When the Demand For Social Capital Exceeds the Supply
The 2010s were notorious for the wave of unscrupulous power grabs and “cancellations” in the Evangelical world. Some of them drew national prominence, and others represented much more local attempts by ambitious Evangelical elites to garner power and secure positions for themselves. One of those stories never really got a public hearing. The only version out there is the one-sided account given by a Louisiana muckraker and an ambitious ministry entrepreneur who has since deleted the relevant posts on his blog so as not to derail his current ambitions. As an eyewitness to this event, I’ve decided that it’s time to reopen this case as an illustration of the way power and ambition operate among Evangelical elites.
At the 2019 Valentine’s Day Chapel at Louisiana Christian University (formerly Louisiana College), noted local Baptist minister Joshua Joy Dara gave a sermon on the theme of the Body as a Temple to the Lord. I attended that sermon in Guinn Auditorium and heard the entire presentation first-hand. Having lived nearly my entire life in majority or plurality African American cities, this style of preaching was not strange to me. Fred Luter, Jr. was a frequent guest speaker at Southern Baptist events in my hometown of New Orleans, and there is far more interchange between majority black and white churches than most people give credit. However, I can understand how some people who come from a much more racially homogenous background might not understand the way the black community expresses the Gospel.
The sermon seemed fairly unremarkable. Your body is a Temple to the Lord, Pastor Dara told us. Don’t do things with your body that you wouldn’t want to do to the Lord’s Temple. He used an extended metaphor of a body to a building. Do reverence to the building and keep it for its appointed usage. Don’t treat the building like a crack house, where people go in and out doing bad things as they please. Do take care of the building. Mend its fences, paint its walls, cut the grass, fix the leaky roof.
The obvious context of such a sermon is the real-world problems that Pastor Dara deals with every day as the leader of one of the largest Baptist churches in the Rapides Parish area. Pastor Dara is a minister on the front lines of America’s spiritual war, who can’t hide in an ivory tower seminary from the fallout of unwed teen mothers, broken families, drugs, and alcohol in our communities. White or black, working-class Baptists have to confront the consequences of sinful choices regarding sexual morality. We’re not all wealthy, upper-middle-class Baptists who quietly pay for abortions or rehab when our friends and family get into trouble. Pastor Dara sees the consequences of sexual sin every day; I walked out of chapel that day feeling very clear on the topics he spoke about.
Evidently, Russell Meek felt differently. Dr. Meek began a campaign to have Pastor Dara punished for this sermon, which he claimed demeaned women in an echo of the now-debunked #MeToo hysteria over sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention. Despite the fact that not a single student would go forward and file a Title IX complaint over this sermon, and finding little traction for his campaign on campus, he then leaked information to a dishonest local scandal-writer, Lamar White, Jr., and another #MeToo hysteria-monger Wade Burleson, including a surreptitious recording of a confidential meeting with university officials.
Burleson has since deleted his content, but his blog still possesses a number of posts from that time period demonstrating his antinomian Marcionism and susceptibility to fall for all the chic upper-middle-class moral panics of that time. On the other hand, White, like the muckraker that he is, included salacious commentary about “cutting your grass” being a euphemism for pubic hair. Most of the nonsensical takes that went public about Pastor Dara’s sermon were largely derived from White’s distorted second-hand interpretations. Keep in mind that no public recording of the sermon was made available, and so White is extrapolating everything from whatever Meek told him over the phone.
When even this failed to lead to Pastor Dara or President Brewer’s cancellation, Meek responded by resigning his position and running to then-head of the ERLC, Russell Moore, for aid, evidently expecting a backlash against President Brewer. Other than some symbolic support, such as giving Meek some gig work writing for the ERLC blog, the only real result was a few more reports like the one out of Baptist News. Given Moore’s own career implosion at the ERLC, which followed a similar game plan, there’s a certain ironic parallelism.
