From a letter to a pastor

I’ve written several letters this year to my state reps, to the local paper, to a local TV station, to our school superintendent, and others. They all featured fairly similar content. Concerns about the politicization of the news and schools. Concerns about partisanship and antagonism and ideological pharisaism. Mostly in the context of political correctness or wokeness or whatever you wish to call it. It’s been interesting reading the responses.

The responses mostly fell into three categories. People who agreed and shared my concerns, people who were sympathetic but reluctant to take any kind of action out of fear, and apathetic responses that said they just didn’t have the time or energy to do anything but follow prevailing trends.

Generally speaking, the news was apathetic. All they wanted was to sell their product and survive; they didn’t really care about the issues that much. I think most businesses fall into this same category. The schools were sympathetic but scared, because they have so much exposure to public criticism and are generally well-meaning. And my representatives (maybe because of where I live) openly shared my concerns. Churches are most likely to be similar to the middle group. They are open and public, and generally well-meaning.

It seems to me that its relationship to the people it’s trying to reach and help, and the open and republican (not in the political sense) nature of the church makes it more vulnerable to ideologocal capture. It’s not an autocracy (or shouldn’t be), and it’s not focused purely on some limited and narrowly defined internal goal, like profit. It wants to listen, wants to help, and is made up of many mixed members. And you can’t just shoot off negative responses casually or simply opt out of these issues and the concerns people have abiut them. You’re obligated to listen to the cares and concerns of the people.

Disagreeability is one defense against ideological pressure, but it’s one that the church is disincentivized to take because of the nature of its mission and its guiding values of compassion and service. You’re called to be thoughtful and gentle and wise and kind, because you’re trying to represent Christ. And that’s a lot of work and takes a lot of time. I don’t envy pastors, having to navigate it.

I personally think the way to maintain advantage in the cultural discussion is to always try, whenever possible, to turn the narrative toward what you do believe in and what you do offer as better solutions to those same problems, a powerful positive vision, rather than trading exclusively in negatives and criticism. It’s so easy to get bogged down in criticism. So tell your own stories of “lived experience” instead.

If you are a pastor, because of the open and moral nature of your organization, you have to recognize that at some point there will be an assault on the freedoms of your organization, very likely. An attempt to capture and align your ideology and mission with that of the larger cultural movement.

It’s funny, the way it’s usually done isn’t what you would expect. It’s not a top down or bottom up operation. It’s from the solid middle. It’s from the capture of mid-level administration in schools and companies, the bureaucratic middle of government and law, the regulatory and statutory levels of administration. It’s not quite revolution or tyranny. It’s the meeting of both through the practical, unobtrusive, conscientious middle.

I also think that’s why women, especially middle class women, have played such a large role in it. It’s symptomatic of the psychological tendency of women to divide the world into infants in need of protection and assistance or predatory aggressors in need of repudiation, regulation, or excommunication. The helpless and hurting oppressed and the thoughtless and selfish oppressors. Being very capable and conscientious, and being eager to control a protected space whose limits have been altered by the dissolution of the family (removing the typical mechanisms and outlets for protective instincts) and expanded in scope through modern media (especially social), they assert the kind of soft power women have always wielded.

Women have always been quick to exchange concerns with one another and identify social threats. Men, who have higher thresholds for their alarm system but higher aggression in their threat response systems, will respond to the concerns of women to make spaces safe and acceptable for them and their infants (or proxy infants). And I think that’s what Wokeism is. With religion as a solution gone, with family as a forum gone, and with the way that technology has altered how social information is gathered and exchanged, combined with the effect of reduced male parental involvement (which increases anxiety and creates a greater feeling of need for some substitute protector and provider structure), you’ve got all the conditions you need for something like Wokeism to arise and step into that void. Women used to play this same role in the context of church and family. Now they play it in the church and family of Wokeism.

Those same women are still around, as well as the men who want to confront the world for them, and also many “children” eager to be mothered and to exploit the indulgence and attention of a kind and well-meaning mother. And of course there’s a lot of overlap between the sexes, and the division between woke and anti-woke is more representationally feminine and masculine than it is male or female, but a lot of actual males and females (especially at the extremes of representation) fall into the typical feminine and masculine categories.

So how have men dealt with this sociological and technological shift, if they haven’t thrown themselves into the new forum of woke activism? A lot of men have just gone off on their own, taking no responsibility, living insularly and exploitatively for themselves. People haven’t changed, but the institutions through which they managed and expressed themselves have changed fundamentally. The wokesters of today are the gossiping church ladies and their eager husbands of yesterday. They just found a new church. And plenty more men are just staying at home.

I don’t think you can address this problem until you 1. Offer young men a positive vision for male responsibility where they feel they can meaningfully contribute, and 2. Manage to assure young women that their concerns are being genuinely heard and addressed by Christianity (and by the church and society at large, whatever society is most meaningful to them). Unless you can do that, people will always be looking for someone who will promise to fulfill those needs.

Some pastors are taking direct steps to address this invasion of religious spaces by politically-defined quasi-religious worldviews. We need people to innoculate the young. And they’re going to face plenty of prosthelyzation, no question. I really do think, psychologically, the appeal of social justice for young men and women is that men want something to be demanded of them, and women want to feel that their concerns and demands are being heard. And Christianity can fulfill those same needs, you just have to make the case, and make the case convincingly that it will do it better. I think those are the underlying motivational states that drive people toward social justice or divine justice.

The only thing that will give young people the strength to stand against social pressure when the system demands that they participate is the deep conviction that the solutions being offered won’t solve those problems, and that they have something else that will. If their underlying motivation has a higher call on it than what comes knocking. If they have deeper sense that the pain and need of humanity is being understood and heard, and a deeper sense of a heroic call to take action and responsibility in the world.

This is a personal theory, but I think government and social media are the new ways to express the male-female romantic partnership. That relationship has degraded so much that people don’t feel they can ask of one another what they used to. Women want to feel protected and provided for and listened to, so they can focus on managing their affairs within a protected space. But they don’t feel that they can ask that of men any more, partly out of pride and independence, partly out of past disappointment and disillusionment. So they ask the government to do it. Provide for me, protect me, hear me.

And men want a mission, they want to be asked to do something, to make something of themselves and of the world, to subdue it and provide. But they can’t directly offer those services to women any more without hurting their pride or seeming patronizing. So they do it through the government. They can have a mission there. Listen, provide, and protect; create that protected, civilized space. Subdue the wild beasts, secure the resources, make the space acceptable for the moral authorities. Being able to do these things through the government gives us the distance we need to seek what we need without lowering ourselves before any particular person.

Government is big and impersonal and low-resolution, though. It wields a heavy hammer with a wide strike. It is not very tailored or individualized. It can’t really see you the way another person can, the way your family can. It’s can’t really love you or care about you as an individual. It’s useful, but it’s uses are more limited than we might wish. It’s an open question whether it really has the kind of power we asbribe to it. And the family might have more power than we currently ascribe to it. It’s at least a question worth asking, how effective the family has been at producing wealth and meaning and stability across time, and how effective government has been at the actual production of those goods. We might be expecting too little of one and too much of the other.