Why Justice Begins with Those Who Have Less Power

LOVE MADE SOCIAL — COLUMN 7 OF 16

Christian justice is universal because every person bears the image of God and deserves truth, dignity, and fair treatment. Universal concern, however, does not require identical attention, any more than a physician’s equal regard for patients requires treating a minor injury and a life-threatening wound with equal urgency. Scripture repeatedly directs concern toward widows, orphans, strangers, laborers, prisoners, and poor people because equal dignity requires attention to unequal vulnerability.

This does not mean that marginalized people possess greater worth or that powerful people are always wrong. It means that injustice is often hardest to expose where those affected have the fewest resources to challenge it. Biblical law prohibits judges from favoring either the rich because they are powerful or the poor merely because they are poor.¹ Yet an impartial hearing offers limited protection to someone who cannot reach the court, obtain representation, understand the proceedings, or withstand retaliation. Fair judgment and meaningful access to justice are distinct obligations.

Three responsibilities follow. Moral attention begins where vulnerability and exclusion are greatest. Judgment evaluates claims impartially through evidence and fair procedures. Remedy addresses the injuries and barriers the evidence establishes. Beginning an investigation with those who have less power does not predetermine its verdict.

The biblical foundation for this approach lies in Israel’s understanding of God and its own history. Deuteronomy joins God’s impartiality to God’s defense of the orphan and widow and love for the stranger. Israel must love the stranger because it once lived as strangers in Egypt. Memory becomes an obligation governing the use of freedom: those who have experienced dependence and exclusion must not reproduce them when they acquire security.²

These commands belong first to Jewish covenantal life. Christians encounter them through Israel’s Scriptures and must consider what they require of Christian institutions. They also contain a warning: suffering injustice does not guarantee that a community will act justly once it possesses power. The memory of oppression must shape conduct, not become an exemption from scrutiny.

Biblical law gives this responsibility economic form. Gleaning provisions, commands for prompt payment of wages, and protections for debtors limit what owners, employers, and creditors may do. Ownership does not confer an unlimited moral claim upon everything a field produces. An employer’s convenience does not override a laborer’s need for wages. A creditor’s legitimate interest does not erase a debtor’s dignity or need for shelter.³ Compassion belongs within economic relationships, before their failures require emergency assistance.

The preferential option for poor and marginalized people names this discipline of attention. Explicitly developed in Catholic social teaching, it asks whose needs receive little consideration, whose interests lack effective representation, and who bears costs others can avoid.⁴ Its purpose is to make universal dignity consequential where ordinary protections are weakest.

Social position affects what people can see. Those who benefit from an arrangement may experience its advantages as natural while overlooking burdens carried elsewhere. Institutions therefore need knowledge from people who live with the consequences of their decisions. Philosopher Miranda Fricker describes epistemic injustice: people can be wronged when prejudice discounts their testimony or shared understandings fail to make their experience intelligible. A patient whose pain is dismissed may suffer partly because an institution has already decided whose account deserves credibility.⁵

Listening alone is insufficient. Institutions must make participation accessible, protect people from retaliation, and give their contributions influence. A public meeting held during working hours may be convenient for salaried professionals but costly for residents who must lose wages or arrange child care. A complaint process may exist on paper while remaining dangerous for someone who depends on the organization for essential assistance.

Silence under these conditions cannot safely be interpreted as agreement. Meaningful participation may require compensation, interpretation, accessible materials, transportation, or child care. It also requires clarity about which decisions remain open, what participants can influence, and how the institution will explain its choices. Inviting testimony after every consequential decision has been made offers recognition without authority.

These safeguards do not make affected voices infallible. Marginalized communities contain disagreement, prejudice, hierarchy, and competing interests. A confident spokesperson may lack authorization to represent others. Personal testimony may establish genuine injury without proving every proposed explanation. Someone who faces exploitation in one relationship may exercise coercive power in another.

Faithful discernment therefore combines respect with evidence. It examines patterns, tests competing explanations, asks who remains unheard, and revises conclusions when warranted. Professional credentials and lived experience each disclose knowledge the other may lack.

Consider a health system designing a diabetes program. Clinicians understand medication, nutrition, and disease progression. Administrators understand reimbursement and operations. Patients understand the practical demands of purchasing food, working irregular hours, finding transportation, caring for children, and following treatment under chronic stress. Nutrition advice may assume a kitchen, refrigerator, nearby grocery store, or time to cook. A recommendation can be medically sound while the program delivering it overlooks the conditions necessary to follow it.

