Can Churches Be Reformed?

Last month, I was invited to participate in a panel discussion on the structure of my denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. It wasn’t a public forum so I won’t characterize the conversation as a whole, but it got me thinking about my own experience within a denomination and how I’ve seen it function, or fail to function. And that got me thinking about the Holy Roman Empire, higher education, and the Democratic Party. I’ve gotten away from nuts-and-bolts church topics in this newsletter, so if you’re here because of other topics, let me assure that other topics are coming up soon, and also that I will bring this around to a point that’s bigger than my own little denomination and the travails of American Christianity generally.

One of the first things I wrote here, and the first thing that really made the rounds outside the immediate circles of regular readers, was about church reform in my own context. I think it holds up and if you’re interested in this topic (very interested) and you missed it, it’s worth a read:

You Say You'll Change the Constituti-uh-uh-uhn

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August 17, 2022

An old chestnut: How many Lutherans does it take to change a denominational constitution? Well, first it takes multiple synods memorializing a call for a change, which then must be endorsed by a triennial national assembly by memorializing the church council to create a commission, whose work, if any, will then…wait where are you going?

Something I mention briefly there but have thought a lot more about since is the lack of real accountability both up and down our organizational structure. Perhaps this is familiar in other Christian groups, too. For example, we do our social doctrine through a mechanism called “Social Statements.” These can be good and useful, but even by their own account, they only articulate a sense of the body from which every individual and congregation is ultimately free to depart. Even if binding doctrinal authority were claimed for them, we still wouldn’t have any mechanisms to require their reception at the local level. People tend to already agree with them, or to feel free to ignore them. This is true of a lot of things that are done by our national organization and parachurch institutions like seminaries. They signal a culture or a brand, but that culture and branding only trickle down as far as local congregations want to receive them. There are very limited tools for enforcing conformity “downwards,” and the only meaningful way to enforce accountability “upwards” is for congregations to simply withhold their (voluntary and not assessed) giving to their synods and to the national church.

This creates friction at lower levels when people who have been formed in the cultural ethos and messaging of the ELCA end up in local ministry situations where the people they are trying to serve and lead simply don’t share that inculturation. This can be truly devastating and heartbreaking to people, particularly people of color or LGBTQ people who end up as candidates for calls, or as pastors, for congregations that are not prepared to fully accept their leadership. When this goes badly, there may be some brokering by regional church leaders or calls for more anti-bias training for congregations, but congregations are ultimately autonomous and can’t really be changed from without as if they are undisciplined employees.1

This suggests a kind of bait-and-switch by the denomination, whose seminaries tend to be progressive and conscientiously inclusive in various ways but whose local congregations are often disconnected from that college-educated progressive ethos. Addressing this disconnection takes the form of protocols, training, and consulting at higher judicatory levels, none of which has any clear way to translate into local parish culture without people inside those parishes actively working for it. Congregational culture changes, if at all, from within.

But the effect of this lack of accountability in either direction can be doubled when legacy members, often of an older generation, feel like they don’t fit with the culture of the denomination anymore, even though that culture can’t actually be imposed anywhere. Sometimes this feeling comes off as bitter and hidebound, but I’ve also heard it expressed with genuine anguish. It is fashionable to attribute the decline of mainline denominations to their embrace of theological and social liberalism in the second half of the 20th century, but in a weird way, I think this understates the problem. After all, advocates for a more inclusive church point to our relative homogeneity and the conservatism of many parish cultures as a reason people leave or are repelled, and they have a point, too. Both observed facts—a leftward shift in social and theological positioning at the national and seminary levels and the continued repelling forces of local homogeneity—are related to our structural inability to make choices, set directions, and implement them. I end up making the case for our synods and “churchwide” organization to focus entirely on helping local congregations to thrive, not because I’m a congregationalist at heart (I’m very much not) but because the local level is the only one where resources, accountability, and outcomes are discernibly connected.

I’ve written about a quirk in my own denomination’s structure, but the trend of decline is much more general, and it includes church bodies that are much more hierarchically organized than mine. Several denominations are actively branding themselves as “Christian, but not like that,” and all of them are on similar trajectories.

