I'm about halfway through my third time watching The Sopranos. There’s a line from the episode that's hung with me since the first time I watched the show. Tony’s talking to his therapist and he says “It's good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.” I've been thinking this in regards to institutions, jobs, the basic structures of society. It seems especially true for working in churches in America right now.
Something feels deeply off about our institutions. It’s not just that people don’t trust them anymore or that we’re joining fewer rotary clubs or civic organizations or participating less in political parties. Everyone knows church attendance is down. But we continue to participate in a vast array of institutions only now they go by the names Amazon, McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, Apple, and Google. The biggest employer in just about every major city in America is actually a university because of their connections to a hospital. I just don’t buy the idea of institutional decline, though I do believe that institutional participation has changed and there’s something about it we need to diagnose.
What feels off about it all? Lately, I’ve come to put it like this: no one believes that the institutions of which they are a part are for them in any significant way.
Students going to a university know that they’ll come out with debt and a degree that will net them just enough money to live paycheck to paycheck. They also probably know that the president of the school makes millions of dollars just like the football and basketball coaches. I’ve written elsewhere about the stress middle and high school students face in their daily lives because of pressure to perform and the imposition of career vocabulary to describe everything they do. They seem to know school doesn’t work for them. Every working person I know lives with the awareness that they’re expendable, that as soon as keeping them messes the bottom line they’ll be looking for a new job. No one trusts the government, local or federal.
It’s easy to diagnose this problem as a matter of approaching institutions as consumer products. Maybe the problem is that people look at a church, universities, their jobs, their government and ask the wrong question. I’ve heard this so many times from the boss, the university administrator, the disgruntled parent, the longtime church member. “The problem is people today just think ‘Well what am I going to get out of it?’” Looked at this way, the problem of saying “Institutions aren’t for us” means “I’m not going to get what I want so I’ll just shop elsewhere.”
But I’m not convinced this gets at the problem correctly.
A few weeks ago I read Spincer Piston’s Class Attitudes in America: Sympathy for the Poor, Resentment for the Rich. It’s a fantastic book that dispels many of the myths about the attitudes Americans hold about the poor and the rich. Looking at America's staggering inequality and policies that seem designed to punish the poor and reward the rich, you might expect Americans to despise the poor and admire the rich. Piston discovers that when asked to speak in their own words, most people hold the exact opposite attitudes. I won’t wade into the data, but what he concludes after rounds of surveys is that when asked and given the freedom to articulate themselves, most people think the poor, as a group, don’t have as much as they deserve and the rich, as a group, have more than they deserve. If America has political policies that punish the poor and reward the rich, it’s not as a reflection of the attitudes held by most Americans.
Piston also found that when it's clear a policy will benefit the poor or will take from the rich, people become more politically active. It's not that they have a clear or uniform definition of “the poor” or “the rich.” They just know the two represent distinct groups and that they want to see more done for the former and more taken from the latter.
The key for all of this lies in the fact people have to see a clear benefit for the poor or clear harm for the rich and a sharp group distinction drawn between the two. For instance, people generally oppose the “death tax” which is a tax on the inheritances of the very, very wealthy. That’s because it sounds like it’s a tax on everyone’s inheritance. When told it only takes from the rich, support for the policy goes way up.
The whole thing can be summed up like this: when it comes to politics, Americans think about groups of “rich people” and “poor people.” Most of them think that the poor don’t have as much as they deserve and that the rich have too much. Also, Americans get politically active around policies and politicians that they believe will benefit the poor. People phone bank, knock on doors, campaign, and give money when they believe that a policy benefits the poor.
I’m not interested in the political lessons here though there are plenty. I think Piston’s work does a lot to help explain what’s going on in our institutions, and why so many people don’t think they are for them in any significant way.
People don’t believe the institutions of which they are a part and structure their world are not for them not because they think of themselves as lone individuals shopping for the best individual benefit, but because they think of themselves and others as a part of various groups and don’t see those groups being named or the way that institutional policies will benefit them as groups.
