is incensed by the lack of justice in our current system. “That’s not fair, mom!” she told me, aghast, during one of our conversations about racial injustice. “Life will never be fair,” I told her. Just kidding, no I didn’t. That may be what Rupert tells his kids, but it’s not what I tell my kids. No, I responded by encouraging her to do what she can to change the status quo. And with great resolution, she told me that she would.

More than anything else, what I see in Rupert’s post is defeatism. Even if we accepted Rupert’s conclusion that life will never be fair because human nature is selfish, that shouldn’t prevent us from trying to make the world more just. My parents were dispensational premillennialists. This meant that they believed the end of the world was coming soon, and that in the meantime world was declining into a state of wickedness, and that they couldn’t change that because of prophesy. I asked my dad why, then, he was so invested in right-wing political causes. If the world was going to descend into wickedness no matter what he did, why bother? “We still have to try,” he told me. I may no longer share my parents’ beliefs, but I’ve never forgotten my father’s response.

It does not matter whether we will succeed or not. We still have to try.

There’s another place I’ve seen this defeatism, and that’s in arguments over gun control. Inevitably, at least in conversations I’ve been in, those arguing against gun control will eventually fall back on the claim that “the problem is sin, and as long as there is sin in the world we will always have gun violence.” I’m reminded of an Onion article written after a spate of mass shootings: “‘No Way to Prevent This,” Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” Rupert’s argument—that we will never have a fair society because we as humans have selfish natures, so why try—is similar. 

Of course, the problem with Rupert’s defeatism is not only that we should strive for a more just society regardless of whether we will achieve it but also that he’s quite simply wrong. None of the structural inequalities that exist in the U.S. today are inevitable. There are countries that have lower levels of inequality and greater levels of social mobility than the U.S. There have been societies where racism as such does not exist. There are countries where women have greater access to reproductive healthcare and maternity leave than they do in the U.S. Rupert may have given up on efforts to bring about a more fair and just society, but I sure haven’t. 

Anyway, back to Rupert: 

But here’s the real question. Do we really want fairness?

Jesus said the last will be first, and the first be last. That’s not fair.

We’re told that the worker who starts late in the day will get his full pay. That’s not fair.

Rupert apparently missed the fact that Jesus said that the last will be first and the first will be last in the context of upsetting the social inequalities of his day. Jesus lived in a society that was very hierarchical, a society where people were often locked into their roles in society by birth. One reason Jesus made so many of the religious leaders of his day angry is that he upset these hierarchies.* I am by no means saying that Jesus was perfect, only that in my reading of the gospels, Jesus would have more in common with the social justice activists of today than he would with someone like Rupert, who would rather maintain the status quo than work to upset it.

And you know what? I can play the Bible verse game too! At one point Jesus told a rich man that if he wanted to follow him, he had to first sell his possessions and give the money to the poor. When his disciples were astounded at this, he told them that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” Now it may be that Rupert would argue that this, too, is not fair, but to me it looks a lot like social justice—an attempt to make society more just by distributing resources in a way that ensures that all individuals have a fair shot at life.

Rupert’s ends his posts with these lines:

We’re told that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. That’s not fair.

Honestly, it isn’t fairness that I want, because if I get what I deserve, it won’t be all that good. Mercy I’ll take. Grace I cherish. But please, not fairness.

One problem I have with the evangelical Christianity of my youth is its emphasis on sin and guilt. I was taught that I was a worthless sinner whose only value came through Jesus. If I got what I deserved, I was told, I would be tortured for eternity in hell. I should be grateful that Jesus loved me enough on the cross to die in my place and offer me salvation. Bear in mind that I was condemned to hell not only for my own sins, but also for the original sin that I was born with. This framework is incredibly toxic. “You’re lucky you get anything,” it says. “You have intrinsic dignity and worth as a human being,” I would say.

I wonder if Rupert is the kind of person who would tell a slave to stop dreaming of freedom and focus instead on being a good slave. I suspect he probably is. After all, isn’t that what Paul told the escaped slave Onesimus—to return to his master, Philemon, and serve him diligently? And all I can think is, that’s easy to say when you’re not a slave. Human rights are advanced by people crying out for justice and working to upset the social structures that contribute to inequality, not by people accepting the status quo and poo-pooing silly ideas like “fairness.”

In response to a comment on his post, Rupert added this:

actually Rubaxter, it’s a joyous life I’m leading my children into. They are never the victim. They don’t look through the window of how they’ve been wronged and the evil spawn of vengance that results. Instead, they expect the deck to be stacked and live within that as pure, righteous men.

You mentioned empathy and that’s entirely different animal. And we can live as empathatic beings without resorting to victimhood.

Thanks for weighing in and I challenge you to live a day in freedome without looking for who has wronged you. It will change your life.

Even after reading Rupert’s entire post, I found this comment completely jarring. Rupert writes of expecting and accepting that the deck is stacked. Well you know what? If Rupert’s sons are straight white males like he is, the deck will be stacked soundly in their favor. There is a special sort of evil involved in teaching privileged children to accept their privilege as just how life is.

Rupert writes that he teaches his sons not to “look through the window of how they’ve been wronged” and speaks of “the evil spawn of vengeance that results.” I have to ask, was it this “evil spawn of vengeance” that led Sojourner Truth to advocate for an end to slavery? Was it this “evil spawn of vengeance” that motivated Ida B. Well’s campaign against lynching? Was it this “evil spawn of vengeance” that led Fannie Lou Hamer to push for civil rights in Mississippi? I can hardly verbalize how toxic this entire perspective is.

I’ve written a lot about victim blaming, but usually in the context of rape and sexual abuse. This, too, is victim blaming. Rupert writes of people “resorting to victimhood” and looking “though the window of how they’ve been wronged” until “the evil spawn of vengeance” results. This is disgusting. Apparently, working to right wrongs and end injustices is unacceptable. Instead, we should simply close our eyes and ignore them. Because, you know, trying to make society a better place is “resorting to victimhood.” Well you know what? I would argue that working to improve society and curb injustice is the opposite of “reporting to victimhood.” There is a vast gulf between vengeance and justice.

Rupert is preaching the gospel of the privileged. He appears to be uncomfortable with calls for social justice. On some level, I’m not surprised. Rupert is a straight white male, and calls for social justice can be uncomfortable when you’re benefiting from the inequalities present in society. But instead of listening and coming face to face with his privilege, or simply being annoyed and stewing, he has sought to integrate his unease with calls for a more just society into his Christian theology. He has created a theology where Jesus came not to free the oppressed but to silence the victims and overlook societal injustice.

Rupert may have banned the word “fair” from his house, but it certainly isn’t banned from my house. I want my children to grow up understanding the injustice present in our society so that they can work to make the world a more fair, just, and equitable place. I want my children to understand their privilege as white children growing up in an educated household so that they will see their responsibility to help break down inequalities and curb injustice—and so that they will understand that others do not have what they do, and resolve to do something about that.

Every time my children say “it’s not fair,” they are learning about justice.

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* As a reader pointed out on a post a few weeks back, the story we find in the New Testament is very one-sided and does not always portray groups like the Pharisees or the Sadducees either accurately or fairly. I am using the New Testament version of the story in this post in order to point out that, even when we have this debate on Rupert’s territory and in his terms, his argument fails.