Evangelical Sociology and Clericalism

One thing you would sooner or later realize about the Good Shepherd (orphanage) was that it had no neighbors. Like (I think) most institutions, it was turned inward, trying to be a world in itself. It stood at the edge of the little town of Canefield, which it looked upon as a threat to its morals. In his many chapel talks and sermons, Brother Whitespade suffered over the possibility that some of the Canefield merchants might sell cigarettes to the Good Shepherd children for some of the tiny allowance of spending money we received, and over the possibly regrettable results of mixing between our older girls and boys and the older boys and girls of Canefield, who had not had the advantage of orphanhood and the moral instruction of Brother Whitespade.

And so the Good Shepherd, officially, was enclosed within itself.... Remembering, as always, the free and casual comings and goings at Squires Landing, I wrote neighbor down in my tablet.
~Wendell Berry in Jayber Crow

One consequence of what I called "evangelical sociology" in the previous piece is that since evangelicals regard themselves as intractably "outside" elite American institutions and much of the American mainstream they must find civic belonging elsewhere.

Again, in talking about "evangelicals" I am referring to the children of Hatch's democratized Christianity, a group which tends toward congregationalist governance and, often though not always, a hard and quite extensive separateness from civic society. The outcome of this is that you end up with localized church institutions that have no ties outside of themselves—no sister churches in a shared denominational fellowship that has real authority to offer counsel and aid to them, and no ties to local civic society that is aided and enriched by the faithful ministrations of Christian believers.

When I say civic belonging has to be found elsewhere, what I mean is that it will nearly always be found in local churches, though also can sometimes be parachurch ministries, particularly for teens and college-aged evangelicals, who will often be channeled less into church and more into demographically targeted parachurch ministries.

The problem with this, purely on a level of common life and our existence as social animals, is that church isn't a replacement for civic society. We humans are workers, we are loafers, we are cousins and friends and admirers and much else besides. The sum of who you and I are as people and our longings for neighborliness will not be met exclusively through one local Christian institution. But sometimes democratized Christians seem to think they can be met in that way. When this happens it is likely to lead either to a lack of satisfaction in one's civic life, because the institutional church or parachurch world is simply too small, and a search for answers outside the church or it will manifest as a shrunken civic vision that can't even really imagine what it would mean to be more engaged in broader civic society, to love a city, to seek its welfare because its flourishing is, to some degree, your flourishing.

When this happens, you are left with the local Christian institution one belongs to as the only sort of political belonging one has. This, in turn, often leads to a strongly clericalist structure to evangelical community because pastors come to occupy a unique role not so much as a shepherd and preacher, but rather as a kind of charismatic guru and protector of the group's existence in some contexts or as a kind of charismatic, accomplished, and vaguely Christian life coach who offers good advice for alienated knowledge workers in other contexts. (We don't often think of free church Protestants as "clericalist" because that term is more often used to describe a policy that elevates the authority of clergy to places and heights it is not fit for. But while one can find clericalism quite easily in other Christian communities, it is a mistake to think that the democratized traditions of Christianity lack such problems.)

Such clericalist Christian communities will probably always struggle for health, but particularly in a post-Christendom context with stronger pressures on churches and a heightened need for effective evangelization it is especially disastrous. In particular, several communal vices seem to follow from this sort of clericalist vision of Christian community.

First, the clericalist vision create unhealthy, disproportionate biases toward stability which undermines Christian piety.

In a clericalist understanding of how Christianity works publicly, you don't really have a way of thinking about public Christian presence outside of local institutional churches or, perhaps, parachurch organizations. The ecosystems that you can still find with Catholic institutions and that once existed for the Mainline do not exist in kind for evangelicals.

This creates a heightened sense of fragility and vulnerability for Christian believers because their experience of their faith in public life isn't one of existing in a robust, inter-connected network of Christian communities, all of which have grown out of the faithful ministry of the church universal and teaching of Christianity. Rather, their experience is that the world outside the institutional church is unsafe, the church can be a "safe" place for Christian community, but also the church is only safe to the degree that the church's leadership is felt to be "solid" and trustworthy.

If members believe that a pastor is keeping the community "solid" or "safe," they are incentivized, by the very nature of clericalist assumptions about church life, to protect that pastor, no matter what. This becomes an evangelical version of the argument one saw time and again during the reporting on the Roman abuse scandal when Roman clergy asked victims to stay quiet because one shouldn't let all the good work the church does be compromised by "a few bad apples."

