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A Few
Words from the Editor
Having obtained a favorable ruling in our
application for 501(c)3 charitable status as of
September 1, 2006
(the status is actually retroactive to The Center’s inception in 2000),
we are now able to assure contributors that their donations are fully
tax-deductible. I am still
waiting for the generous deluge of funds which I expected this achievement
to incite. Perhaps I am
unreasonable. When I attempted
to approach foundations for a small gift in past years, I was always
lectured in gentle avuncular style that So-and-So Foundation’s charter
forbids awards to any but 501(c)3’s.
Now the uncle isn’t writing me letters: no one, so far, is
writing me letters. This
includes two people with whom I attended school from the tender age of
nine—who did absolutely nothing to acquire their vast wealth, frankly,
except be born with a certain name, and whose trust fund dispenses
thousands to dozens of organizations every year as a tax dodge.
Lest my application be lost in the crush or read by Heinrich
Himmler reincarnated as an office flunkey, I directed my appeal directly
to the homes of my “friends”. I
even sent warm, chatty e-mails. Apparently,
none of this was à propos.
Not a word in acknowledgment—not even a return e-mail with
something like “hi” in the subject box.
Did I grovel too much, or not enough?
I am a pitiful fund-raiser (now
considered one word by most, I fear) and a perfectly miserable
self-promoter. I know that.
I shouldn’t even be writing in this vein within this venue—not
even with vague, anonymous references.
But I’m getting old, and I continue to devote those years during
which many others my age are piling up wealth to the thankless task of
trying to save a few scraps of our culture for our children.
No one—not I, nor any member of The Center’s board, nor any
contributing author—receives a farthing in remuneration for all this
work. I am rather irritated at
this moment that people who command position, power, and resources in our
declining society register no observable interest in preserving from
oblivion a priceless tradition of thought wherein reason, conscience,
creativity, and the search for transcending and humane purpose are
valorized. This insouciance,
of course, is visible at every level in our public life: I am no longer
writing about a couple of quondam friends.
If Eric Voegelin was right to style Marxism a “great swindle”,
then our generation is witnessing The Great Betrayal among the Free
World’s (as we once called it) victors: its politicians, legislators,
educators, artists, corporate leaders, jurors, and sometimes even
spiritual advisors.
On the other hand, if enthusiasm for the
cause of responsible individualism were high, then we wouldn’t be in our
present mess. The difficulty
of securing support for ventures like The Center for Literate Values
surely indicates that the crisis in response to which The Center was
formed exists and poses a major threat.
So we struggle onward. For
those readers who may find my assertion needlessly theatrical, I can do no
better than offer the contents of this issue.
Professor Schwartz has given us the initial version of a paper for
which he hopes to find broader exposure later.
This is not to imply that his thesis is under-developed.
On the contrary, he offers a detailed analysis of how our
culture’s anointed (often self-anointed) elite superciliously sneers at
our few remaining exponents of coherent values for being—of all
things—elitist! My own piece
on the evolution of literary romance as a social and psychological
phenomenon would have echoed many of Dr. Schwartz’s suggestions if I had
not been forced to halve my work. It
grew and grew on me, and the half dealing with contemporary issues will
appear in the next edition. At
the very least, one may certainly say that overturning hierarchies in
celebration of illogic is no less a sign of cultural collapse than
embracing chaotic fantasies where only one or two characters prosper
thanks to a lucky star. Mark
Wegierski’s sketch-like commentary anatomizes our most common political
and philosophical approaches to the current challenge; while Mark Notzon,
now a veteran of teaching English all around the globe, entrusts us with
the retrospective testimony of a young scholar somewhat adrift in our
time’s turbulent seas. Ivor
Davies’ exquisite short story traces the immensely more confused transit
of a young grad-school student through the helter-skelter contemporary
campus.
A former student of my own—one of the most intelligent,
beautiful, sensitive young people I have ever met—wrote me recently of
her shock to read on our website that the literate life stood in some
danger. Then she described the
inner satisfaction she has found in radical vegetarianism (including
abstinence from milk products, since cows may perhaps be pained by
milking). Further exchanges convinced
me that this young woman was disciplining her appetites for all the right
reasons; but her case reminds me of many where the ascetics concerned
carry their sacrifices to extravagant lengths. Such headlong lunges
after spirituality are symptomatic, I think, of a culture in decline.
Our scintillating but misguided children are usually like my friend
in discerning no immediate
connection between the guilt they feel on behalf of their wasteful,
self-indulgent society and the collapse of that intense self-examination
fostered by reading and writing. We
must redirect such promising energy along avenues which make full use of
its benevolent impulse; for ill-directed energy—passion,
as the current parlance has it—can all too readily transfer its
attention from the human soul to a symbolic blade of grass, or even (as
Dr. Schwartz shows us) from love to narcissism.
J. H.
back to Contents
***************************
Religion
Against Itself:
The Revolt of the Elite
of
the United
Church
of
Christ
by
Howard
S. Schwartz
Howard
S. Schwartz is the author of The
Revolt of the Primitive. He
welcomes responses to this essay and may be reached at
Oakland
University
(e-mail Schwartz@Oakland.Edu), where he
is Professor of Organizational Behavior.
Revolt
of the Elites
Appropriating the term revolt of the masses from José
Ortega y Gasset, and then reversing its referent, the late Christopher
Lasch introduced the concept of the revolt of the elites.
