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I spent a lot of time in my college years learning about and raising awareness of human trafficking—modern-day slavery—through Christian organizations such as International Justice Mission and campus groups I was involved in. And it was in those contexts that I first became familiar with the term “social justice.” Many of my fellow millennials understood the term as an expression of the practical outgrowth of our Christian faith. But—for reasons explained in this week’s Dispatch Faith essay—the term itself also became associated with more liberal ideologies and has since fallen by the wayside.
Writer Maggie Phillips argues this week that the term’s theological roots are cause for conservatives to resurrect it, especially as they seek to appeal to younger Americans who care deeply about social issues. In so doing she considers whether Pope Leo XIV might be the figure who could prompt religious conservatives to do so.
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Religious Conservatives Should Take Back ‘Social Justice’
After the 2024 presidential election, there was a sense that the excesses of wokeness had been repudiated once and for all. Having apparently rejected BLM, DEI, and LGBTQ overreach at the ballot box, America was ready to roll back the progressive social justice project. The counterrevolution had begun and in the public square, we could wish each other Merry Christmas again.
Until relatively recently, it felt like the phrase “social justice” was everywhere, whether it was corporations stating their commitment to it or conservatives rolling their eyes at it. Of course, the conservative allergy to what we’ve recently thought of as wokeness dates back further than the 2020 George Floyd era. It really traces its lineage back to the critiques of George W. Bush’s Compassionate Conservatism in the 2000s (that it was too expensive and big-government social engineering by another name), and to that copy of Politically Correct Bedtime Stories your friend’s dad had in the 1990s. A New York Times review of government agency documents last March found the phrase “social justice” was being flagged for removal from government websites. But it’s not just on the political right: Center-left think tank Third Way is warning Democratic politicians to steer clear of social justice-coded words like “incarcerated persons,” “privilege,” and “centering.”
It all seems to be part of a tacit admission that “social justice” is electoral poison.
But I don’t think that assumption is true: Kids marching in the streets for social justice didn’t disappear into the ether on November 5, 2024, and the term itself isn’t an invention of the progressive secular left. As conservatives fight among themselves for the future of the post-Trump right, a faction that’s interested in winning not just the Republican Party but any kind of first-past-the-post election in the future might do well to ask itself: “What’s so funny ‘bout peace, love and understanding?”
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For one thing, data indicating that the youth are part of a coalition of the ascendent on the right just isn’t there. The youth support that the GOP picked up in the 2024 presidential election appears to be crumbling. And young people still care about social issues. That’s especially true among Christian Gen Zers, a group that the new right seems very focused on appealing to. According to Christian pollsters at the Barna Group, among Christian Gen Zers, racial injustice is one of the top five concerns for many black, Hispanic, and Asian Zoomers. Half of black Zoomers described themselves as “very motivated” to continue learning about injustices in society, and almost half of Hispanic and white Christian Zoomers said the same. A look at young people’s philanthropic giving patterns is also instructive. The Lilly Family School of Philanthropy’s “Next Generation of Philanthropy” study found that Zoomers are increasingly donating to causes that meet basic needs (providing housing, food, clothing). Indeed, a higher proportion of Zoomers gave to such causes in 2019 than millennials did at the same age in 2003.
In other words, they are interested in social justice.
The term itself comes not from the blue-haired social justice warriors so often caricatured on the right, but from Catholicism, which is currently enjoying its own weird cultural moment. Suddenly people love hot priests, tradition, and high-church aesthetics. Instead of reflexively dismissing social justice issues like racial equality as “woke” (a term no one on the left uses anymore anyway), what if the right embraced more of the substance of Catholicism along with the window-dressing? Political conservatives have long been happy to make common cause with Catholics on sexual ethics and the traditional family. But too often, they’ve ceded Catholic social teaching about caring for the poor and marginalized to secular progressives. Bringing back social justice, both as a term and a concept, might help conservatives avoid the post-midterm wilderness they’re facing at present.
For what it’s worth, the concept is nothing new.
Pope Leo XIV’s first major exhortation as pontiff, Dilexi Te, traces the church’s social justice tradition all the way back to St. John Chrysostom. Calling the late fourth-century bishop “the most ardent preacher of social justice” of all the Eastern Fathers, Leo recalls the saint’s exhortation to the faithful to “recognize Christ in the needy,” by giving from their own wealth to feed and clothe them. Pope Pius XI coined the term itself almost a century ago in his 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno. Pius explained social justice was an obligation of both the government and private spheres, to meet “the needs of the common good” by upholding human dignity. Far from being a left-wing rallying cry, the document was as much a repudiation of socialism as of unfettered capitalism. It built on ideas from an 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, by his predecessor Pope Leo XIII (from whom the current pontiff derives his papal name). A reaction to the Industrial Revolution, Rerum Novarum was a pro-private property document that denounced socialism as “manifestly against justice.” Leo XIII was heavily interested in the duty of government to protect the rights of the individual, the obligation of the wealthy to ensure just wages and good working conditions, and the “pernicious error” of social engineering in the family and the household.
