A church member once told me about serving in the Army in the 70s right after the debacle of the Vietnam War. It was a low point for the institution. The military today, on the other hand, ranks among the most highly esteemed institutions in the United States.
In any event, he told me of his frustration with the Army and the sense that it had become a kind of “Mickey Mouse” operation. Those serving with him tended to agree.
Then one day, while looking in the mirror, he noticed the name attached to his uniform – his own. It struck him. He thought, “I am the Army. It’s not just some abstract entity. And if there’s a problem with it, it’s up to me to do my part to make it better.”
It was a lightbulb moment. He decided right there and then to put all his energy into it and eventually rose through the ranks. He later went on to serve in the FBI and the CIA.
In a similar vein, Yuval Levin, in his new book, A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream, urges a renewal of our flailing institutions.
Despite outward prosperity, the effect of decades of “institutional decay and deformation” has produced within our society an ill-defined sense of isolation, mistrust, and alienation, along with an accompanying “shortage of belonging, confidence, and legitimacy.”
Part of the problem, he suggests, is that the very idea of an institution “runs against the grain of how we think about personal freedom, justice, choice, and many other things we care about.”
America, after all, was founded on “dissenting Protestantism,” a belief system that valued “direct connection to the divine and rejected as inauthentic or illegitimate most forms of institutional mediation.”
From the beginning, then, Americans have been skeptical of the traditional, fundamental belief that human character is shaped and molded by institutions.
We prefer to think we’re born complete and whole with direct access to the divine. Thus, what we need is liberation from any social institution that would lay claim on us, including those designed to form character, habit, and belief, moral or otherwise.
“The desire for immediacy, informality, and authenticity is one of the most distinctly American facets of our national character,” he writes, which is, “in important respects, anti-institutional and always has been.”
Ironically, such an approach denies the role formation plays in insuring genuine freedom – that we need the tools of judgment and character and habit to use our freedom responsibly and effectively – the very things institutions are tasked with effecting.
And it’s only grown worse over the last few decades. 40 years ago, for example, a full 65 percent of Americans said they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in organized religion. That number in 2018 was down to 38 percent.
Levin argues that one of the main reasons for this drop is that our institutions (the church included) have given in to an individualistic impulse, and no longer consider formation to be their purpose.
“We have moved from thinking of institutions as molds that shape people’s character and habits,” he writes, “toward seeing them as platforms that allow people to be themselves and to display themselves before the world.”
Indeed, “as different institutions come to be seen (by both the people in them and the larger public) as platforms for displaying individuals, they also come to lose their distinctions from one another and so tend to become homogenized into increasingly interchangeable stages for the same sorts of cultural-political performances.”
“It isn’t quite that the culture of one institution has invaded others,” he adds, “as that the boundaries and distinctions have broken down and everyone, inside and outside, is participating in the same obnoxious quarrel.”
Can I get an amen?
This is clearly evident in mainline churches today. Much of what comes from their pulpits sounds increasingly like groupthink – unoriginal, predictable, and mostly uninteresting. Worse still, and more to the point, it sounds indistinguishable from the wider secular culture.
Pastors tend to concern themselves less with the church’s historic mission and its unique set of beliefs, and focus instead on “an outside audience that wants to see a dramatic enactment of culture-war animosity.”
As a result, the church, like virtually every other institution, appears “indistinguishable from the open public space around it, and so it is simply another platform for public speech rather than a structure for meaningful action.”
No wonder people have lost interest. If the church chooses to present a warmed-over version of what is already on offer by the culture, why bother? What’s the point of getting up on Sunday morning for something you can get anywhere and everywhere?
And there’s a corollary to this, specifically, the loss of the kind of give-and-take deliberations within congregational life from which authentic discernment has historically emerged (as opposed to the same old, same old)..
A friend recently wrote an article relating to his work as an executive coach. He identified four key elements required for effective organizational work:
1) Common Values: “for exploration of issues, problems and potential solutions” 2) Open Conversation: which is not only open but “occasionally fierce,” thus allowing for “wide variance of opinion” 3) Frame the Problem: “agreeing on what [the group] is trying to achieve” and 4) “Yes, and”: as opposed to “yes, but,” which allows the group to “build upon ideas” rather than simply “shutting them down.”
This struck me because everything Levin cites in terms of our current institutional malaise recommends the opposite.
Instead of a community committed to a common mission, possessing an internal deliberative process based not on public opinion but adherence to its own unique set of values and perspectives, and holding to the kind of trust that encourages a respectful hearing of genuinely divergent views and opinions, institutional life today seems content to merely stick its finger in the air to see which way the cultural winds are blowing (or, sometimes, who has the loudest voice).
Which leaves little room for disagreement or divergent opinion. All ideas must reflect current fashion (think political correctness). The uniqueness of, say, the Christian witness is muted, if not irrelevant altogether, deferring to our cultural elites who increasingly speak with one voice, and not, be it noted, a particularly Christian one.
All ideas end up being either ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ depending on how closely they adhere to what is currently deemed “acceptable speech.” Rest assured, too, that names will be taken and violators will be prosecuted.