St Augustine being taken to school by St Monica, by Niccolò di Pietro (courtesy wikipedia)
Ross Douthat has responded to my post about religion in the meritocracy. He has very helpfully framed my mastery hypothesis in terms of Pelagianism vs Augustinianism:
what’s being described is not, primarily, a situation where Augustinian accounts of human nature are less intellectually convincing than Pelagian ones. Instead you have a sociological system whose structures and rigors are set up to reward Pelagian psychology, which really does “work” if your goals are normal meritocratic ones… and so even you convince yourself to become Augustinian in theory you will find yourself constantly pulled back toward Pelagius in practice.
His article raises a number of interesting points; for now I’ll just discuss his thoughts on how religious discrimination affects the lives of ambitious Christians.
It’s important to distinguish how Christians/the Church should think about this question from how secular people should think about it. (There are, of course, other ways that non-Christian, non-secular people should think about it, but I don't feel particularly qualified to speak on their behalf; like Douthat, most of my friends are either Christians or secular meritocrats.)
There are many reasons that non-Christians, and specifically secular people, might want society to give scope to religious practice. To name a few: If you take pluralism seriously you'll want to respect the rights of other people to pursue what they view as meaningful. If you take agnosticism seriously you might hope that a diverse array of religions are practiced in case religion (rather than atheism) turns out to be true. If you're a multiculturalist you'll value diversity (I'm not making fun of this view; I find it pretty compelling). If you're cynical and/or a utilitarian you might think that religion is an illusion (an "opiate of the masses") that can nonetheless benefit people who are capable of believing and/or contribute to political stability. If you buy the decadence arguments that Douthat has made, you might think that widespread secularism promotes specific social dangers.
So if you're a secular person with the meritocratic values that are mainstream in the highly educated professional classes, you might have good reasons to worry about questions like "have we made it too difficult for religious people to be ambitious." You might worry that some religious people are avoiding certain careers where they could make a real contribution because they're discriminated against, and that other religious people are forced to conceal their religious beliefs in an unhealthy or unjust way in order to fit in in their careers. You also might worry that the discrimination that religious people face in certain spheres is driving people away from religion for the wrong reasons. (Or, I don't know, maybe if you value intensity you might think it's a good thing for the only religious people to be ones who've overcome adversity?) You might also worry that by discriminating against religious people you're inadvertently radicalizing religion: if the only religious people left are the ones who are willing to make serious sacrifices (to put it positively) or who have an almost pathological willingness to alienate the people they know (to put it negatively) this is a situation which easily conduces to religious extremism.
But from the Christian perspective, the situation looks quite different. Douthat writes that "there’s a negative feedback loop for the ambitious as religion and religious institutions decline":
It’s not just that meritocrats don’t want to submit to biblical religion’s humbling and somewhat depressing view of human sinfulness. It’s also that the waning or weakening of religious institutions closes off some of the religious paths that the ambitious used to follow, carrying a version of of the achiever’s mentality that Pollnow describes while also submitting at least somewhat to the church.
But it's worth stressing that, from the Christian's perspective, an equally bad feedback loop exists connected to the growth of religion and religious institutions. As the scope grows for the activities of the ambitious Christian, so do the spiritual dangers. Douthat recognizes these dangers as well, but he also points out that religious decline doesn't automatically generate religious purification:
as anyone familiar with recent evangelical scandals can attest, being a kind of outsider-leader carries temptations of its own. And the recent experience of Catholicism offers considerable evidence that the smaller, purified, starting-afresh church famously prophecied by Joseph Ratzinger doesn’t emerge automatically just because the old church of worldly power has declined. Instead you can get a mix of outsider-leaders and outsider-movements that seem particularly prone to scandal, and a core ecclesiastical structure that sometimes resembled the secular meritocracy but with more more misgovernment and mediocrity, as ambitious creeps compete for a declining institution’s spoils.
There are two things to be said on this point. One is that from the Christian point of view this crisis, like any crisis, is what St. Josemaría Escrivá would describe as a “crisis of saints": the most effective way—indeed, the only effective way—to ensure that the Church flourishes is for individual people to follow the L-rd, to take up the cross, to preach the Gospel, to become saints. So at one level we don't need to fret about whether we're in a position to effect the relevant changes (in society, or in the Church) to ensure that the Church flourishes. On the other level, one of our tasks as Christians is to use our resources as best we can to promote the good of society and the health of the Church.
There’s a lot more to be said here—including about what practical steps we could take to promote healthy communities in the Church—but it would be a mistake to think that the task of Christians is to take a “moderate” stance between the dangers of a prestigious Church and a discriminated against one. From the Christian perspective, the reason to protect the Church from discrimination is primarily for the sake of the people who would persecute it and those who would abandon it; the people who actually stay, who undergo persecution, are better off thanks the persecution. Periods of persecution tend to produce saints; this process benefits the people it sanctifies and it’s good for the Church, which often experiences growth and renewal following the witness of martyrs.
Douthat’s decadence project may give secular folks reasons to worry about discrimination against Christians—but it shouldn’t make Christians worry about this, particularly. Whereas if secular folks find themselves worried about the question, they should consider taking up the additional (and more fundamental) question of whether religion might be true.
In the next post I’ll offer some reasons for thinking that Catholicism is true. I’ll also share some ideas for promoting healthier communities within the Church, along with some zany ramblings about how our current arrangement isn’t that different from the setup where the Popes came from the best families in Rome.