Pregnancy resource centers would be a good start for a new social justice right. These centers get a lot of flak, especially since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, for misrepresenting themselves to women seeking abortions. Pro-choice advocates say they’re a bait-and-switch: Women go in thinking they can get an abortion and get an ultrasound instead. Critics worry that because pregnancy resource centers are not licensed medical centers, women’s health information isn’t protected the same way, and crucial information needed to diagnose and treat at-risk women may be missed or delayed.
For my part, as someone who knows pregnancy resource center volunteers personally and who has also reported on the yeoman’s work some of these centers are doing, my default assumption is most pregnancy resource centers are operating in good faith. I remember the genuine admiration from a pro-choicer a few years ago when I told them about work I saw firsthand that the Sisters of Life are doing in New York City.
It’s why I think pro-life conservatives could, without much trouble, refit the messaging around pregnancy resource centers: Talk about them less as a pro-life initiative per se, and more of a social justice thing. After all, many are helping women meet basic needs—maternity clothes, baby clothes and diapers, counseling, help finding a job, and childcare. And we know that minorities, especially black women, have higher rates of unintended pregnancies compared to white women, and account for the majority of abortions.
Pro-choice groups have also long protested so-called “TRAP laws”—additional health and safety requirements on abortion clinics in the name of women’s safety—saying they are simply a Trojan horse that restricts abortion access through onerous facility restrictions instead of shutting them down outright. It’s an easy conclusion to reach. But surely pro-life conservatives could communicate to voters that they really mean what they say about protecting the vulnerable if they could find common ground with legislators on the left that not only take seriously abortion’s root causes, but also progressive pro-choice concerns about women’s health and safety as well. For example, a bipartisan bill that would require pregnancy resource centers to meet certain basic health and safety requirements seems like it would be an easy win for both sides.
Doing so would require religious conservatives to prioritize being social justice warriors (to borrow a phrase) rather than culture warriors. Tellingly, at a time when U.S. Catholics are wearing themselves out online fighting over the right kind of liturgy, in Delexi Te Pope Leo XIV links authentic worship not to Latin missals or which direction the priest is facing, but to works of mercy. In the Catholic tradition, the corporal works of mercy derive from Matthew 25: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned, burying the dead, and providing shelter to the homeless.
Vatican-watchers and politicos alike are still reading the tea leaves to see where Leo stands ideologically. But he hasn’t been shy about criticizing the Trump administration’s immigration policy in fairly strong terms. And if Dilexi Te is any indication, he is clearly interested in promoting social justice among Catholics. Could the American pope’s personal popularity at home translate to making social justice cool again? Maybe not “cool” per se, but politicians who align themselves with Leo’s priorities might see some gains at the polls, especially among midterm voters seeking an alternative to MAGA. Leo emerged as the most popular world leader in a 2025 in a Gallup poll of Americans, his favorability rating of 57 percent an exact inverse of respondents’ 57 percent disapproval rating of Donald Trump.
Some on the right seem eager to adopt the trappings of Catholicism for clout with some young online trads while ignoring the vast majority of their peers who are simply searching desperately for someone, anyone, they believe will protect their interests. As I write this, protests in Minneapolis are bringing back memories of George Floyd. And from Zohran Mandani’s election as the mayor of New York City to recent predictions of the advent of Woke 2.0, voices on the left are telling their audiences that 2024’s national pendulum swing to the right is due for another oscillation. Conservatives can revert to snarky muscle memory, or they can pay attention. It would be a tragically missed opportunity if all we get out of an American Catholic pope is White Sox memes and a solipsistic X debate over whether Jack Posobiec should wave his rosary around performatively at AmFest. We need no more vibes; we’ve seen where vibes have gotten us. Principled conservatives don’t have to reinvent the wheel to prevent electoral oblivion. If they can get over decades of conditioning against social justice, a 2,000-year-old faith tradition that helped form the Western order might just offer some actionable insight.
