I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked to say a prayer to change the weather. For some reason it’s a popular joke, implying that pastors have some special pipeline to God. More to the point, it betrays a shared sense that pastors are holy creatures, closer to God and immune to sinful pressures.
Now, I do think pastors should be held to a higher standard and that they should strive for holiness. But I also know every single one of them is a sinner. It’s biblical, after all, as well as confessional, doctrinal, and in accord with lived experience. We all fall short of the glory of God. No news flash there.
Yet some pastors seem to believe their own “press releases,” so to speak. The temptation is to assume that because you serve a religious community, you’re somehow immune to non-religious influences.
In fact, it is my long-held conviction that the biggest problem faced by today’s mainline churches is the inability, particularly among seminary professors, denominational leaders, and clergy, to distinguish the secular from the sacred.
In particular, there is a long tradition in my denomination (U.C.C.) of closely aligning with the wider culture. The New England Congregationalists, after all, were and are the theological heirs of the Swiss reformer John Calvin, who famously oversaw a theocracy in Geneva.
And it is the case that the Pilgrims who first arrived here on Cape Cod came for religious freedom yet quickly denied it to others. One HAD to be a Congregationalist (now part of the UCC) in Massachusetts.
Mimicking Geneva, the pilgrims set up a kind of theocratic order where church and state were virtually indistinguishable. To this day, all over New England, there’s a Congregational church at the center of virtually every town green.
John Davenport, one of the founders of the New Haven Colony (in the 1630s), as well as founding pastor of its only church for a hundred years, Center Church on the Green, a church I once served, left Boston because it had become too “liberal.”
After some 40 years in New Haven, however, he left in a huff. The reason? The New Haven and Hartford colonies were in negotiations to merge. But the Hartford crowd allowed non-church members to vote! For Davenport, this was simply beyond the pale.
Nonetheless, throughout most of American history, pastors were considered not just leaders of the church but civic leaders as well. They were respected and valued.
Years ago my father, not altogether flatteringly, lamented that the best people no longer go into the ministry. Nowadays, he opined, they become doctors and lawyers instead. Thanks, Dad!
Yet there’s something to this. The status associated with ordained ministry has certainly declined. Once part of Coleridge’s esteemed “clerisy,” or intelligentsia, the clergy today often fight against cultural irrelevance. As American society has steadily moved away from the church and toward secularism, clergy find they’ve lost not only their prestige but their seat at the table. They are now second-class citizens, at best.
This loss of status and its associated anxieties is hard to take. And if I’m reading the tea leaves correctly, many clergy have embarked, often unconsciously, on a strategy to gain some sort of respect from those who usurped their place of social standing. By this I’m referring to the new clerisy, the “professional managerial class,” i.e. today’s “best and brightest.”
Though clergy lack their upper-middle class earning power, the lure of obtaining the associated status of this knowledge-based, white collar “ruling class” is undeniable. After all, we clergy read books, too! And important ones, we’ll have you know!
The end-result is a curious desire to “keep up with the Joneses.” There mustn’t be any daylight between the “smart” or “hip” views of elite secular opinion and any self-respecting progressive member of the clergy.
Never mind that these views rarely accord with the Christian faith. We just massage them a bit so they’re made to sound biblical. We can even come up with chapter and verse, if need be.
What tends to be less appreciated, however, is how increasingly tenuous these views are held by the de facto leading lights of contemporary culture, those the clergy doggedly seek to mimic.
Due to competitive economic pressures, there is increasing anxiety and confusion among our elite class, which has forced many to question their future place in society. They fear downward mobility, in other words.
In a brilliant essay entitled, “The Real Class War,” Julius Krein makes the counterintuitive argument that today’s elite, those who comprise the top 10% of wage earners, are actually being left behind.
As can be seen in the chart at top, Krein reports that the “performance gap between the top 1% or 0.1% versus the top 10% is actually larger that the gap between those right at 10% and any part of the bottom 90%.”
“Since 1979,” he adds, “the real annual earnings growth of the top 1% has more than tripled that of earners at 10%, while growth for the 0.1% is, in turn, more than twice that of the 1%.”
Since roughly the year 2000, after the go-go decades of the ‘80s and ‘90s, opportunity and income has dropped for the professional managerial class (PMC).
Krein shows how careers in Big Law, finance, hedge funds, Silicon Valley, and other professions such as the biotech field, journalism, and academia have all experienced loss of job satisfaction and income, comparatively speaking. Add to this the precipitous rise in the cost of housing and education – both important markers of elite status.
Due to the increased “clustering” of professional jobs into elite “superzips,” young people find themselves unable to afford a home, since wages can’t keep up with real estate prices. In San Francisco, for example, a household income of $117,000 is considered “low.” The national top 10%, in contrast, is $178,000!
The same goes for education. The cost of elite education, the entry point into the PMC, adds further pressure. “Between 1979 and 2013,” Krein writes, “tuition costs rose faster than even the 1 percent’s income growth – and more than twice the rate of the top 5 or 10 percent’s income growth.”
“Moreover,” he adds, “while the costs of education have risen, since 2000 the rewards have been declining…From 2000 to 2014…wages for college graduates actually fell.” So much so that nationally 28% of all millennial college graduates are living at home, and a whopping 40% in both New York and Los Angeles!
Krein paints a curious picture. “Since 2000, the combination of stagnation, widening inequality, and the increasing cost of maintaining elite status has arguably had a more pronounced impact on the professional elite than on the working class, which was already marginalized by that point.”
“Elites outside of the very top found themselves falling further behind their supposed cultural peers.” Indeed, they are facing the very real prospect of being the first generation unable to match their parents’ income, status, and lifestyle.
And if that weren’t enough, the professional class reports increasingly job dissatisfaction.
In contrast to the wildly creative period of the ‘80s and ‘90s, when the old, ossified corporate model was undergoing major restructuring and “outside the box” thinking in response to an expanding globalized market and the emerging financialization of the economy, many of today’s professional class consider their jobs meaningless, if not make-work.
Even in Silicon Valley, renowned as the epicenter of creative thinking, professional workers there report a daily drudgery of spread sheets and pie charts that tend to have little or nothing to do with expanding the high-tech frontier.
So what, you may ask, does this have to do with the clergy? I’ll get to it, I promise.
Given all of the above, Krein argues that the “status anxiety” of the elite PMC has fueled a strange phenomenon – an increase in radical politics and radical cultural mores. The result? Members of the elite often seem far more radical than the working class for whom they often claim to speak.
“Although better off than the working class, lower-level elites appear to be experiencing far more intense status anxiety.” And because of this increasing anxiety and insecurity, a patronizing elite class tends to project their own anger and frustration on the working class, “only to complain about a lack of working-class enthusiasm later.”
Furthermore, as the elite class grows more insecure, there’s an ever-stronger pull among not a few of the PMC to mimic the cultural and political attitudes espoused by their putative overlords, the billionaire oligarchs, in hopes of obtaining that coveted corner office. Sort of like carrying the right ideological purse with your outfit.
If I’m right, what’s happening in the church is that as status becomes ever more tenuous for the cultural elites, with whom church leaders tend to identify, there’s a commensurate ratcheting up within the church of radical views and radical attitudes, ones many church goers find increasingly off-putting and as largely disconnected from their everyday lives..
Thus, as church leaders strive desperately to be “relevant” and “in-the-know,” they show themselves as knowing far less than those they would presume to serve.