If the media and popular accounts of this event were so biased, why wait six years to write anything about it? Frankly, at the time, I told President Brewer to go at Dr. Meek full-bore. I would have led with a sarcastic comment about Dr. Meek “whitesplaining” the issues of the black community to a bunch of entitled Upper-Middle Class evangelicals and spoiled rich college students, then conducted a scorched earth campaign against Burleson and anyone else who participated in the attack on Pastor Dara. This was right after the May Massacre at Southwestern Baptist Seminary, and the feeding frenzy of Evangelical Left scavengers on Paige Patterson’s career had not quite yet died out. I wanted to preemptively strike against the continuing dilution and corruption of Southern Baptist institutions. President Brewer disagreed and told us to stay silent, depriving the story of oxygen. He was right, and I was wrong. I see that now. Nearly everyone involved in this incident has moved on with their careers. I myself was among the 15% of faculty laid off during the COVID downsizing at LCU, and President Brewer has retired. This gives us all the critical distance necessary to learn from the situation and understand the dynamics involved in these kinds of intra-Church power struggles that masquerade as issues of doctrine or justice.
First, never trust the media on intra-Church disputes. This should not be understood as some kind of right-wing screed against left-wing bias, although there was plenty of that in White’s gossip column. Even the official releases from LCU’s media office and attorney were not strictly true in the sense of an unbiased report of what happened. Media offices and attorneys are writing from the perspective of protecting their institutional employer. They often fail to tell the whole truth because even when the truth proves them right, being right is secondary to preserving the good provided by the institution.
Take the LCU press release that White cites when the university calls Meek a “widely-respected professor” who “earned high marks from his students and colleagues.” What benefit would it have been to the university to air the dirty laundry of its then-employee? In the expectation of a possible positive resolution to a conflict, an institutional spokesperson is going to speak the best of everyone. What doesn’t come across is that Meek had a long history of this kind of politicized rabble-rousing on campus. This is a man who thinks it’s appropriate to go to a Professor of Politics in Hattie B Cafeteria and inform him of the correct way for a Christian to teach politics based on one course he took at Midwest Seminary (by the way, it was “you only need John Rawls”). He had previously instigated Black Lives Matter student protests on campus rather than respect the wishes of the faculty as a whole to participate in respectful dialogue on the topic among students in an open, non-threatening atmosphere in their relevant classes. While it is true that he did have a small following of students attracted to his political ideas, as the only Political Science professor on campus, I had the dubious privilege of listening to the rest of his students complain about incessant insertion of irrelevant political screeds in his Old Testament courses. Surreptitiously recording President Brewer and Dr. Clark was not some out-of-character act of a desperate man seeking justice but par for the course for a professor who believed that his position gave him the right to impose his political preferences on his students and colleagues.
Second, these types of conflicts cannot be disconnected from the career and political ambitions of those who participated in it. Pastor Dara’s sermon would never have created a ripple except for the precedent set by the takeover of Southwestern Baptist Seminary the year before by allies of Russell Moore. I’m not saying that Meek or Burleson were directly looking to advance their careers by “cancelling” Pastor Dara or President Brewer. Cancel Culture works because it creates a general presumption that moral panics, purity spirals, and holiness signals are good for one’s career in general and by creating a favorable environment for upward mobility among lower-ranked elites. As many recent and older texts in elite theory describe, ambitious climbers are not necessarily conscious of the self-interested motives that drive them to competitive behaviors. They may generally believe that they are motivated by philanthropy and altruism, and that the benefits they derive from status games are entirely secondary to the moral good they provide.
Until we become aware of the way that these kinds of power struggles within Evangelical institutions generate and profit from new and ever-expanding pseudo-moral panics as part of the churn of elite competition, we’ll never be able to address the great damage that comes from this dynamic. There will always be young, hungry elites looking to displace older, complacent leaders from their positions. This is simply human nature, even within the Church. Last year, the Justice Department, under a Democrat no less, failed to find evidence for systematic abuse of women in the Southern Baptist Convention. We still live, however, with the scars and broken institutions created by these moral panics created by elite competition.