Elsewhere
Scholars continue to debate the degree to which religion—especially in the U.S.—is undergoing a revival of sorts vs. just a leveling off of the “nones” (see the next segment for more on that). But recent social science indicates there has been some plateauing among the “nones,” at least for now. For the website today, three scholars from Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute articulate why that might be, and why the prophesied demise of religion hasn’t come to pass.
Ultimately, religious people typically aren’t religious in a transactional way, simply being religious because of its mental health benefits, or improved marriages, or increased civic engagement. And focusing only on such avoids the question of why religion benefits us in ways secular organizations do not seem to have matched or replicated. We suggest religious benefits come from something deeper and more profound than a utilitarian scorecard.
Arguably the most prominent female former atheist in the world, Ayaan Hirsi, explained in 2023 her own recent conversion to Christianity simply: “Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?” Even the nonreligious often recognize that religion provides a vital sense of meaning and purpose for believers. And this is not just conventional wisdom: Research has shown that believers in God are more likely to report that life has meaning.
While the secular state certainly promotes similar society-building concepts as many religions, religion has a unique influence over the human soul. It is one thing for a philosopher to opine that societies should be generous and kind, but it is quite another thing for a person to believe that the creator of the universe has commanded them to do so. For instance, in the U.S., underage drinking is outlawed. Unsurprisingly, our own unpublished analysis from more than 160,000 underage U.S. college students finds those whose religion prohibits drinking are much less likely to drink: Among underaged college students of no religion, 43 percent reported drinking alcohol in the last two weeks, compared to 13 percent of Muslims and 7 percent of Latter-day Saint underage college students. So why would religion matter if society has already outlawed such behavior? A likely partial answer is because such an instruction, for believers, has come from on high, rather than from humans.
More Sunday Reads
- Everyone’s favorite religion-and-numbers guy Ryan Burge is in Deseret this week, splashing a bit of cold water on the narrative that the U.S. is seeing a religious revival. The long-term numbers simply don’t bear this out, he says, even if there are some outliers. “The reality is that there hasn’t been a single event in the past 50 years that sparked a sustained, measurable rise in religious attendance in the United States. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, churchgoing did increase briefly, but by early 2002 it had returned to normal. Likewise, the Asbury University revival of February 2023 received wall-to-wall media coverage, but follow-up reporting showed no lasting change in local religiosity a year later. That said, some aspects of Protestant Christianity have experienced noteworthy growth over the last several years. The Assemblies of God, a charismatic evangelical denomination, has recorded sustained growth for decades; since 2000, its membership is up nearly 19%. The Presbyterian Church in America, the more conservative cousin of the Presbyterian Church USA, is up about 31% during the same time period and has enjoyed an annual growth rate of 2.2% since 1980. Additionally, the number of Americans identifying as non-denominational Protestants has grown from essentially a rounding error in the 1970s (about 3%), to nearly 15% of the population in more recent data. In numeric terms, there are likely 30-40 million non-denominational Christians in the United States, making this group three times the size of the Southern Baptist Convention. However, the sources of growth in American Christianity are still outweighed by the decline of older denominations like the United Methodist Church and The Episcopal Church.”
- Since the U.S. raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, religious leaders in the country have mostly been quiet. But for years, the majority of Venezuela’s Catholic leadership had opposed Maduro, his predecessor Hugo Chávez, and their socialist regime. Two months ago, however, the New York Times published a fascinating profile of one Jesuit priest who has wielded extraordinary influence in his close relationship with Maduro: Numa Molina, who has stood apart from many of his fellow Catholics in the country. “Throughout his career Father Molina has accused Venezuelan bishops and cardinals of being out of touch with Venezuela’s poor. ‘They are religious officials, not pastors,’ he said in the interview. He has continued defending the government, even as it lost the support of the poor he claims to represent. Mr. Maduro set off an extraordinary economic collapse, scrapped most social programs and carried out extrajudicial killings in impoverished neighborhoods,” the Times reported. “The ideological split inside Venezuela’s Catholic Church is an aftershock of the Cold War. It was a period when many young priests in Latin America, inspired by the gospel’s message of social justice, supported Marxist rebels and accused conservative bishops of legitimizing right-wing dictators. But after revolutions won power in countries like Nicaragua and Cuba and morphed into new dictatorships, many of those priests struggled to reconcile their progressive beliefs with political realities. In private, some Venezuelan priests say Father Molina has failed to see that political reality at home. His concern for the material well-being of his congregation, they say, had led him to become too deeply enmeshed in politics and make moral compromises with a government accused of drug trafficking and torture.”
Religion in an Image