Gassett’s subject was the man of the masses at the time of the
Russian Revolution and the rise of fascism:
The mass
man... had no use for obligations and no understanding of what they
implied, “no feeling for [the] great historical duties.” Instead
he asserted the “rights of the commonplace.” At
once resentful and self-satisfied, he rejected “everything that is
excellent, individual, qualified, and select.” He
was “incapable of submitting to direction of any kind.” Lacking
any comprehension of the fragility of civilization or the tragic character
of history, he lived unthinkingly in the “assurance that tomorrow [the
world] will be still richer, ampler, more perfect, as if it enjoyed a
spontaneous, inexhaustible power of increase.” He
was concerned only with his own well-being and looked forward to a future
of “limitless possibilities” and “complete freedom.” (Lasch, 1995)
The revolt of the masses, then, was a revolt against the idea of
constraint, a revolt against obligation, and a revolt against the
civilization within which these constraints and obligations were embedded
and which they made possible. Marxism
and fascism, the ideologies of the time, were utopian ideologies. They
promised the ego ideal, “limitless possibilities” for the common
people. Under the
circumstances, a revolt against constraint was not beyond comprehension. Constraint
and obligation, one could imagine, were only characteristics of the
historical period, which would soon give way to something much more
appealing.
It was left to the elites of the time to uphold the values of
civilization and the obligations that it imposed:
From
Ortega’s point of view, one that was widely shared at the time, the
value of cultural elites lay in their willingness to assume responsibility
for the exacting standards without which civilization is impossible. They
lived in the service of demanding ideals.
“Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us—by
obligations, not by rights.
But
for Lasch, the relationship of the classes to the traditions of morality
has been reversed.
Once it was the “revolt of the masses” that was held to
threaten social order and the civilizing traditions of Western culture. In
our time, however, the chief threat seems to come from those at the top of
the social hierarchy, not the masses….
[T]he masses have lost interest in revolution; their political
instincts are demonstrably more conservative than those of their
self-appointed spokesmen and would-be liberators. It
is the working and lower middle classes, after all, that favor limits on
abortion, cling to the two-parent family as a source of stability in a
turbulent world, resist experiments with “alternative lifestyles,” and
harbor deep reservations about affirmative action and other ventures in
large-scale social engineering… They
have a more highly developed sense of limits than their betters. They
understand, as their betters do not, that there are inherent limits on
human control over the course of social development, over nature and the
body, over the tragic elements in human life and history.
And,
by contrast:
Today it is the elites, however—those who
control the international flow of money and information, preside over
philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the
instruments of cultural production and thus set the terms of public
debate—that have lost faith in the values, or what remains of them, of
the West. For many people the
very term “Western civilization” now calls to mind an organized system
of domination designed to enforce conformity to bourgeois values and to
keep the victims of patriarchal oppression—women, children, homosexuals,
people of color—in a permanent state of subjection.
These
elites, whom Lasch identifies with what Reich (following Daniel Bell)
calls “symbolic analysts,”
are in revolt against “
Middle America
,” as they imagine it: a nation
technologically backward,
politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual
morality, middlebrow in its tastes, smug and complacent,
dull and dowdy. (p.6)
This
revolt had a characteristic affect:
It was, above all, however, the “deadly hatred of all
that is not itself' that characterized the mass mind, as Ortega described
it. Incapable of wonder or
respect, the mass man was the “spoiled child of human history.”
And
here again the place of the classes has been reversed:
Upper-middle-class liberals… have mounted a
crusade to sanitize American society: to create a “smoke-free
environment,” to censor everything from pornography to “hate
speech,” and at the same time, incongruously, to extend the range of
personal choice in matters where most people feel the need of solid moral
guidelines. When confronted
with resistance to these initiatives, they betray the venomous hatred that
lies not far beneath the smiling face of upper-middle-class benevolence. Opposition
makes humanitarians forget the liberal virtues they claim to uphold. They
become petulant, self-righteous, intolerant.
And:
In the heat of political controversy, they find it
impossible to conceal their contempt for those who stubbornly refuse to
see the light—those who “just don’t get it,” in the self-satisfied
jargon of political rectitude. Simultaneously arrogant and
insecure, the new elites, the professional classes in particular, regard
the masses with mingled scorn and apprehension.
In
sum:
In the
United States
, “
Middle America
”—a term that has both geographical and social implications—has come
to symbolize everything that stands in the way of progress: “family
values,” mindless patriotism, religious fundamentalism, racism,
homophobia, retrograde views of women. Middle
Americans, as they appear to the makers of educated opinion, are
hopelessly shabby, unfashionable, and provincial, ill informed about
changes in taste or intellectual trends, addicted to trashy novels of
romance and adventure, and stupefied by prolonged exposure to television. They
are at once absurd and vaguely menacing—not because they wish to
overthrow the old order but precisely because their defense of it appears
so deeply irrational that it expresses itself, at the higher reaches of
its intensity, in fanatical religiosity, in a repressive sexuality that
occasionally erupts into violence against women and gays, and in a
patriotism that supports imperialist wars and a national ethic of
aggressive masculinity.
About the causes of this transformation, Lasch does not offer much.
He cites the decline of old
money, with its roots in the community, and the rise in importance of
success, which calls for the acceptance of a migratory way of life and an
embrace of mobility. The elite
travel in their own circles these days; they are international, not
national, and therefore their sense of being obligated to their countrymen
is attenuated. There is also
the rise of meritocracy, which has provided this class with the illusion
that it has earned its status on its own, and therefore owes nothing to
those who have gone before. Nor
does it owe anything to those that will come, who will have to make it in
their own time.