In my own life I have seen a senior pastor keep his job after a junior pastor on his staff was arrested for sexually assaulting boys in his church office, and another pastor (who was also his son) was sleeping with multiple women from the church. The unfaithful pastor's wife even alleged that her husband was hitting her and that his father, the senior pastor (her father-in-law!), knew about it. Even after all that, this pastor not only kept his job, but a few years later when he retired he was feted for his many decades of "faithfulness."

As long as he kept the church feeling stable and comfortable for the congregants, nothing else mattered. The clericalism of the church meant that actual Christian behavior basically had nothing to do with the daily life of the community. The purpose of the community was to be a reliable and unchallenging enclave for people with certain lifestyle preferences.

Second, clericalist communities cannot recognize non-clerical forms of expertise.

In his recent essay, Matthew Arbo lamented the disconnect between ethicists and local churches and Christian communities. All that Arbo said is true, and much of it, I think, has to do with this latent clericalism in evangelical churches.

Because the world outside one's Christian enclave is regarded in various erring ways, it is very difficult for people who have vocations in that world and who have excelled in them to be welcomed in churches, or rather to have their vocations welcomed in those churches. Theological ethicists are not formed in churches, after all, but in universities and seminaries. As such, it is immensely easy for churches to dismiss them in the tale-as-old-as-time way by suggesting that they went off to university and got a bunch of silly ideas in their head and now we need to patiently endure them for awhile until they come back down to earth.

One outcome of this is that it is not only theological ethicists who have an uncertain place in evangelical communities; it's also any number of other "experts" who are perceived to be compromised somehow because of their proximity to "the world." This can create enormous challenges for doctors and lawyers in particular who might have some particular conviction derived from their experience in their field that is not out of step with Christianity at all but is politically inconvenient for the life of their particular church community. Typically, such people will see their concerns dismissed repeatedly and they will eventually grow tired of such treatment and look for an exit, which only serves to make the church even more homogeneous and bound to the senior leader.

Another outcome is that pastors are actually encouraged to pontificate on issues of the day that are outside their training or expertise but that affect the life of the church in some way.

Third, this clericalism elevates small businesses, entrepreneurialism, and self-made individuals into positions of heightened and unaccountable authority.

If there is someone other than the pastor who is valued in such Christian communities, it is self-made individuals with secure wealth through owned property.

To be sure, there is nothing wrong with being a successful entrepreneur or business owner. I've known a number of them and I'm both grateful for and amazed at their abilities.

That said, what can happen in clericalist communities is that the pastor holds a place of robust formal authority (provided he has proven himself reliable) but that pastor derives his power and security largely from the generosity of a small number of high net worth individuals who support him and the church, sometimes through employing a large number of church members. These figures possess a similarly robust but largely informal authority.

Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with a highly successful business owner serving on a session or leadership board, nor is there anything inherently wrong with that business owner hiring members of the church. And yet as anyone who works in the nonprofit world knows well, money is power. So if your church finds itself in a situation where a large share of the giving is coming from one or two wealthy benefactors who also provide work for a number of congregants, it is not hard to imagine how a church discipline situation could go sideways rather quickly.

In such an eventuality, the likely outcome will be that the bias toward stability kicks in and nothing is addressed.

But in that scenario the financial benefactor of the church simply grows in power and influence, all of which is relatively unaccountable since the individual is not ordained, not bound to any confession of any kind, and is actually financing the church's ministry and work.

This is one of the cardinal ironies of this sort of congregationalist evangelical church culture: Often congregationalism is cited as a buffer against abusive practices commonly seen in episcopal polities. But within congregationalist circles it is often the case that they have de facto shadow bishops of their own; they just aren't recognized, ordained, or accountable to any kind of external authority.

What all of these failures so far amount to is a kind of ecclesial version of extreme allergies one sometimes sees in a child who grew up in a city constantly hooked up to screened devices and cut off from the natural world. Without the ordinary bumps and bruises that come with a childhood in the world, he lacks the resources needed to navigate predictable, ordinary problems. Likewise, churches that are entirely self-contained, lacking in any external authority or thick relationships with other local institutions, will always rely on an artificial ethic of compliance and submission that makes them far more vulnerable to a variety of issues.

Fourth, they confuse the role of the pastor.

The account of the pastor sketched out in Scripture seems to view the pastor's calling as relatively circumscribed: Preach the Word, administer the Sacraments, shepherd the flock. This is a fairly specific vision for ministry, even if shepherding and pastoral care will inherently end up involving a variety of questions and issues.

In contrast, in Christian communities where an institutional church is the be-all-end-all of everyone's communal life, the pastor inherently takes on far more responsibility because he is less a minister with circumscribed responsibilities and more a kind of steward or overseer of a separatist enclave.

