Sara has been contending that most people in the study probably were thinking about personally helping people and not so much the government connection when asked about social justice. It hit me the other morning that she is probably partially right because there was another question on there about the federal government reducing inequality and no matter what I did, I could not get the same findings out of it. So, not conclusive, but it may be a hint that the social justice in the study may be more on the person-to-person side of the scale. I know that was keeping you up at night. Now you can sleep well.
Either way, I stick by the symbolic connection with the word. That much is clear, but what the symbol is or what pops into peoples' heads is an open question still.
If that is the case, then it is definitely welcome news like some people have commented. It is always a good thing to get people to care more about caring for people.
I forgot to mention in the last post that it is super ironic, I think, that as far as comments on the study go (not counting the plain jane journalistic reports) Glenn Beck was actually one of the more even-handed commentators on it all. Almost made me feel bad for singling him out. It was close.
2 comments:
I actually had been thinking about that very thing, and I must say I agree with Sara! Having not read your paper yet (thought my handy-dandy Baylor access might let me do just that, but no luck!), I kept wondering why the response articles and, to an even further degree, all of the comments took such extreme political angles. My personal response when thinking about how the Bible could (should?) influence the way people think about social issues is the person-to-person connection you mention. I do not automatically associate the term 'social justice' with government, but rather with communities and individuals. Government certainly plays a role, as the term definitely has a broad spectrum of applications. But in the context of what I know about this study, I could see how many people would be first thinking of the personal aspect. Anyway. Just my two cents. Interesting stuff!
Yeah, I had asked baylor to not release the paper yet because I was going to try and publish it. It may be out soon-ish.
well, while there may be some small hints that sara was right about the social justice, I am far from ready to let the political angle go. In every area I looked at in the paper, including social justice, liberal political ideology was always one of the top 2 or 3 strongest predictor for the belief too. In other words, in every single case, it was people who are politically liberal and not politically conservative that were most likely to agree with these things. So, while the social justice may be 'person to person,' it is in some way strongly related to liberal politics.
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