The
Function of Ideology
Since Marx, it has become familiar to say that a ruling class
creates an ideological superstructure that legitimates its dominant
position in the economic base. Within
this ideology, the elite are worthy of their possession of the good; while
those who have less, have less because they are less worthy. From
this standpoint, the characteristic beliefs of the current elite present a
paradox.
The problem is that, while the Marxist
explanation may help us understand the elite’s detachment from, and even
their contempt for, lesser mortals, it runs aground on the specifics of
their beliefs. The ideological
items here are the familiar tropes of political correctness, which by all
accounts is a product of the leftist politics of the sixties. They
do not proceed from an ideology that justifies privilege, but from one
that excoriates privilege. They take the side, not of those who have
power and standing, but of those who, according to the ideology, have been
deprived of them, and who have been deprived of them precisely by those
who have the power and standing.
Through their ideology, the elites as Marx recognized them were for
themselves; their ideology buttressed their position. By
contrast, the elites that Lasch discusses are against themselves; their
ideology undermines their position. The
revolt of the elites, in other words, appears to be a revolt against
elites.
This is so with regard to the economic position that Lasch sees as
the prime mover here, but also regarding the racial, sexual, and sexual
preference dimensions that are the overt content of the ideology; or at
least that will be so if we assume that the elites in question are largely
white, heterosexual, and male. The
ideology of elites would, one would think, celebrate their
characteristics, not indict those who have these characteristics as
oppressors.
Another peculiarity here is that the elite ideology has an
antagonistic dimension to it that is not generally present in class
ideology. In the Marxist
analysis, the ruling class justifies its position, and maintains that it
has a greater entitlement to the privileges of its position; but by the
same token, it affirms the value of the lower classes within their
diminished positions. Indeed,
the lower class acceptance of their position, which Marx calls “false
consciousness,” buttresses the higher classes’ claims to theirs: this
convenient concordance is easily parlayed into an affirmation of their
goodness. To be sure, with its
sense of entitlement, an elite can become defensive and antagonistic
toward what it considers to be threats to its standing. Politically
correct ideology, though, involves aspersions of moral badness from the
outset, in the forms of racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on, without
regard to any threats to its standing. It
is made out of antagonism. We
do not see here, in other words, a claim of entitlement for oneself with
situational defensive antagonism when threatened. A
claim of entitlement is not put forth. Rather,
there is simply a moral program against others, which stands by itself.
And who are these others? Lasch
says that they are “Middle Americans,” a term referring to their
geographical location and class. He
also calls them “the masses,” and, more informatively, the working and
lower-middle classes. But this
raises again a paradox, for if one assumes that the elite class sees
itself as leading a group, the working and lower-middle classes are the
group they are leading. The
elite’s status refers to that group; without it their elite status
disappears. Here again, the
revolt of the elites appears to be a revolt against themselves.
Altogether, then, Lasch leaves us with a problem, which is how to
understand the relationship of this elite to its PC ideology. It
is an ideology of elite against elites; an ideology which stands by itself
and does not relate to anything; an ideology against a group, but this is
the group of which the elite are the leaders.
What does this ideology mean, and why has this elite adopted it?
The answer I will propose is that the PC ideology functions
differently than does the classic ideology of an elite. It
does not justify the elite, but rather expresses its psychodynamic. The
task, then, is to understand the psychodynamics of this elite. Lasch
has identified it as the symbolic analysts, which he has also identified
as the new ruling class of capitalism. I
agree with the first designation, but I believe the second needs some
refinement. The symbolic
analysts have arisen not so much to dominate capitalism as to redefine it.
The ownership of capital, that
is to say, no longer counts for very much. What
counts is the creation of meaning. This
suggests that the term “symbolic analysts” is a misnomer. The
new class does not so much analyze symbols as create them.
The creation of symbols takes place across the full range of our
economic activity. One can see
it easily in the “cultural production” that Lasch associates with the
elites. However, equal levels
of creativity have transformed practices in areas one might think of as
being constituent parts of the economic base, such as the “control of
the international flow of money,” with which he also associates them.
For example, when Michael
Milken reconceived the way financial markets function (Lewis, 1990)
he was being as creative as any artist. Or
one can find creativity in a new idea of the way a computer’s
motherboard relates to its processor, a reconsideration that can render
the old way of thinking thoroughly obsolete almost overnight, and can turn
the products of the old way into valueless junk.
Creativity is the defining activity of the new economic order in
much the same way that rationality is the defining activity of the old
one. To be sure, no economic
activity in our time can exist without a degree of both of them, but their
relative importance has shifted dramatically.
What is important for our purpose is that creativity and
rationality exist in a kind of tension. Rationality
works through established forms, but creativity creates new forms, which
must destroy the old. This
tension is our issue. If we
want to look for the meaning of PC ideology, we must look at the
psychodynamics of the tension between creativity and rationality.
Psychoanalytically, it is the tension between the sphere of the
mother, which Lacan calls the imaginary, and the sphere of the father,
which he calls the symbolic. The
father brings understanding of the world as it has been wrought. The
mother is the muse. She is the
ear to whom the creative person speaks.
Our developmental task with regard to the father is twofold. First,
we must subordinate ourselves to him, so that we may learn what he has to
teach. Then, having
internalized what he has taught, we must separate from him as an
individual and make our own way. Our
developmental task with regard to the mother is only to separate from her.
