I hate to say it, but if I want banal political or social analysis, I know I can always count on the clergy.
Our local newspaper is often a good source. It runs the occasional guest column where local clergy comment on whatever they choose. I’ve even written a couple myself.
Generally, what’s remarkable about these offerings is how utterly predicable they are. Without a hint of irony, they almost always betray conventional wisdom (which, by definition, is noncontroversial) while simultaneously aiming to be provocative and countercultural. Most articles fall safely within the parameters of socially accepted political correctness.
Most recently, a local pastor wrote of the time she was foreman of a jury asked to adjudicate the guilt or innocence of a young black man indicted on a variety of counts. She points to how easy it is to judge another, especially a stranger, based on little more than superficial evidence and observation.
It’s even harder if you’re a Christian, apparently. That’s because the doctrine of original sin forces us to be unduly suspicious of others, especially the stranger. It leads to distrust and unfair negative judgments.
One could argue the exact opposite. Knowing we are sinners just as easily could make us more understanding and less judgmental, given the awareness of sin tends to temper the soul, making us humbler and more empathetic, mindful of how easy it is to stray from doing what is right.
If anything, failing to admit our sin begets false virtue, rendering us more likely to judge others unfairly. Why? Because we’re morally superior! It’s far easier to judge others if we’re guiltless. It’s also arrogant, if not pharisaical.
Cicero once said, “I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me.” Given the right circumstances, in other words, we’re capable of anything.
That’s a sobering thought, one with which the Apostle Paul surely would agree. “I do not understand my own actions,” he confesses in Romans 7. “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” No self-righteousness judgmentalism there.
In any event, the pastor’s article, as I see it, accomplishes two basic objectives. One, it assures our increasingly secular culture that original sin is bunk. No need to worry about all that musty old biblical stuff. For the author has helpfully debunked such narrow-minded twaddle.
Then again, her view is hardly controversial, since it accords perfectly with what passes for modern intellectual sophistication. It’s as if she’s saying to the educated reader, “I’m one of you. I don’t buy this stuff either.”
The other objective is to establish that since original sin doesn’t exist – that sin is socially conditioned and thus not intrinsic to the human condition – there’s nothing preventing those sufficiently enlightened from re-ordering society to create, if not a perfect world, then at least a darned good one. Assuming, that is, our voice can be heard above the din of retrograde nay-sayers standing in the way of progress (the true sinners?).
But there’s something else at work here, something far more insidious. And it also has to do with sin: status-seeking.
None of us likes to admit it, but this is among our worst sins, precisely because we’re so adept at hiding it, especially from ourselves. Status-seeking is nonetheless an extremely powerful human motivation, one, as I say, we will deny up and down.
I recently watched an interview on YouTube where an author, when asked about his Christian altruism, demurred by saying that the only time we humans are truly selfless is when we’re sacrificing ourselves for another. Is it possible that the root cause of this quirk in the human psyche just might be …original sin?
In this regard, clergy are hardly exempt. Part of the problem is that historically clergy in Protestant America were esteemed cultural leaders. They were respected for their moral, spiritual, and, yes, intellectual prowess. They enjoyed high status.
Starting in the mid-60s, however, the culture began to reject the church, which has been especially difficult for the clergy. Dispossessed of their seat in the cultural heights, they’ve been desperate ever since to regain their erstwhile standing.
Having already hitched their star to the upper echelons of society, they’re left with little choice but to “dance with the one who brung ‘em.” So, as the elites of society shift away from traditional Protestantism and toward secular atheism, the clergy find themselves in the untenable position of having to straddle two diametrically opposed worlds.
How then to speak for the church without offending those ill-disposed toward it, especially when they’re the gatekeepers to the lofty precincts of cultural relevance?
Despite this, I hear clergy repeatedly mouth this utterly vapid, reflexively self-regarding cliché: “Speak truth to power!” The irony, of course, is that the clergy ARE the power! Or at least they aspire to be. Sure, they lack the financial resources, but they can still parrot the latest party line as defined by the cultural elite.
In On the Constitution of Church and State, Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously coined the term “Clerisy,” based on the German word “Klerisei,” meaning “clergy.” Today we’re more apt to use the word “intelligentsia” to refer to this group of “learned individuals.”
Adam Webb writes, “For Coleridge, writing in 1830, the most important bearers of tradition were the Oxbridge scholars learned in theology and the liberal arts, along with the vicars and schoolmasters scattered through the countryside and socially intertwined with the landed gentry. Together they bore a multigenerational trust, that of preserving ‘civilization with freedom.’ The clerisy kept secular society permanently in contact with higher truths.”
In the 20th century, T.S. Eliot observes, the clerisy was challenged and weakened, effectively replaced by a new class of social reformers. Civilization would be defined increasingly by these largely secular intellectual leaders and thinkers.
Later, in the 70s, John Kenneth Galbraith borrowed a preexisting phrase, the “New Class,” to refer to the social and political scientists (technocrats) who were reshaping “post-material” and “post-industrial” societies.
In an insightful piece by Joel Kotkin, the argument is made that the true source of today’s cultural divide is not, as we suppose, race or gender. It’s “the growing conflict between the ascendant upper class and the vast, and increasingly embattled, middle and working classes.”
He likens this to the situation during the French Revolution, at the end of the Ancien Régime, France’s feudal era, when “the Third Estate, made up of the commoners, challenged the hegemony of the First Estate and the Second, made up of the church and aristocracy.”
Kotkin calls today’s situation “neo-feudalism,” a new social order led by “our two ascendant estates filling the roles of the former dominant classes.”
“The First Estate,” he explains, “once the province of the Catholic Church, has morphed into what…Coleridge…called ‘the Clerisy,’ a group that extends beyond organized religion to the universities, media, cultural tastemakers and upper echelons of the bureaucracy.”
“The role of the Second Estate,” he adds, “is now being played by a rising Oligarchy, notably in tech but also Wall Street, that is consolidating control of most of the economy.”
Together they are reshaping not only economics, but contemporary culture itself, including its ethics and norms. And, notably, in a secular direction.
This updated, modern-day clerisy is precisely that to which so many of today’s clergy aspire, if unconsciously. To be part of the clerisy, after all, is a time-honored tradition. Effecting its breathless, ever-evolving fashions and foibles is but the newest challenge.
To successfully appeal to, or to be welcomed into, this new elite clerisy-class – one almost uniformly embarrassed by the gospel – is no small feat.
Aligning Coleridge’s original understanding of the clerisy to fit today’s radically altered version would seem to require no small amount of verbal jujitsu, especially as it relates to beliefs and values as well as spiritual and moral truths.
Unless, of course, I’m missing something.