This is where I think a more far-reaching critique of institutions is necessary. My most recent column in The Christian Century (subscribe here to get a year for just $10) points in this direction. It relies on an analogy between the Democratic Party and the Holy Roman Empire, which occurred to me after the DNC deep-sixed its own 2024 post-mortem because it might hurt some important feelings, and after Stephen A. Smith briefly teased a run for the 2028 Democratic nomination:

This institutional incapacity provides a broad opening for charismatic, attention-grabbing entrepreneurs to take over a political party. Smith, whose policy views I never considered and whose sports takes I don’t particularly enjoy, does not seem to have been serious about trying to do this. But he’s undeniably good at getting attention, which has become a critical asset in US politics. Someone will be able to do it. Strong enough midterm results will probably steer the party toward normal standard-bearers in 2028. But disappointing results will expose the party as a disabled ship waiting to be boarded from outside.

This has already happened to the Republican Party, which is now largely the vehicle for the views, whims, and moods of one man. My diagnosis of the problem is that for the Democratic Party as for the denominations, the first task of leadership is to keep the patchwork of constituencies content, rather than to organize for a particular mission. I think the case can be made that the modern university has suffered from the same problem. At least, it always looked that way to me when I got any glimpses into the inner workings of higher education. It’s a difficult balancing act, requiring real skill. But it tends to respond with high latency to external threats. So much ink has been spilled on whether universities are too left wing or too oppressive and capitalistic, when I suspect both claims are at least somewhat true and downstream of common problems in governance. We assumed it would just always be there, the church that was established once upon a time, somewhere in the world, or the university that preserved and advanced knowledge and credentialed young people for a productive life. We didn’t plan to have to fight for our place in the world, to call forth the constituencies we relied on.

From what I can tell, actual defections from mainline Protestant churches are not drastically different from defections from conservative denominations or the Catholic Church. People just start staying home. Or they switch to a church outside of our denomination that meets some concrete need. A lot of times these are non-denominational churches. This bothers us because we find the explicit or implicit political and cultural positioning of these churches unpalatable, or the theology destructive, or the worship and sacramental life thin. And sometimes people seek out just those things, to be sure. But I think switching churches for the explicit purpose of leaving one set of denominational politics and institutions for another is relatively rare. The local independent megachurch may be a sort of bubble; I drove past the shell of one just today. It may grow up quickly without putting down roots, and thus wither when tested. But it can plan, prioritize, and make decisions entirely on its own. That’s not how I want to do things. But I do want to learn from it.

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In particular, there was a kind of secular acknowledgment of sin that felt at once catastrophizing and unnecessarily letting the poster off the hook. There was a kind of moral neoteny at play here, or so I felt at the time, a way of denying oneself agency that felt fundamentally dishonest.

Once I wrote about this sort of thing with reference to the works of Grant Morrison, describing it as a way of remaining “helpless before the world,” but I didn’t really explain what exactly that meant or why I thought this tendency emerged. To the best of my abilities, I’ll try now. To be helpless before the world is to be clean of sin, to be clean of ever having to know or care that even if only on the most infinitesimal level within your own life you will cause someone to suffer. The late modern westerner is burdened by the vestiges of a middle class Judeo-Christian morality: she may no longer believe in the wrath of the Lord, but she does believe in sin, and sin is woven deeply into the fabric of the world, into our souls or our psyches, take your pick.

In a related vein, on an Augustinian critique of “Hanlon’s Razor:”

First, one of the key near-term reasons this is important to me is that I think these simple common-sense, jokey-but-serious heuristics like Hanlon’s Razor are often surprisingly crucial for AI alignment debates, AI regulation debates, and also for personal safety using current-generation machine learning. For instance there is also a dark mirror of Hanlon’s razor, the mastermind fallacy, in which people frustrated or demoralized into thinking that goodness is weak begin to conflate evil with competence and intelligence – and then choose evil.

Not not related, a good essay on Hell:

It all leaves me feeling the need to consult a psychoanalyst—or, perhaps, better yet: a desert father—so that I can ask what psychodynamic compulsion forces us, time and time again, to project the complications of our own history onto a forsworn and rejected other. And yet precisely this outward rejection reveals how deeply the other has been taken into the self, becoming constitutive of that self’s thought and life. We really cannot do without the one we reject! Here is a foundational point in the doctrine of hell.

And last but never least, Tony does some shoe-leather reporting on all the young adult converts cramming Manhattan churches:

“See, being Catholic isn’t just about how you pray, although how Catholics pray is beautiful. Being Catholic is about the movies you watch. It’s about the television shows you watch. It’s about the music videos you watch. It’s about the podcasts you watch. It’s about the TikToks you watch. And it’s our responsibility to make sure that good things are watched a lot and bad things are watched less.”