Subordinating ourselves to her
is not a task at all. Fusion
with her is the baseline from which we start; it is the matrix out of
which our individual identity comes into being.
These developmental tasks are difficult, but each is difficult in
its own way. Subordination to
the father is difficult because it feels like death—the sacrifice of our
pristine individuality, which is experienced, to begin with, as exactly
and entirely who we are. Separation
from the mother is simpler, though it is much more difficult because life
seems perfect in her embrace. Yet
without that separation from mother, subordination to the father seems
senseless, abusive, and intolerable; his very presence feels like an
assault. In this regard,
development does not feel like a positive project but like a losing
proposition, from which arises a tendency to reject it. This
rejection is what we call regression.
There is another way of looking at this. The
father’s function is to make us independent of the father. He
teaches us what he knows, and when we have learned it, we do not need him
any more. We can rely on what
we have learned and act independently based upon that knowledge, which is
now a part of us. The mother
does not function to teach us independence. Our
relationship with her does not leave a precipitate of objective knowledge.
It is purely subjective. Therefore,
it cannot be relied upon in the same way. James
Baldwin speaks of the suicidal panic that a writer goes through after he
has finished one book but has not gotten going on another. He
does not know whether there is another book in him, and he cannot know
until he has written it. The
creative person is always dependent on the muse; and she may be there or
she may not.
This leads to a kind of primitive worship of the mother, which is
the psychological substrate for the power of feminism and hence of the
political correctness which represents its social program.
Because of its dependence on the mother, and because of the felt
necessity to reject the forms that the father has wrought, creativity has
what we may call a regressive pull; regression is a felt and powerful
temptation. The rise of the
symbolic analysts has, as a concomitant, a rise in the power of this
regressive pull. If we want to
understand the ideology of the new elite, we must look at the dynamics of
this temptation.
I will explore these dynamics by looking at how they play out in
the ideological expression of a specific elite. The
elite is the national governing structure of the United Church of Christ. To
explore the expression, we will consider a series of television
commercials produced by the UCC and aired during 2004 and 2005.
Religion
Against Itself
On
March 28, 2006
, the San Francisco Chronicle
reported that the major TV networks had rejected an ad by the United
Church of Christ, saying it violated their rules against controversial or
religious advertising. The
article by Wyatt Buchanan, a Chronicle
staff writer, says:
The
30-second commercial for the United Church of Christ will begin airing on
cable networks and Spanish-language stations next week. The
ad, called “Ejector,” shows a gay couple, a single mother, a disabled
man and others flying out of their pews as a wrinkled hand pushes a red
button. Text on the screen reads, “God doesn’t reject people. Neither
do we,” and a voiceover says, “The United Church of Christ. No
matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you’re welcome
here.” The church tried to run a similar ad in December 2004 in
which bouncers outside a church stopped gay couples, racial minorities and
others from entering. The
networks also rejected that ad. (p.
D12)
Both
of the ads, which are available on the UCC website at http://www.stillspeaking.com/resources/indexvis.html,
are well produced and slick, and end with images of happy and diverse
groups of people, evidently representing what the UCC has to offer.
Blogger and political psychologist John Ray, commenting on the
article, has written:
A
Leftist church (probably with a minute membership) was ostensibly trying
to advertise itself but did so only by misrepresenting the great majority
of Christian churches. No
follower of Christ rejects anyone from Christian services—any more than
Christ rejected lost sheep—but some churches will endeavour to point the
way to more biblical standards of behaviour. Deceptive
advertising is rightly banned and this ad was grossly deceptive and
defamatory
About one thing, Ray appears to be wrong. The
United Church of Christ cannot be said to have a minute membership. Wikipedia
says this about it:
The
United Church of Christ (UCC) is a mainline Protestant Christian
denomination in the
United States
, generally considered within the Reformed tradition, and formed in 1957
by the merger of two denominations, the Evangelical and Reformed Church
and the Congregational Christian Churches. Currently,
the United Church of Christ has approximately 1.3 million members and is
composed of approximately 5,750 local congregations.
On another matter, Ray is certainly correct. The
ads are defining the UCC as a church that differs from the others in that
it does not reject people like gays. This
definition only makes sense if one believes that such rejection is the
norm among Christian churches. And
in fact, on its website at http://www.ucc.org/index.php,
the UCC declares, “… the ad acknowledges the rejection that many have
experienced from organized religion.”
But as Ray observes, Christian churches, followers of one who
famously gathered social rejects around him, do not, as a general rule,
reject people from services. On
the contrary, in a manner that almost anyone would regard as definitional,
Christians believe that Christ, through his sacrifice, offers us
redemption from sin, and that it is one of the main functions of the
Christian church to extend that offer of redemption. The
result is that Christians characteristically deal with those they regard
as sinners by offering salvation; attempting to bring the individual into
the fold, not by expelling him.
To be sure, there are matters which some would not consider sinful
and others would. Certain
persons might well feel themselves rejected. That
will always be so, as long as one holds that anything is sinful. But
that there is sin is the very premise of Christianity. Jesus
did not die on the cross to abolish the category of sin; he died to redeem
us from it. And if Christians
do not reject sin, even though they welcome the sinner as a person with a
redeemable soul, it is hard to say how they can possibly be Christians.