We aren’t actually asking “How will this benefit me?” but “How will this benefit us?” Do any of us think the institutions of our society will actually benefit us? Do we even know what we mean when we say “us”?
How can anyone actually think that universities exist for the benefit of students when almost all of them leave with thousands of dollars in debt? No one thinks that the health insurance industry exists for the benefit of people living paycheck to paycheck, and if you're one of those people, you know the institution isn’t for you. Churches tend to talk about being for all people, but when push comes to shove, the poor members and working class members know that the fact that their offerings don’t match those of the wealthy members means the institution won’t be for them.
I think it's why so many leaders talk about “stakeholders.” It’s a way to obscure the sharp framing of the groups with something to gain or lose. The whole thing gets muddled and the benefits aren’t clear. No wonder people check out. People don’t think of themselves or others as “stakeholders.” They think of themselves and others as groups, black or white, straight or gay, rich or poor. These obviously aren’t the only categories or groups and often times people have a hard time when the groups overlap and conflict and they find themselves torn between opposing commitments. It’s all difficult and complicated, but at least it’s much more honest than “stakeholders.”
Why are so many people leaving churches and how can we get them to come back? This has been the puzzle every pastor I know thinks over all the time. It’s one we’re trying to figure out at Ephesus Baptist (soon to be Jubilee Baptist as of a unanimous vote this morning!). The Atlantic ran an article a few years ago on some surveys on the subject. They discovered that logistical hurdles kept people from church while belief drew them back in.
Looking at Piston’s work, particularly the parts about how people become very politically active (campaigning, door knocking, phone banking) for policies they know are for the poor, I wonder if there’s not an untapped motivation for people.
What would a church look like that tapped into people’s motivation not only to see themselves as parts of groups, but also to be activated by clear benefits for the groups they care about, especially the poor?
Any church that’s re-starting, re-branding, or changing in some way ends up describing themselves as either “a family of faith called to be very good and nice people that do very good and nice things for everyone in the whole wide world” or “a community on a journey through the tensions of faith and doubt, healing and hurt, and other things that are good and easy but also difficult and hard.” Statements like these don’t put forth the clear benefits or sharp farming of distinct groups that people generally think in. Being for “all people” or just “for people” isn’t how most of us conceive of the world. It’s setting up a church of stakeholders, and it might, ironically, end up leaving a lot of people out who would otherwise be motivated to join a church that is for a particular group they care about.
At the moment I’m a part of a church trying to figure out who we want to become in the future. You can read about our plans to replant here. We have a lot to figure out. I’m just one pastor amongst three. We’ve got a cooperative council to help us discern the best way forward for our church. I write all of that to say that this this isn’t an “official” statement about our church. It’s just a draft of a draft. It’s me trying to think through the end of one institution and the beginning of another and imagine what we might become.
So were I given free reign to apply Piston’s work to the institution I know best and have the strongest attachments to, I would have a church that says this about itself:
We know that today indebtedness, burnout, worry about employment, and fear of financial ruin mark the lives of so many. For years the church benefited from widespread economic stability, but now we have to figure out how to preach good news in more precarious times. While so many of our institutions offer individual solutions to collective problems, we believe that as a church it’s only when we work together that we experience God’s liberation from bondage, forgiveness of indebtedness, and freedom from captivity.
Day in and day out we hear that stability, power, community, and hope only exist for the few that can afford them. But we are a church for the underpaid, for the exploited, for the unemployed, for the indebted, and for the poor. We are a church for them because we believe God moves for them. It was for them that Jesus lived, died, and rose again. It was to them that he preached the good news. And it is because of him that we are a church for the many.
I don’t know that this is the church Jubilee Baptist will become or if this is the language we’ll use when we speak about ourselves, but I do believe it’s awfully close to the institution people need and want right now.
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Things I read this week that I liked:
The Ills That Flesh Is Heir to
it was a slow week reading-wise