According to Jeff Maples of Pulpit & Pen many well-meaning Christians are buying into the social gospel propaganda. “Christians are being guilted into believing that if they don’t jump onto the social justice bandwagon, they are being disobedient to the Great Commission,” says Maples. “This is simply false and it’s underhanded.” He writes:
There is a dangerous trend that is sweeping throughout churches, especially in America. The church has largely redefined the gospel from its most basic tenets to something that tends to have a mass appeal to outsiders–the “social gospel.” The social gospel comes in many different flavors and is advanced by those of various theological traditions, but it appears to be most prevalent in the cabal of New Calvinism. However, they are certainly not the only ones. The Gospel Coalition, which should be rightly renamed The Social Gospel Coalition, is by far the most prominent outlet for the advancement of social justice in the Church.
The social gospel advances ideas such as racial justice, open borders, and left-wing political ideology that has a facade of Christlikeness, but under the surface, merely replaces the gospel with social activism. The social gospel is different from the culture war, as the culture war tends to try to instill and enforce conservative and religious ideology through the use of boycotts and other “take-overs” of the culture. The social gospel, on the other hand, is an attempt to appease the world and the culture by encouraging Christians to adopt political social justice ideas through the guise of “gospel mandates.”