Yet the idea of Christians turning sinners away from services,
absurd as it is, stands as nothing against the idea of Christians
rejecting the disabled from services. The
idea that followers of Christ, who largely ground their faith in the
belief that Jesus worked miracles in healing the sick, would reject
disabled people from services because they are disabled is more than
absurd; it is bizarre.
But we must assume that the people who are behind the ads mean what
they say. After all, they
define themselves through this idea. It
constitutes, by negation, who they are in their own minds. They
define their church as a refuge for people who have been rejected by
“The Ejector,” and “The Bouncers.” What
is more, they believe that this sort of rejection is so common that they
can build up their brand, so to speak, by appealing to its victims.
Moreover, the concatenation of homosexuals, single mothers, racial
minorities, and disabled people in the ads suggests that, in the mind of
the UCC, the rejecting response of other Christians toward these groups
grows out of the same impulse. The
attitude that other Christians are believed to hold toward disabled
people, that is to say, is the same, though it may have a different
object, as the attitude they hold toward single mothers, racial
minorities, and homosexuals.
The ads, in short, do not make a great deal of sense in their own
right. That suggests that the
way to understand them is not in their own right, but as the expression of
unconscious emotional forces. Returning
to our earlier considerations, we can see in these ads a clear expression
of Lasch’s “revolt of the elites.” Viewed
as expressions of emotion, the ads clearly illustrate the kind of contempt
for the masses that Lasch held the elites to have. The
charges of political incorrectness, in the form of the excoriation of
“organized religion” for its racism, homophobia, etc., are manifest. In
effect, the ads, which overtly accuse organized religion of rejecting
others, are themselves rejections, and what they reject is Christianity as
it has been practiced in the United States and those who follow
it—those, in other words, who represent “‘family values,’ mindless
patriotism, religious fundamentalism, racism, homophobia, retrograde views
of women,” and other postures of which Lasch has spoken.
But in addition to that, the paradoxes that we saw in Lasch’s
treatment are fully present. The
focus of criticism in the ads is the elite of the church. The
“wrinkled hand” which pushes the ejector button must surely be a
church official, and the bouncers are clearly not acting autonomously. They
are wearing earphones and microphones. Clearly
they are in touch with someone who is giving them orders and clarifying
what they are supposed to do. But
if it is the elite of “organized religion” that is being attacked, who
is doing the attacking? The
United Church of Christ is, after all, part of organized religion and, at
least as far as its public positions are concerned, entirely
representative of the mainline Protestant denominations. It
therefore appears that these elites are attacking themselves.
The
Purpose of the Analysis
If this is so, it suggests that it is possible to explore the
dynamics of the revolt of the elites through a study of the dynamics in
the UCC that led to this ad campaign.
We can do this by focusing on a set of questions raised by the
irrationality of the ads. For
example, what kind of attitude can it be that UCC believes other
Christians have? Second, what
is going in the mind of the UCC, or rather of the UCC elite,
that leads them to have the notion they have about other Christians? They
certainly didn’t get that notion from reality, since in reality other
Christians do not have it. So
where did they get it? And
finally, how can it be that, quite contrary to fact, they believe the
notion’s reality to be ubiquitous?
The answer I will propose provides a key to all of these questions.
It is that the attitudes that
the UCC attributes to the minds of other Christians are not in other
Christians, at least no more than they are in the mind of the UCC. In
truth, with regard to the orientation that I will describe, the UCC is
simply part of mainline Christianity. In
fact, what I am saying is equally true of the other mainline
denominations, including the Presbyterian and Episcopalian churches.
The UCC believes these attitudes are in the minds of other
Christians because it has projected them there. This
is what psychoanalysis calls “projective identification,” and I have
elsewhere described its role in political correctness (Schwartz, 2003). Briefly
put, it projected them there because it couldn’t stand these attitudes
being in themselves. By
projecting them outside, the UCC seemed to solve two problems. It
could get rid of the unacceptable ideas and it could give them a focus
outside itself which it could find unacceptable, and in that way maintain
its hatred of the ideas. And
the reason it finds these ideas ubiquitous is that the UCC brings them
along wherever it collectively turns. What
we are seeing here is the externalization of an internal conflict. It
is not a conflict between the UCC and other Christians, but within the
mind of UCC itself.
But what are these ideas, and why are they so unacceptable?
For an answer to that, we need to turn to the psychology of political
correctness.
In my view (Schwartz, 2003), political correctness is based upon
identification with what psychoanalysis calls the maternal imago—the
primitive image of an omnipotent, perfectly loving mother that we all
carry with us in the deepest layers of our psyche. At
that stage, the infant is narcissistic; it experiences itself as being the
center of a loving world. The
primitive mother is the fantasy that personifies that loving world: she is
part of the narcissism of the child.
The problem is, what to do about our experience with aspects of the
world that are not loving. This
is the question Freud addresses with his theory of the Oedipus complex. The
objective reality of the world is not built around us and does not care
about us. In psychoanalytic
theory, this objective, indifferent reality is personified in the father. We
first encounter it in the form of the relationship that the father has
with the mother, which does not revolve around us. He
has taken mother’s love away from us, we feel, and we respond to him
with rage. But remember
that the father here is only representing the indifference of reality. Rage
against reality is obviously an unproductive strategy for living in the
objective world. Ordinarily
this rage is overcome by an internalization of the father, and the reality
he represents, to form the superego.
