Justice and Religion

There’s a fine old country gospel song, “Farther Along,” I can recommend to any of you who are fans of hillbilly music. It’s been recorded by a number of people, including Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt on their Trio album. Look it up sometime.

The song has a question and answer structure. A typical verse runs:

When death has come and taken our loved ones,
Leaving our homes so lone and so drear;
Then do we wonder why others prosper,
Living as sinners year after year.

The answer is, of course, that “farther along” we’ll understand why the world works in this apparently unjust way.

This is just one expression of a question central to all religions. If the universe or its God is just, why do bad things happen to good people? And why, on the other hand, do good things happen to bad people? The answer is, of course, that the injustice is only apparent, because it will be rectified in another life. You may suffer in this world, but you will be rewarded in Heaven. The bad man may seem to prosper now, but he will end up in Hell, suffering the pangs of eternal damnation. (Or, in the Hindu framework of reincarnation, the good man will come back in a better situation in his next life, while the bad man will come back as a cockroach.)

We see this theme in Plato’s Republic, which may contain the first really clear expression of the afterworld as an instrument of justice. (Compare The Odyssey, in which the spirits of the dead wander aimlessly in the underworld, their past lives having no apparent influence upon their present circumstances. I might note that, as far as I can tell from limited reading, the Jewish concept of Sheol is closer to the underworld of Odyssey than to Christian images of the afterworld.) We see it in a very strong form in Christianity in the expression: “But many who are first will be last, and the last first.” (Mark 10:31)

The concept of a retributive afterlife seems to arise from the need to reconcile evident present injustice with a basic intuition that life should be fair. There is, in fact, no evidence whatever that the books are, in fact, balanced on “the other side of the river.” But this belief appears to help people to tolerate their otherwise intolerable lives. Some people think that this is one of the most pernicious aspects of religion, in that it leads people to tolerate misery and oppression, instead of rising up to seize a better life. There’s a folk song on that theme too, “The Preacher and the Slave,” by Joe Hill, the chorus of which is:

You will eat, by and by,
In that glorious land above the sky,
(Way up high),
Work and pray,
Live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die,
(That’s a lie!)

Joe Hill may have been a little harsh; as a Marxist, he presumably thought of religion as the opiate of the people. Since it is quite evident that life isn’t fair, and since no religious organization I know of can guarantee to make life fair in this world, they are forced into promising justice in the world to come. So the churches won’t be held accountable now for the failings of society, but everyone will be held accountable in the world to come.

Take what comfort you can from that idea. Personally, I’ll just go with “Life isn’t fair.”