The reality of elite competition in contemporary America is that it masks itself in altruism and generates problems so that they can be seen to address them. Imagine a divorce attorney who also owns a marriage counselling business with a suspiciously large number of customers who end up divorced; this is the nature of American elites and their various social justice concerns. As Musa al-Gharbi writes in his recent book, the elite of today are “symbolic capitalists” who find reservoirs of social capital to exploit in order to raise their status and burnish their “brand.” Just like a market capitalist looks for underexploited market niches to expand their business, modern-day elites seek out opportunities for moral aggrandizement. Advertising is the science of creating new demand for a product being produced, and likewise, Creative Class elites create new moral issues and problems when there is an oversupply of ambitious strivers and too few opportunities to advance their interests and careers. It’s the St. George problem. What does St. George do after he slays the dragon? Retire? No, he seeks out the next largest dragon to slay. What happens when we have too many St. George-s and not enough dragons? Then St. George begins to hire actors to play the dragon, just as Jussie Smollett did one cold Chicago night.
The problem is that Evangelical institutions don’t need “creative destruction” that might be justified in the economic sphere. Acknowledging the problems that come from sclerotic elites and rigid institutions doesn’t mean embracing the kind of neoliberal fluidity that J. G. Machen warned us against in the early 20th Century. Churches provide stability to people amidst an increasingly unstable world, and the tendency to subject them to the same demands we place on secular government has proven to be worse than the original problem. Church elites need to be far more limited in their ability to enact their own wills or pursue their own agendas within the Evangelical community than secular elites in American government.
Lastly, we all must learn to protect our own minds and thoughts against manipulation by these kinds of events. We’ve been programmed by years of education and propaganda to think that an institution which stonewalls and denies these kinds of accusations is necessarily guilty. In fact, it is the very opposite. It is beneath the dignity of our leaders to react to these kinds of spurious moral panics and cloaked attempts at personal career advancement. It is a waste of institutional resources and credibility that could be used to advance the actual goals of the institution. The reasonably correct first instinct of the vast majority of people should be to assume that these kinds of accusations of wrongdoing are lies until proven otherwise, because of the long history of Jussie Smollett hoaxes and frauds over the last twenty years. These hoaxes aren’t the exception; they’re the rule because they’ve been institutionalized as the main form of elite advancement by ambitious, young strivers to power and wealth.
My instincts in this case were wrong. President Brewer was right. This petty accusation wasn’t worth a drag-out battle that would tar the institution further. I’m not saying that this event was handled perfectly; Meek’s illicit recording doesn’t reflect well on the leadership of the university, and it showed that some members of the administration didn’t understand what they were dealing with. Elite strivers riding a sense of moral superiority won’t be deterred by threats of the kind levelled against Meek. Their attempts to bully him into silence probably only exacerbated his sense of aggrievement that, as the LCU press release mentioned, probably originated from a dispute over his salary but grew into a battle over status and respect.
In the end, the real issue is the very human need for validation, status, and power. Despite the fact that they represent churches and not a government, the main drivers of elite evangelical action are no different than the drivers of elite political action. When there are limited numbers of elite careers and positions, humans will naturally compete by the rules of the game that are placed before them and ultimately fight over the rules themselves in order to change them to their benefit. When the rules of that game are holiness, purity spirals, and delegitimization, you can expect elites to seek out ways in which their competitors are impure and immoral, and to argue that they have a better grasp on the true essence of the institution’s goals than the leadership. It’s time to stop being gullible, Evangelicals, and stop buying into the just-so stories that competing elites continually derive to justify why they should be in charge instead of the current leadership. Uncontrolled elite competition is highly damaging to any institution. We need to be doing better about limiting it.
Image Credit: Unsplash