The solution that underlies political correctness, however, is
quite a different one. In this
psychology, we deny the objective character of reality, and hence the
meaning of the father. Mother’s
omnipotence, her capacity to make our lives perfect just by her presence,
would take care of us entirely, if her love had not been stolen by the
father, who is seen here as an imposter. He
has taken mother by force and subterfuge and stolen her love and
beneficence from us. Oh, he
tells stories about how he achieved something in the world to earn a place
with her, but they are lies, built around the central lie that the
external world is indifferent to us. The
world is not indifferent to us. If
it were not for him, the fantasy continues, the world would be a loving
place, as it was when we were infants in our mother’s arms. Get
rid of him and we will again be in the state of perfect bliss of union
with mother. In the meantime,
he is to be hated for his theft of love and deprived of it in the future. Those
from whom he has stolen it, who are in PC terms the members of oppressed
groups, are to be loved in compensation.
It is clear from its website that the PC orientation in the UCC is
palpable and powerful. Throughout
the twentieth century, the UCC, through its elite, redefined itself as a
leftist social action organization. With
the eclipse of Marxism, this agenda metamorphosed into the identity
politics that provides the content of political correctness. This
political correctness placed impossible demands on the UCC elite, which it
could only resolve with the kind of projection we see in the commercials.
To put the matter briefly, the UCC identification with the mother
redefined its function in terms of maternal love. It
would love each of us exactly as we are, and would make us feel perfectly
loved in that way. The problem
is that this meant that it had to make demands upon itself that it could
not fulfill, because of human limitations on the capacity to love and
especially on the limitations reality imposes on the efficacy of love. But
these limitations were not acceptable and hence had to be projected
outward. “Organized
religion,” insofar as it is imagined as the rejecting church, may be
seen as a repository created for the purpose of receiving those
projections. But these
limitations represent the objective indifference of reality. The
rejecting church, therefore, is reality, which is represented by the
father. Thus, by adopting this
maternal identification, the UCC was not only setting itself up as being
different from the father, but as his antagonist. The
point is that offering love, by itself, could not constitute a sufficient
way of being. The offering of
love had to be accompanied by a rejection of the father. These
are two sides of the same coin. That
is the complex dynamic that led to the creation of those peculiar
commercials.
In a broader sense, however, what is involved here is a massive
redefinition of the nature of the church, and indeed of religion. We
may think of it in terms of a movement between two ideas of the church,
which we shall call the father church and the mother church.
For psychoanalytic purposes, we may think of the ultimate object of
religion as being the ego ideal: fusion with the primordial mother. This
immediately suggests that a church that takes a maternal orientation will
be fundamentally different than a church that takes a paternal
orientation. The difference is
that the father stands between us and the mother and makes demands upon
us. The promise is that if we
become like the father, we can have the mother. So
it is with the father church: it makes demands on us that we must fulfill
if we are to attain salvation. The
mother church does not. It
offers us salvation in the form of membership alone. It
does not go too far to say that the mother church sets itself up as God;
it puts itself in the business of worshipping itself. This
is obviously quite a significant redefinition of the nature of the church
and religion, and we can see it taking place all through mainline American
Protestantism
The
Father
Church
and the
Mother
Church
For example, consider an article in First Things magazine
(2005) by Philip Turner, the former
Dean of the
Berkeley
Divinity
School
at Yale, and currently Vice
President of the Anglican Communion Institute. His
thought here is directed specifically at his own church, the Episcopal,
but he means it to apply to all of mainline Protestantism within the
United States
, which would include the UCC.
Johnson begins by reporting that after serving ten years as a
missionary in
Uganda
, he returned to the
US
to attend graduate school in Christian Ethics at
Princeton
. Subsequent to that, he took
a job at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest. This
is what he reports:
Full
of excitement, I listened to my first student sermon—only to be taken
aback by its vacuity. The
student began with the wonderful question, “What is the Christian
Gospel?” But his answer,
through the course of an entire sermon, was merely: “God is love. God
loves us. We, therefore, ought
to love one another.” I
waited in vain for some word about the saving power of Christ’s cross or
the declaration of God’s victory in Christ’s resurrection. I
waited in vain for a promise of the Holy Spirit. I
waited in vain also for an admonition to wait patiently and faithfully for
the Lord’s return. I waited
in vain for a call to repentance and amendment of life in accord with the
pattern of Christ’s life.
This was quite different from what his ten years in
Uganda
would have led him to expect, and it was no aberration:
I have heard the same sermon preached from pulpit after pulpit by
experienced priests. The
Episcopal sermon, at its most fulsome, begins with a statement to the
effect that the incarnation is to be understood as merely a manifestation
of divine love. From this
starting point, several conclusions are drawn. The
first is that God is love pure and simple. Thus,
one is to see in Christ’s death no judgment upon the human condition. Rather,
one is to see an affirmation of creation and the persons we are. The
life and death of Jesus reveal the fact that God accepts and affirms us.
From this revelation, we can draw a further conclusion: God wants
us to love one another, and such love requires of us both acceptance and
affirmation of the other.
In other words, God is love and makes no demands on us. The
church simply follows this model. This
is what I am calling the mother church. The
attack upon the father, defined here as social practices that have
resulted in some being marginalized, follows from this.
From this point we can derive yet another: accepting love requires
a form of justice that is inclusive of all people, particularly those who
in some way have been marginalized by oppressive social practice. The
mission of the Church is, therefore, to see that those who have been
rejected are included—for justice as inclusion defines public policy. The
result is a practical equivalence between the Gospel of the
Kingdom
of
God
and a particular form of social justice.
