Can justice movements lose their soul?

Public life in America feels increasingly volatile. Anger saturates political discourse. Across the ideological spectrum, our public conversations often mirror the hostility they claim to resist.

Many people reach for the language of prophecy to justify the indignation they assume is righteous. They see themselves speaking truth to power and confronting injustice. Sometimes that is exactly what they are doing. But is that all they are doing?

The indignation we see today is not always righteous, and it is not always decent.

Prophetic courage is indispensable in times like these. Societies cannot confront injustice without voices willing to challenge power and expose wrongdoing. But movements that confront injustice need more than prophetic fire. They also need a deeper discipline that guards against unrighteous impulses and unexamined motives.

“Movements that confront injustice need more than prophetic fire.”

Justice movements rightly call for prophets who will confront injustice. But they also need priests who remind us that how we struggle matters just as much as what we struggle for.

Which raises a troubling question for our moment: Has some of our justice work begun to lose its soul?

The moral crisis beneath the conflict

One of the primary tasks of the priestly tradition is to examine the moral and spiritual forces animating our public struggles. When we look honestly at our current moment, one reality becomes difficult to ignore. The crisis confronting our nation runs deeper than political polarization or policy disputes. At its core is the normalization of hatred and othering in our public life.

Americans increasingly define themselves against one another. Political opponents are not merely wrong but evil.

Social media rewards humiliation and outrage. Entire groups of people are reduced to caricatures that justify indifference, exclusion or hostility.

Research from political scientists at Vanderbilt University has shown partisans on both sides of the political divide are increasingly willing to dehumanize members of the opposing party. Some respondents openly describe political opponents as animals or as lacking essential human traits. When people begin to see others this way, the moral restraints that normally govern human behavior begin to erode.

Hatred may offer emotional release or moral validation, but it ultimately corrodes the soul of both individuals and societies.

“Hatred corrodes the soul of both individuals and societies.”

The great African American theologian and mystic Howard Thurman understood this dynamic well. In Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman examined the role of hatred in the lives of oppressed people struggling against injustice. He acknowledged hatred can serve a social function. It can provide a sense of dignity and solidarity in the face of humiliation. But Thurman warned hatred ultimately destroys the one who harbors it and dries up the springs of creative thought.

Hatred creates what Thurman called the illusion of righteousness. It convinces us our hostility is morally justified because we are responding to real injustice. But once hatred takes root, it begins to shape our character and our imagination.

People can become life affirming and life negating at the same time. They champion justice for their own group while embracing hostility toward others.

The animating force of hatred is one of the most dangerous and pervasive temptations facing justice movements today.

Priestly discipline

The biblical tradition reminds us not everything offered to or done on behalf of God is acceptable simply because it is passionate or sincere. The priestly tradition places great emphasis on careful attention to what is brought before God and how it is offered.

At the heart of this tradition is the concept of holiness, setting things apart for sacred use and dedicating people and practices to God for worship and service. Holiness is not perfection. It is being set apart and devoted to God in a particular way.

This priestly vision does not govern worship alone. It extends to our lives and our work. As the epistle to the Romans teaches, we are called to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.

Jesus, who was not only a prophetic figure but also a priestly one, echoes this vision when he tells the Samaritan woman true worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth. Throughout his teaching, he emphasizes practices that shape the inner life of believers. He speaks about prayer, forgiveness and humility and warns about the danger of reckless words. He cautions against anger that gives way to contempt and contempt that leads to violence.

The priestly tradition reminds us how we act matters just as much as what we claim to be fighting for. We desperately need to emphasize the priestly dimensions of justice work, because when the prophetic impulse is detached from priestly formation, justice movements become reactive and spiritually unmoored. Anger becomes identity. Outrage becomes strategy. Contempt becomes normalized as a legitimate tool of resistance.

King and the discipline of nonviolence

This is why the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. remains so important. King was prophetic in his critique of injustice, but he also was deeply disciplined in how he carried out that critique. His commitment to nonviolence was not passive. It was principled. He insisted that movements for justice must use what he called “Christian methods” and “Christian weapons.” He warned against the temptation to meet hatred with hatred or violence with violence.

“Let no man pull you so low as to hate him,” he said. To do so would not defeat evil but deepen it.

King understood that resistance is not only external but internal. It is not enough to avoid physical violence. One must also resist what he called the “violence of the spirit.”

Hatred, contempt and bitterness can take root within us and begin to shape how we speak, act and imagine the world. This is why he warned if movements succumb to these forces, they will leave behind “a long and desolate night of bitterness.”

“What begins as a struggle for justice can become a cycle of retaliation, producing the very chaos it seeks to overcome.”

What begins as a struggle for justice can become a cycle of retaliation, producing the very chaos it seeks to overcome.

This is not simply a lesson for the past. It is a warning for the present. In fact, it plays out every single day in these divided states of America. In our public life today, verbal and emotional violence have become normalized. Shouting replaces argument. Contempt replaces conviction. Opponents are treated not as neighbors to be persuaded but as enemies to be defeated.

What King teaches us is clear. The issue is not whether we resist injustice. It is how we resist it. Resistance must be principled. It must be disciplined. And it must be rooted in something deeper than anger.

Learning from the life of the church

In my own work, I have been wrestling with this imbalance for years. A few years ago, while working with students and Black clergy on preaching and its relationship to the issues shaping our communities, I began to notice a pattern. In many congregations, preaching leaned heavily toward pastoral concerns, addressing personal struggles and existential needs, with far less attention to prophetic engagement with social realities. In other spaces, particularly within Pentecostal and nondenominational traditions, there was a strong emphasis on worship, holiness and spiritual experience.

What became clear to me was not that any one of these emphases was wrong, but the absence of balance created gaps in ministry. In response, I began to articulate a threefold model of preaching that holds together the pastoral, the prophetic and the priestly.

Years later, I find myself observing a similar imbalance beyond the pulpit. In many justice movements today, the prophetic impulse is strong but the priestly dimension is often neglected.

When religion mirrors the conflict

The problem becomes even more serious when religion is drawn into these dynamics. Faith traditions that should challenge social conflict sometimes become vehicles for intensifying it. Religion can be domesticated to comfort the conscience of those in power. It can be nationalized to bless the interests of one group over others. It can be weaponized to attack opponents or instrumentalized to legitimize narrow political agendas.

When this happens, religion no longer serves as a moral compass for society. It becomes another force organizing social conflict. Too many Christian leaders and faith-based justice organizations have allowed these dynamics to taint their witness and work.

We must resist these temptations and forces. Our calling is not simply to reflect the conflicts of the age but to bear witness to a different moral and spiritual vision.

Recovering the balance

The Christian tradition offers a different path. It calls believers to confront injustice with courage while remaining anchored in love, humility and spiritual discipline. It reminds us the methods we use shape the future we create. As the epistle to the Romans teaches, we are not to be overcome by evil, but to overcome evil with good. That is not simply a moral ideal. It is a discipline that must shape how we engage the world.

Justice movements rightly call for what we might describe as prophetic voices, those willing to confront injustice and speak truth to power. But they also need a priestly discipline, one that attends to the inner life of the movement and reminds us that how we struggle matters just as much as what we struggle for.

In a time when prophetic voices and justice work are everywhere, we would do well to pause and examine not only what we are fighting, but what is shaping us in the process. Because the deeper question is not only whether injustice will be confronted, but whether those who confront it will remain faithful in the struggle.

So, I leave you with the simple but urgent question of our time: Can justice movements lose their soul? The answer may shape not only our movements, but our future.

 

Lewis Brogdon serves as executive director of JustFaith Ministries in Louisville, Ky.