Andrew Cuomo, Governor of New York, identifies his religion as Roman Catholicism, but Andrew Cuomo’s real religion is Social Justice. If his religion were Roman Catholicism, then he would sit on the three-legged stool of Scripture, Church Tradition, and the Pope’s Decrees and form his opinions from there. The sources of authority recognized by Roman Catholics would be authoritative to him. Protestants outright reject Rome’s three-legged stool, finding it unstable because two of the three legs can’t bear weight. We say, “Sola Scriptura—Scripture alone.” But if Cuomo were truly Roman Catholic, he would fight passionately to uphold the tenets of his religion.
Instead, in open defiance of Scripture, Church Tradition, and the Pope, Cuomo is willing to abort babies. He’ll strive for the mother’s “right” to kill them right up until the moment of birth. “Governor Cuomo will fight to pass the Reproductive Health Act” (1) because this fighting is his religion. Andrew Cuomo is a Social Justice warrior fighting a fundamentally religious war.
Social Justice becomes religion as soon as it becomes the animating principle of one’s life. You can tell that something is religious to a person when they are willing to fight for it with unexpected passion. If something is of the utmost importance to someone, if they get emotional when they talk about it, if they delight in its victories and lament its defeats, if they strive after it more vigorously than they do for most anything else, then it has become a religion to them. You can identify your religion by what you’re most passionate about, and many people today are most passionate about Social Justice.
Social Justice is the latest in the long line of religions born from Adam’s eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If knowledge of right and wrong does not come from outside of humanity, from the special revelation of God in Scripture, then it can only come from inside of humanity, from human reasoning. All false religions emerge from demonically-inspired human thinking. When the collective reasoning (of supposedly free thinkers) settles on a definition of the highest good, then the pursuit of it is the supposed path to life. At some point between the 1960s and today, equality was identified by the collective reasoning of Americans to be the highest good. Along came Social Justice to promise equality—and life—to anyone willing to eat its fruit.
The god of Social Justice is equality. The religious pursuit of that god across every difference in life is called Social Justice. The elimination of disparities between the races, the sexes, the sexualities, the species, the nationalities, and across any other category of differentiation, has become a religious enterprise. Rejecting the Christian teaching that God providentially makes people to differ in many ways, the flattening out of all distinctions between people becomes the highest good. Equality becomes god.
The god called equality is forever elusive, but that only provides endless fuel to the religious effort to attain it. Humans have reasoned that disadvantages are the greatest of evils, so the heroic quest to eliminate them, as endless as it is religious, has begun. America’s new majority religion—Social Justice—has taken over and shows no signs of slowing down.
The reason Andrew Cuomo supports abortion is the opposite of what he says. He says, “I’m not here to legislate religion” (2). In truth, his support for abortion is absolutely religious. His Social Justice religion tells him what to do, and his religious zeal animates him to do it. The elimination of disparities between the genders requires that women be allowed to murder the innocent life inside of them. Justice would demand the protection of innocent life. Social Justice demands the protection of a woman’s autonomy, in order that her freedom be kept equal to that of any man, who cannot become pregnant. The Moloch-like god of equality demands the sacrifice of babies, and the “Social Justicians” (3) religiously comply. By their religious zeal (picture the cheering of the New York State House of Representatives when Cuomo’s Reproductive Health Act passed), they prove that Social Justice is their religion.
When women turn out en masse and in costume to march for women’s rights in a country that doesn’t actually withhold rights from women (except for, ironically, the right to life of unborn women), we witness the passionate activism of the Social Justice religion. When support for building a wall to enforce national boundaries is called xenophobic and immoral, we hear the spiritual language of the Social Justice religion. When colleges attempt to force their employees and students to use preferred or gender-neutral pronouns, we see the zealous enforcing of the rules of the Social Justice religion. When pastors decry “toxic masculinity” and “white privilege” from their pulpits, we see the insidious seeds of the replacement of Christianity in the church with the Social Justice religion. America is no less religious a nation in 2019 than she was in 1969. Only now, Social Justice has replaced Christianity as the majority religion.
(1) https://www.ny.gov/programs/2019-state-state-budget-address
(2) https://www.foxnews.com/politics/cuomo-defies-catholic-church-with-new-york-abortion-law-im-not-here-to-legislate-religion
(3) a term coined by Phil Johnson of Grace to You, the teaching ministry of John MacArthur
