Time & Perspective Quote by Tony Campolo

Even-handed justice is the kind of phrase that sounds soothing until you hear the accusation inside it: we have not been even-handed, and we have not been just. Tony Campolo, the evangelical preacher who spent decades trying to drag American Christianity toward civil-rights-era moral clarity, chooses words that sidestep partisan buzzwords while still lighting a fuse. He doesn’t say “revenge,” “reparations,” or even “accountability.” He says “justice,” then modifies it with “even-handed,” as if anticipating the reflexive backlash that any corrective policy will be smeared as favoritism.

The timing language matters as much as the moral claim. “I think the time has come” is a preacher’s soft gavel: patient, measured, but final. It frames justice as overdue rather than optional, a bill the country keeps trying to refinance with rhetoric about unity. Campolo’s religious vocation shapes the subtext here. This isn’t the technocrat’s justice of procedures; it’s the biblical insistence that nations, like people, are judged by how they treat the vulnerable and how honestly they reckon with harm.

Contextually, Campolo has often spoken into debates about race, poverty, war, and the hypocrisies of a faith culture quick to police private behavior but slow to confront public inequity. The line works because it’s strategically “moderate” in tone while radical in implication: if you truly apply justice evenly in America, you end up interrogating uneven history, uneven policing, uneven schools, uneven wages. The calm phrasing is the disguise; the demand is disruptive.