The church abandons its connection to its own doctrine, as it has
come from the past and as it is reinterpreted through learned and
authoritative theological discussion. The
word of God comes to be brought forward though spontaneity, within the
overall frame of God’s inclusiveness, and unconstrained by the necessity
of linkage to tradition. In
other words, the church speaks with the voice of God and what it does is
an expression of divinity:
…
changes in belief and practice within the church are not made after
prolonged investigation and theological debate. Rather,
they are made by “prophetic actions” that give expression to the
doctrine of radical inclusion.
Johnson continues:
Such
actions have become common partly because they carry no cost. Since
the struggle over the ordination of women, the Episcopal Church’s House
of Bishops has given up any attempt to act as a unified body or to
discipline its membership.
Certain justifications are commonly cited for such
failure of discipline. The
first is the claim of the prophet’s mantle by the innovators—often
quickly followed by an assertion that the Holy Spirit Itself is doing this
new thing, which need have no perceivable link to the past practice of the
church.
The church as mother, who accepts us exactly as we are, believing
what we want to believe, poses no demands. It
also imposes no ethical standard, apart from the embrace of inclusiveness
itself.
But the deep roots of the idea are in the doctrine of radical
inclusion. Once we have
reduced the significance of Christ’s resurrection and downplayed
holiness of life as a fundamental marker of Christian identity, the notion
of radical inclusion produces the view that one need not come to the
Father through the Son. Christ
is a way, but not the way…
This unofficial doctrine of radical inclusion, which is now the
working theology of the Episcopal Church, plays out in two directions. In
respect to God, it produces a quasi-deist theology that posits a
benevolent God who favors love and justice as inclusion but acts neither
to save us from our sins nor to raise us to new life after the pattern of
Christ. In respect to human
beings, it produces an ethic of tolerant affirmation that carries with it
no call to conversion and radical holiness.
For Johnson, this represents the loss of what makes Christianity
Christianity. But we should
also see within it the rejection of the Church as father, in the form of
the demands made by the Church:
In
a theology dominated by radical inclusion, terms such as “faith,”
“justification,” “repentance,” and “holiness of life” seem to
belong to an antique vocabulary that must be outgrown or reinterpreted. So
also does the notion that the Church is a community elected by God for the
particular purpose of bearing witness to the saving event of Christ’s
life, death, and resurrection.
It is this witness that defines the great tradition of the Church,
but a theology of radical inclusion must trim such robust belief. To
be true to itself, it can find room for only one sort of witness:
inclusion of the previously excluded. God
has already included everybody, and now we ought to do the same. Salvation
cannot be the issue. The
theology of radical inclusion, as preached and practiced within the
Episcopal Church, must define the central issue as moral rather than
religious, since exclusion is in the end a moral issue even for God.
We must say this clearly: the Episcopal Church’s current working
theology depends upon the obliteration of God’s difficult, redemptive
love in the name of a new revelation. The
message, even when it comes from the mouths of its more sophisticated
exponents, amounts to inclusion without qualification.
Johnson’s word “obliteration” should not be taken lightly. The
mother church is, indeed, engaged in a project of obliteration. This
project of obliteration is what we see in the commercials of the UCC. In
order to see this clearly, we need to get a sense of the environment in
which the church found itself, since the church conceived of the
commercials as a marketing strategy for dealing with its environment.
The
Marketing Strategy
The ads were part of a program called The Stillspeaking Initiative
(TSI). Its meaning is that God
is still speaking, so we should pay attention to what He is saying now,
rather than take restrict ourselves to what He said in the past. The
brainchild of a former marketing executive named Ron Buford, the
project’s conscious purpose was laid out in a series of annual reports
put out by the UCC and available on their website.
We will turn to the specific rationale for the ads in a moment, but
first of all we must give the matter a bit of context.
As I said above, UCC membership is by no means minute; however, it
is shrinking. Having begun
with 2.4 million members, it lost over 40 percent over the following 50
years. This was in keeping with the other mainline Protestant
churches
of the
United States
. In 1960, mainline
church membership stood at over 29 million. By
2000 this number had fallen to 22 million—a 21 percent drop. Some
mainline denominations have suffered even greater membership losses.
The Disciples of Christ suffered a 55 percent membership loss.
The Episcopal Church, at a 33 percent rate of attrition, shrank
almost proportionately to the UCC (39 percent) during this period.
This drop in membership needs to be contrasted with an overall
increase in church membership within the
US
during the same period. We
will discuss the causes of this later on. For
the present, note that during the same 1960 to 2000 period, the following
changes took place in other, non-mainline Protestant denominations:
1960
2000
Assemblies of God:
508,602 2,577.560
Southern Baptist Convention 8,731,591
15,960,308
Roman Catholic Church: 42,104,900
63,383,030
Perhaps
even worse from the UCC point of view was that donations from member
congregations to the national church had declined even more substantially.
The reasons for these declines
are complex and we shall return to them shortly. For
the present, our interest is not in the real reasons, but in the UCC
perception of the reasons. Insofar
as that perception has been conscious and publicly avowed, it provides the
conscious rationale for the program as a marketing innovation. To
get a handle on it, we turn to the UCC annual reports, which are available
on the UCC website at http://www.ucc.org/ocwm/.