Patients and professionals should therefore help define the problem, design the program, and evaluate its results together. Clinical evidence protects against ineffective or unsafe treatment; patient knowledge helps make treatment usable. Amartya Sen’s attention to people’s actual opportunities clarifies the distinction: providing a service does not establish that someone can meaningfully benefit from it.⁶ Justice asks what people can actually do with what an institution offers.

Jesus repeatedly directs attention toward people whom social and religious hierarchies have rendered peripheral. He permits a woman with chronic bleeding to interrupt him publicly, asks Bartimaeus what he wants, places a child among disciples debating greatness, and makes a Samaritan the moral center of a parable.⁷ These encounters recognize agency as well as need. People spoken about become people who speak.

Jesus’ question to Bartimaeus is especially instructive. An observer might assume that his need is obvious, yet Jesus addresses him as someone capable of naming what he seeks. Christian service should practice that restraint. Expertise and generosity do not eliminate the obligation to ask people how they understand their circumstances and priorities.

James turns this scrutiny toward the church itself. He condemns an assembly that honors a well-dressed visitor while humiliating a poor person. Its seating arrangements reveal that wealth governs recognition within a community professing faith in Christ.⁸ Churches must ask how influence operates among them: whose calls receive prompt answers, whose objections can halt a proposal, whose preferences become binding constraints, and whose needs become unfortunate complications.

A congregation can proclaim equal dignity while allowing giving capacity, professional status, or family connections to determine whose judgment matters. Correcting this requires more than welcoming language. It requires examining appointments, budgets, access to leaders, and the processes through which decisions are challenged.

Church ministries must also resist defining people entirely through deprivation. People with low incomes are workers, parents, caregivers, entrepreneurs, artists, teachers, organizers, and neighbors. A ministry that sees only need can overlook the capacities essential to lasting improvement. John Perkins’s community-development tradition is valuable because it connects assistance to local leadership and durable community capacity.⁹

Success should therefore include leaders developed, ownership expanded, organizations strengthened, and authority shared. A program may deliver valuable services while leaving recipients dependent on decisions they cannot influence. Christian service should help people acquire the means to shape their own lives and contribute to common life.

Emergency assistance remains indispensable. A hungry child cannot wait for institutional reform. A family facing eviction needs immediate help. Relief asks what will prevent suffering now; repair asks why the same people repeatedly confront the same emergencies and what would reduce their exposure.

These responsibilities belong together. A church may need to distribute food while also supporting reliable access to adequate income and affordable groceries. Its faithfulness includes asking whether recurring demand reflects conditions its charitable work cannot resolve alone. An institution should be willing to regard the reduced need for some of its emergency services as evidence of success.

Power is necessary for this work. People need the capacity to organize, negotiate, own property, challenge abuse, and influence decisions. Authority also enables parents, clinicians, employers, public officials, and church leaders to fulfill responsibilities. The moral questions concern how power is acquired, exercised, limited, and made answerable to those affected.

Those questions become difficult when vulnerable groups have competing interests. A neighborhood development may create housing while threatening existing small businesses. An institutional reform may improve services while imposing costs on workers with little financial cushion. Beginning with vulnerability does not remove the need for judgment. It requires identifying foreseeable burdens, considering alternatives, and preventing those with the weakest bargaining position from becoming the easiest people to sacrifice.

Evaluation must follow the same discipline. Growth, average income, institutional reputation, and majority satisfaction can conceal concentrated injury. A program may improve overall performance while repeatedly failing a smaller group. High enrollment may coexist with exclusion of those facing the greatest barriers. Institutions must ask who benefited, who could not participate, who left, and whether those carrying the heaviest burdens experienced meaningful improvement.

The condition of those with less power is indispensable to assessing justice because people and institutions with power generally possess greater means to defend their interests and resist scrutiny. Christians with influence must therefore accept evidence that unsettles their assumptions, limits on their discretion, and participation that can change their decisions. Universal concern becomes credible when it reaches people whose cooperation is convenient but whose authority has been unwelcome.

Christian justice begins where vulnerability is greatest and proceeds through impartial judgment toward effective remedy. Its aim is a common life in which dignity has practical protection through enforceable rights, meaningful participation, and accessible means of correction—and no one must depend entirely on another person’s goodwill to be heard.

Endnotes

1. Exodus 23:1–9; Leviticus 19:15; Deuteronomy 1:16–17.
2. Deuteronomy 10:17–19; 24:17–22; Psalm 68:5–6; 146:5–10.
3. Leviticus 19:9–10, 13; Deuteronomy 24:10–15, 19–22.
4. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (2004), §§182–184, 189–191.
5. Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
6. Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).
7. Mark 5:25–34; 10:46–52; Matthew 18:1–5; Luke 10:25–37.
8. James 2:1–9.
9. John M. Perkins, Beyond Charity: The Call to Christian Community Development (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1993).