"Thinking Eternally, Acting Locally." - Neal August
A brief excerpt from my (work-in-progress) book on power abuse in the Church.
Lagado
In chapter four of the third part of Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver arrives in
the metropolis of Lagado in the land of Balnibarbi. He discovers a city with
houses in ruin and disrepair and people dressed in rags, filled with misery and
want. The citizens themselves lead wildly busy lives but nevertheless produce
nothing for their effort. Though the land has good soil it remains
uncultivated. Eventually Gulliver learns that forty years prior, certain
persons known as Projectors visited the learned island of Laputa and returned
to Lagado with only smattering of knowledge but full of volatile spirits. The
Projectors began to dislike the management of the city and fell into schemes of
putting all arts, sciences, language, and mechanics under their control and
direction. They established new rules for building, agriculture, trade, and
manufacturing. The Projectors promised that with them in control, implementing
their ideas, “one man shall do the work of ten; a palace may be built in a
week, of materials so durable as to last for ever without repairing. All the
fruits of the earth shall come to maturity at whatever season we think fit to
choose, and increase a hundred fold more than they do at present; with
innumerable other happy proposals. The only inconvenience is, that none of
these projects are yet brought to perfection; and in the mean time, the whole
country lies miserably waste, the houses in ruins, and the people without food
or clothes. By all which, instead of being discouraged, they are fifty times
more violently bent upon prosecuting their schemes, driven equally on by hope
and despair.” Furthermore, the Projectors ridicule and despise those who have
managed to succeed by other methods, accusing them of setting bad examples for
the kingdom. They call them ignorant and enemies, claiming they prefer their
own ease and sloth rather than the good the country. And when the new rules and
policies fail, the Projectors lay all the blame on the successful, yet the same
projects continue to fail with equal disappointment.
Swift’s story is a satire on pseudo-intellectuals of
the 18th century Enlightenment. His aim was to ridicule the
intelligentsia of his day and the so-called learned institutions who provided
ill-suited scientific advice for governmental policies to better organize
society. Far from being an attack on knowledge and science, Swift critiqued the
fashionably high view of man’s nature and the assumption of the inevitable
progression of humanity’s accomplishments. He understood the corruptibility of
mankind, especially when, armed with self-glorification and absurd pretensions,
it seeks to apply modern philosophy on political practice to hubristically tame
creation and properly administer society. In this way, Gulliver’s Travels has been read in part as a repudiation of Robinson Crusoe’s optimism and Daniel
Defoe’s perceived endorsement of Thomas Hobbes' radical political philosophy in
Leviathan. In this way, Gulliver next
travels to the land of Glubbdubdrib and stays at a place haunted by the spirits
of great past leaders who are conjured up by a friendly necromancer. For the
next few weeks, Gulliver interviews many of history’s most venerated and
powerful leaders – great shapers of the modern world! But, instead of heroes of
great virtue and the restorers of liberty to the oppressed, Gulliver meets men of considerable ignorance, vice, and corruption, and unscrupulous,
cutthroat villains committing mass injustices. While the winning writers of
history had hidden the truth to prop up the power and privilege of cruel kings,
judges, and ministers, the reality was one of “whores, pimps, parasites, and
buffoons.” Indeed, the real virtuous workers of history were left either
unrecorded or written down as the vilest rogues or traitors, dying in poverty,
disgrace, or state execution. And such lies and bullying have been seen from ancient
times down to the modern age.
Therefore, given man’s innate corruption, Swift
ridicules giving such ignorant and immoral men the political power to implement
scientific policies of societal change. The logical conclusions of such
implementations, he thought, would be societal atrocities. The hubris to enact
such atrocities guaranteed an unwillingness to turn away from further disaster.
As Allan Bloom notes, “Power is concentrated in the hands of the rulers; hence
they are not forced even by fear to develop a truly political intelligence.
They require no virtue; everything runs itself, so there is no danger that
their incompetence, indifference, or vice will harm them.”[1]How
prescient was Swift!
Today we have been witnesses to the economic and
social disasters of socialist nations like the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and
Cambodia, led by ideological leaders of dialectical materialism seeking the
earthly utopia of a worker’s paradise. Armed with four- and five-year plans,
they promised a great leap forward of economic and social progress by
implementing industrialization, nationalization, collectivism, centralized
economic planning, and ideological purges. The results were economic collapse,
mass poverty and starvation, oppression, and deaths in the tens of millions.
Nevertheless, no matter how high the bodies piled, the socialist leaders dug in
and doubled down, refusing to abandon their plans or relinquish their control.
As Solzhenitsyn recounts in The Gulag
Archipelago, when Soviet policies inevitably failed, those who had
initially raised concerns were accused of sabotage and labeled capitalists and
counter-revolutionaries.
Even in more capitalistic societies, there are
activists, academics, policy wonks, politicians, and bureaucratic central
planners who come into power with grand visions of great societies and begin to
implement progressive deals of social change though mobilization and new rules
for wages, finance, welfare, insurance, and healthcare. When their policies
result in the unintended consequences of unemployment, bankruptcy, shortages,
inflation, unaffordability, these modern-day Projectors blame the scapegoats of
racism and the rich.
Within the Church,
there are leaders who assume control over seminaries and entire denominations,
promising increased enrollments and evangelical harvests only to reap decline
and financial disaster. Yet, instead of humbling themselves before the Lord and
seeking alternative methods, they dig in and double down on their ideological
policies, blaming and railing against liberals, moderates, and those they claim
haven’t fully embraced their way of being the people of God.[2]
In local churches there are pastors and
power-wielders who ignorantly seek to implement their will upon the
congregation and the business of the church. Perhaps they are pursuing their
own personal ministry agenda irrespective of the effects their actions have on
the other ministries of the church. Perhaps they are traditionalists attempting
to recapture the feeling of a spiritual moment of their past by organizing and
structuring their church surroundings to reclaim that lost sensation. Perhaps
they have attended a megachurch for a conference and, impressed by experience,
seek to emulate that experience on their return. We need a café! We need people greeting in the parking lot! We need
golf carts escorting the elderly! We need new decorations every week for the
Children’s Ministry. Perhaps they are individuals building their own
kingdoms of prestige and privilege and wanting to take back their church to
advance grand projects of growth and leading-edge ministry excellence. But what
happens when the consequences of their actions and the implementation of their
policies result in disaster, destruction, ruin, and disrepair in the church and
its ministries and people? Do they humble themselves before the Lord in
repentance or do they dig in and double down
more on
prosecuting their schemes? Do they admit their mistakes, or do they seek a
scapegoat to blame?
[1]
Allan Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs: An
Outline of Gulliver's Travels (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 48. See
also Bloom, The Closing of the American
Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1987), 293-298.
[2]
Pastors such as Rick Warren, Steve Furtick, and Ed Young Jr. are frequently
pilloried as worldly and labeled false teachers by fundamentalists and
so-called discernment ministries because of their contemporary methodology and
tremendous Kingdom success. If one points to their thousands of conversions as
evidence of God’s blessings, fundamentalists will deem such success as
illegitimate and suggest that we have finally arrived at the great falling away
of 2 Timothy 4:3. I note that Billy Graham received the same accusations from
fundamentalists for his Kingdom success.
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