The line of thought and action that culminates in the ads
begins in the annual report for 2003. They lay out the problem this way:
Current
church growth statistics give us pause as we ponder what lies before us:
while almost 1,000 UCC congregations (16 percent) are growing numerically,
52 percent of our churches show no membership change and 32 percent are
losing members. Local church
giving increases at an average yearly rate of 2 percent; however, it is
not enough to offset the harsh economic realities forcing congregations to
make painful choices between staff, building maintenance, outreach, and
giving to Our Church’s Wider Mission (OCWM).
Declining OCWM income has had a debilitating effect on national and
Conference ministries, forcing cutbacks and curtailment of many important
programs.
And
suggest the solution:
This
annual report reflects our denomination’s accomplishments and highlights
and, if we are honest, our setbacks and shortcomings. It
also announces the initiation of the Still Speaking Initiative—a bold
plan for church-wide renewal. In
the days ahead, our churches will hear more about the “God is still
speaking,” [sic] national identity campaign, which portrays the story, image and
ministry of the United Church of Christ, inviting the unchurched into our
congregations. The Still
Speaking Initiative also seeks to inspire greater generosity in our
members and to increase giving to the local church and its wider
settings—in the knowledge that healthy, vital congregations are the
foundation and the future of the United Church of Christ.
The
ads, then, will be part of a strategy to invite the unchurched into the
UCC, as well as to increase contributions to support activities at the
national level (referred to as the OCWM).
It is anticipated that this program will place them “at odds with
society… requiring resistance, daring and decisive action” as it did
for their forebears.
We often have been referred to as the “early” church, because
we’ve been early in addressing the important issues facing our society
and taking uncomfortable positions that sometimes go against cultural
acceptability. Why? Because
we love Jesus more than the lure of respectability.
Among these positions:
•
Forebears of the UCC were the first mainline church to take a public stand
against slavery, in the year 1700.
•
We were the first predominantly Euro-American church to ordain an African
American as a minister—Lemuel Haynes in 1785…
•
We were the church that initiated the defense of the Amistad captives in
1839, and supported their case to the Supreme Court, which eventually led
to their freedom.
•
We ordained the first woman to ministry, Antoinette Brown, in 1853…
•
As a denomination, we were on the front lines of racial desegregation and,
in 1959, we challenged the Federal Communications Commission to allow
people of color to have access to and be seen on the televised airwaves.
•
We ordained the first openly gay person, William Johnson, in 1972.
Thus,
they are placing the action they are going to take in the same vein as
social action initiatives they have undertaken in the past, and which they
say have cost them some respectability.
They go on to quote one of their laypersons: “Give up the
comfortable. Allow someone
else to learn and lead, and with my eyes look around — there’s so much
more God wants me to do. And
with risk comes blessing.” And
they say to themselves, “CONSIDER… OUR FUTURE… in support of a
church embodying resistance and daring in our generation”
(italics in original).
They lay out the program this way:
These are tough times for the Church. Giving
is down in mainline churches and, on Sunday mornings, most pews are filled
with graying worshipers. A
recent survey revealed that 87 percent of Americans feel that religion is
important to their lives. Yet
only 42 percent of Christians attend worship services on a regular basis. Even
more startling—85 percent of mainline churches are in a state of
membership decline.
If so many people feel that religion is important, why do so few
attend church? There are
several reasons: a large segment of our society has little or no church
background; others feel that worship is boring and uninspiring; some
maintain the church has lost its vision in society; others have had a
negative personal experience in the church and feel unwelcome.
The religious community faces a choice: either we do things the way
we’ve always done them and continue to face declining membership, or we
learn from our culture and embrace new ways to tell our story of faithful
devotion to the gospel of Jesus Christ….
The Still Speaking Initiative, in collaboration with Covenanted
Ministries and Conferences, is in the initial stages of addressing the
many challenges before us—spiritual, financial, and demographic. New
television commercials will air in 2004 to let the unchurched know about
the UCC’s unique witness and welcome. …
The 2004 annual report follows in this vein, and the program
becomes evident:
2004
began with a mad scramble. The
decision had been made—full speed ahead with a strategic, five-year
marketing plan to proclaim to the world that anyone could find a home in
the United Church of Christ. The
Stillspeaking Initiative was formally established as an independent,
inter-covenantal department reporting to the Executive Council, and an
advisory task group was created….
From
this it appears that the decision to launch the program, with its ads, had
been made. It was only after
this that the advertising agency was sent out to find evidence. Not
surprisingly, they did:
One of the first items of business was to hold focus groups in
three test market areas to gain objective input into what unchurched
people thought about the church…. Here
are some excerpts from the findings of the report issued by the
advertising agency working with TSI:
•
Almost no one in any of the
focus groups was aware of the UCC.
•
Disaffection from the church
was very apparent. Everyone
had a story stemming from personal rejection, disappointment, and the
failure of the church to be there for them.
•
Several themes ran through the
meetings. One, in particular, was emphasized repeatedly: the need for
openness and acceptance of all God’s children by the church.
Participants were unanimous—the church needs to be a welcoming
place that uplifts one’s self-image and encourages individuals to be a
vital member of the community
The focus group leaders concluded that alienation was at the heart
of these individuals’ disaffection with the church. “Alienation
is about real personal experiences and deep hurts that have caused people
to turn away from the church. It
is not about the rejection of God or spirituality.”
However, even with deep levels of distrust—even anger—projected
at the church, the focus group participants gave positive feedback. Facilitators
observed, “There appears to be a genuine opportunity to bring these
people back because they are open to a welcoming church community and
extended support system.” The
final report provided clear direction: “A positive, welcoming, come as
you are message will reach the desired audience.”
&nb |
