At a clergy gathering years ago, a pastor got up and made a brilliant observation: “Whenever I read the Bible,” he began, “it always surprises me. When I hear a pronouncement coming from the United Church of Christ, I’m never surprised.”
This is a crucial point. The uniformity of thought within the mainline Protestant churches today is appalling. And stultifying. As I’ve said many times, the rhetoric is generally warmed-over elite opinion cloned from “sophisticated” secular sources.
Yuval Levin, in A Time to Build, states what ought to be obvious: “Being exposed to influences we did not choose is part of how we learn to live with others, to accept our differences while seeing crucial commonalities, to realize the world is not all about us, and to at least abide with patience what we would rather avoid or escape.”
Unfortunately, the absence of this is all too evident in the church today. There is rarely any genuine give-and-take unless it relates to the color of the carpet. Issues of depth and substance tend to be predetermined and predigested.
Any outré viewpoint, no matter how thoughtfully expressed, tends to be tolerated with wan diffidence, but mostly anathematized out of the gate. Conventional “wisdom” is the order of the day.
Such an approach violates a basic tenet of spiritual discernment which requires that all voices be heard. For, as has been said, one never knows through whom God might speak.
Indeed, one of the basic functions of effective institutional formation seeks a broad consensus premised on respect for the personal, the intimate, and the private, rather than merely parroting fashionable opinions defined by the anonymous crowd.
But because of the church’s outsourcing of opinion, its short-circuiting of an effective internal discernment process, elite opinion fills the void. But should we trust it?
Levin points out that “the percentage of students at selective colleges whose families are in the top quarter of income earners in America has gone from roughly 34 percent in 1985 to more than 65 percent today.” Over this time, believe it or not, the elite class has actually grown more homogenous in terms of race, sex, and ethnicity!
Increasingly, we find “a uniform body of elites atop [our] different institutions, all of whom share the same kinds of educational backgrounds.” And, as such, the same opinions.
To make matters worse, in the past the various sectors within society had their own elites. Today there is just one. They think alike and, in their feigned conceit, assume others should as well. Because they themselves have “made the cut” in a highly competitive, meritocratic system, they assume their authority naturally.
Yet beneath the preening self-confidence, nagging doubts persist. Unlike the elites of old, who knew they were privileged and thus felt an obligation to serve the less fortunate, our new breed of elites operates under the false assumption that they earned their place unaided. After all, a meritocratic system is, at least in theory, open to all. Anybody with the kind of grit and determination I have could just as easily have made it. Or so the argument goes.
The result is an awkward though mostly subconscious pattern of guilt due to unearned status and disparate good fortune. But rather than address any underlying character deficiencies, they tend to respond with “increasingly intense displays of…social justice,” using with no small amount of irony the themes of “privilege” to critique the larger society and its institutions (it mostly functions as empty rhetoric that costs them nothing and has little or no bearing on the way they actually live their lives).
As I say, unfortunately, this sort of thinking has bled into our churches (in lockstep with virtually all other institutions). Eager to mimic the elite’s arch, moralizing social justice narrative, often in the vain hope of elitist acceptance (though sheer naivete can’t be discounted), the church seems defined increasingly “as much by a common cultural and political identity as by the tenets of [its] common faith.”
Indeed, by mixing political interests and religious teachings many churches have come to view their purpose “through the lens of our wall-to-wall culture war and so function as platforms for political and cultural combat,” having thus rejected a quieter, steadier form of communal discernment born of humility, compromise, and earnest engagement.
For the fact is, perhaps ironically, having a secure sense of belonging within a family or church that values and respects its members facilitates far greater freedom of expression, considered opinion, and meaningful action.
The very forms and formations given shape by institutions provide “stable foundations for risk-taking – a solid reliable backdrop of rules, expectations, and norms that allows us to try new things by limiting some of the dangers.”
“This is why one consequence of our loss of faith in institutions is a pervasive sense of flux and insecurity that makes us feel like everything is constantly changing, yet also makes us afraid to change much of anything.”
Lacking any social institution upon which to rely as a guide through life’s uncharted waters, we are left to our own devices. Indeed, every question confronting us must be approached “from scratch.” We are truly on our own.
And yet, deep down, we don’t want this. For in truth we yearn for attachment to some person or group, to be part of something that engenders love and loyalty. Moreover, we need and desire structure and, yes, even submission to something higher than ourselves.
Being part of an institution, Levin writes, “helps us practice the virtues of loyalty, solidarity, and fidelity, while giving us some experience of dealing with the darker sides of human relations – managing egos, settling disputes, prioritizing different people’s preferences and points of view, and paving paths to forgiveness.”
Not only that, much of the grandstanding we see today, both inside and outside the church, is because we don’t have a means of “channeling our natural ambition for status toward constructive ends.”
Lacking the “small ponds” of institutional life, where earned achievement is duly recognized, we are left scrambling to make a splash in the “big pond,” which all too often involves the pursuit of celebrity so common to our age.
“Within an institution,” Levin explains, “there is a difference between notoriety and prominence. It is a difference defined by a commitment to the purpose of the institution and to the ideals it works to advance.” No need to seek anonymous “Likes” on social media, in other words.
At one point, Levin argues that the main problem with the church is not so much secularism as its loss of confidence. I’ve been saying something similar for years.
His proposal, as obvious and it is difficult to achieve, is that we need to reinvest in the church as an institution. Such would involve a renewed sense of devotion and the calling forth of both sacrifice and commitment.
In the end, ignoring the needs of the institutional church in our grandiose, headlong pursuit to “fix” the world has been a bit like tilting at windmills. For the only genuine means of making the world better is through the nurture and witness of the steady, albeit sometimes unglamorous, work of our brick and mortar churches, elite disdain notwithstanding.