In such scenarios, even the plain teaching of the Gospel can be lost because the pastor's actual material incentives will push him toward becoming a sort of communal guru who has the answers rather than a humble Christian shepherd of souls.

This confusion will affect different pastors in different ways. In more politically activated churches, pastors who are seemingly bored with the core truths of the Christian faith will find it exhilarating that they are actually expected to pontificate on their various soapboxes and personal beliefs.

In other cases, pastors who would like to be preaching the Gospel will burn out as they realize that their church doesn't want them to do that. It wants them to serve as, I said already, as a kind of vaguely Christian life coach who will assuage their personal wounds as an alienated 21st century knowledge worker.

Obviously neither of these scenarios results in a healthy Christian fellowship marked by the classic marks of the church.

Fifth, they are unable to reckon with the problem of horrid Christians.

I'm reminded here of the old Chesterton yarn about skinning cats:

If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.

Something like the same applies here: If it is true that Christians can be horrid, which it obviously is, then the two obvious things to do are either deny the truth of the Christian message or deny the present perfection of Christians. But often in clericalist communities they find it rational to deny that anyone is horrid.

This is a disaster because it simply won't do at all to deny the presence of sin or to minimize its effects. You can't repent of sins you don't first confess, and if you do not repent you cannot be restored. 

But it also does something else as well. Ordinary congregants are given wildly unrealistic expectations of what church life will be. Set up with such misguided hopes, the first real and enduring pangs of disappointment that they feel will be far more devastating than they ought to be.

Imagine you are a child growing up in the church or you are a new Christian joining a church community for the first time. This church has an exalted view of its own importance as a kind of bastion of Christian truth and commitment or perhaps as a kind of loosely Christian association of highly successful people who all look good and are obviously successful, wonderful, happy people. You are led to believe that this community has The Answers and if you stay long enough and listen closely enough, you too can have a secure, safe life or perhaps a successful, prosperous life.

As a child or young Christian, you are not equipped to recognize that this is unhealthy, unrealistic, and unserious. You think it's real.

So what happens when you discover that that pastor is actually a sinner and that his sins, though not disqualifying and actually fairly predictable and human, have genuinely harmed people in the past? Note that I'm not talking about genuinely disqualifying sin for which a pastor should be removed from his position. I'm talking about ordinary daily failures that sometimes create quite large ripples in a group or church.

In a clericalist framework, this realization can send you into a deconstructing tailspin quite rapidly. You will (understandably) feel lied to and misled. You'll feel like a dupe. And you'll start to wonder "what else did I believe that wasn't actually what I thought it was?" The problem here is that your frustration at feeling lied to is fair enough, but the expectations you had (which, to be fair, you were given by others) were enormously unfair and unreasonable.

Years ago when I read a series of memoirs by young evangelicals who struggled with church I was struck by how their various experiences were flattened by the format of the memoir. Some people had experiences more like mine where they grew up in genuinely awful churches where morally repugnant things happened without any repentance or consequence.

But then there were other people whose sense of "betrayal" from the church and crisis of faith was derived from rather banal things, like a rude but not profane or even hateful comment made by an elderly man who sometimes attended church, or by a hurtful but ultimately banal and relatively harmless misunderstanding with a pastor or small group leader. I say this not to minimize the fact that Christians behave badly, but to try and reckon with it in a real way. (And, again, I am not talking about cases of genuinely disqualifying sin.)

If you live in close community with other people for any length of time in any kind of actually real way, you will discover sides of them that you find distasteful, even awful. But then you need to meet yourself on the way back and consider what sides of yourself might be exposed in such communities and relationships.

If you wish to live a morally serious life, than you will have to reckon with the failures and imperfections that run through your own soul as well as the same in others. There simply is no other option—unless you seek a solitary life which, to be fair, is made much easier by contemporary cities and technology.

Conclusion

I fear that this sort of clericalist political theology, if one wishes to call it that, creates a number of problems that make ordinary Christian citizenship, or even mere Christian piety and common life, far harder and more complex than is necessary.

What is the alternative? That is a long question, but we could list a few basics, at least, I think:

There is the ordinary life of the church ordered around Word and Sacrament. There are the ordinary bonds of trust and brotherhood that exist between churches bound together to one another in real forms of unity. There is the ordinary attempt to fulfill one's vocation wherever one is called, in all its complexity and ambiguity, and to do so as a faithful Christian. There is the ordinary common life of the church as we seek to build one another up amidst the storms and trials of life.

And there is the ordinary attempt to, in Auden's words,

‘O look, look in the mirror,
   O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
   Although you cannot bless.

‘O stand, stand at the window
   As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
   With your crooked heart.’