Conclusion: The City of God and the Citadel of Creatures

Abstract

One of the burdens of my arguments in the preceding pages has been to show - in ways direct and indirect - why social justice cannot be said to be the main concern of religion. That does not mean that it cannot raise its voice against, say, apartheid in South Africa, the violation of human rights in China or ‘ethnic cleansing’, supposedly being perpetrated in Bosnia-Herzegovina. I do not suggest that religion should, or could, be utterly indifferent to questions of justice: that it be ‘colour-blind’ to injustice in the world. For religion does have a prophetic and a pastoral role. Also, even accepting the principle of the separation of religion, on the one hand, and state and politics, on the other, we have seen that actually keeping them apart, in practice, is not easy; although, in my opinion, that must remain the aim of all concerned. What I wish to maintain, primarily, is that religion must not become, or be seen as, the instrument of social justice, in its more technical sense of distributive, economic and political justice; whether such a programme is proposed or carried out under Marxist or liberal inspiration. The most important reason for my view is that construing religion in this way takes religion away from its main goals - the moral and spiritual transformation of humanity - and, at the same time, leads to its adoption of the ideology of liberalism, which, as a Utopia, is quite the opposite of that enshrined in the idea of the kingdom of God.