If you work with youth, you’ve probably been there when a kid first wakes up to all that’s wrong in the world. Seeing society’s injustices for the first time, she longs to make things right. “Why can’t we do more about ___?” is the cry, and you can fill in the blank with any number of causes: food insecurity, racial prejudice, the evils of abuse. These are formative moments, and when they come, Christian parents and youth ministry leaders should recognize an opportunity.

I’ve seen church youth groups plant community gardens, paint homeless shelters, and sort baby clothes for the local pregnancy resource center. Projects like these help kids learn to channel their passion for justice “in deed and truth,” not merely in talk or social posts (1 John 3:18). A teen’s newfound eagerness for righting society’s wrongs is also a chance for parents and church leaders to teach them about how the Christian foundation for justice is stronger than the world’s, and how it bears better fruit.

That’s why I found Trevin Wax’s recent review of Musa al-Gharbi’s provocative book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite to be helpful. Al-Gharbi isn’t a conservative Christian. He’s a Muslim scholar and critical theorist, but he nevertheless “flips the philosophical script of the ‘Great Awokening’ of the 2010s back onto itself,” splashing “the acid of critical theory . . . back onto its advocates, revealing the hollow performance beneath the veneer of justice.” He describes witnessing Black Lives Matter demonstrators protest injustice while literally stepping over and ignoring black people in genuine need around them. He excoriates progressives for lamenting the effects of COVID-19 on minorities while relying on low-income, often immigrant workers to deliver their food and groceries. “Again and again,” Wax writes, “he exposes the vast gap between progressive rhetoric and progressive behavior.”

The lesson Wax takes from al-Gharbi’s analysis isn’t just that activists are often performative hypocrites (that can be true of everyone). Wax also recognizes that the world’s foundation for justice is shaky. As young people often readily recognize, justice demands integrity between word and deed. For this reason, it must be built on better footing, on better character; it must be the fruit of a humble and regenerated heart.