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Why Do Those Wanting to Transform an Institution Almost Always Claim the Institution…
. . .and the people who want to preserve what the institution has stood for must leave and create a new institution to preserve the values of the old institution?
The United Methodist Church, which I recently joined in the hopes of avoiding just such a fracturing, has before it a proposal to split over whether to adhere to traditional church teaching. Although the triggering issue is listed as human sexuality, sexuality is merely the surface issue for a much deeper conflict over many aspects of traditional church doctrine, the authority of scripture, the value of traditions, and questions of how God has related to His people throughout history. But this is not the thread in which to discuss the specifics of the Methodist controversy. For better details on the Methodist proposal, go to the thread entitled, “This Week in the UMC” by @jimchase.
The proposal in the UMC is just another example that (according to the proposal) the faction that seeks to retain the existing values of the institution is required to leave the existing institution and to establish a new institution, while the faction that seeks to fundamentally upend the values of the existing institution gets to claim the shell of the existing institution (the name, most of the physical property, and any people who don’t actively transfer to the new institution).
This dynamic (those who seek change get to claim the shell of the institution while those who seek to preserve what the institution has always been must leave the institution) has played out many places, most prominently universities and other churches, but also sometimes in business corporations.
Why is this? It seems to me that those who disagree with an institution’s existing principles so much that they are willing to split the institution to achieve their fundamentally different vision should be the ones forming a new institution. They aren’t really interested in the existing institution. They want a different institution. So why are they so intent on claiming an existing institution in order to transform it, rather than seeking to build a new institution?
I don’t think it’s that transforming an institution is easier than starting a new one. Fundamental transformation of the Presbyterian Church (USA) took about 40 years from first formal transformation proposal in 1978 to complete takeover in 2016. And there probably was background work going on before the first formal proposal. Some of the largest companies in the world have been built in less time than that.
One of my cynical views is that those who want a different institution understand that there is not enough public support for their desired vision on which to build a new institution. So their only hope is to take over an existing institution and remake it. My other cynical view is that they want the public “goodwill” that comes with the name of the existing institution. Although they want to change the institution to be something very different from what the name of the existing institution means, they know it will take a while before the public realizes that the name no longer means what it used to mean.
Is the value of physical property really enough to justify the effort? So, why does this dynamic keep happening?
Why don’t people who want something that does not currently exist not start a new institution, and instead take over an existing institution in order to remake the institution into something different from what the institution has always been?
Are there approaches people in existing institutions might take to reduce the possibility that the institution will be captured by those who seek to fundamentally change it?
This is not the thread to discuss the details of the proposal for splitting the United Methodist Church. For that, go to the thread by @philo.
Also, my intention is not to discuss here the correctness or incorrectness of traditionalists vs. transformation seekers. Here I am curious about why the transformation seekers keep taking over institutions rather than starting new institutions.
Published in Culture
The goal is to destroy, not to build anything up (see chart on comment #7 for proof).
Yeah, not sure if they are aware of who they are working for, but they are very faithful servants.
I wonder if feminization of institutions contributes to this. My impression is that men are less concerned about appearing to be heartless monsters, especially when they don’t have to answer to women.
I am not sure they believe in the resurrection.
Oh, I’m pretty sure they don’t know. Satan’s greatest trick is convincing people he doesn’t exist. His second greatest is convincing them they are the source of all that is good and holy.
Others have said it in various ways, but put simply: It’s the difference between a Live and let live world view and an Anyone who thinks differently must be destroyed world view.
The people you are asking about are tyrants. They have no interest in simply doing things their way. You must do things their way too.
Or love.
I saw that you got into it with @aarong3eason on another thread when he said,
because it’s not obvious to you (or me) that those who find themselves something to love won’t ever try to unconservatively change that something because they sincerely believe the change is the loving thing to do.
But for church-families as with real families, familiarity and loyalty don’t quite capture how deep the attachment goes. God willing, the attachment really is love.
Loving others doesn’t mean approving of all they do, but it can evoke strong solidarity even when you don’t approve of all they do, and love may not insist on its own way all the time even when it’s in the right.
ALL of the people seizing and transforming an institution think of themselves as improving it. They do not think of themselves as hateful, destructive, and power-hungry. But that does not mean they are not.
But so often in the course of, or immediately after, their transformation success, they say “good riddance” to those who leave because they object to the transformation. That is certainly what I heard at the PC(USA). That attitude seems more of an expression of power-seeking than an expression of living up to the ideals of the institution. So I’m not sure I believe their assertions that they are the ones who are more perfectly living up to the ideals of the institution.
Indeed, they think of themselves as the most virtuous of all! I call them “vampires,” because they suck the lifeblood out of institutions and even if you held a mirror up to them, they couldn’t see themselves. Power mad control freaks.
It was that way with the Boy Scouts. The left must destroy what already exists, because what exists is bad. They then enter the shell and carry on with their perverted movement to destroy every institution standing in way of their agenda.
What a great thread. Lots of interesting perspectives.
Thanks, everybody! Please don’t stop.
After any kind of messy breakup, you might say “good riddance” to someone you wouldn’t have said “good riddance” to otherwise, simply as self-protection.
There’s a guy from an old church of mine who, if I hadn’t dated, I’d probably still be in sporadic touch with. But we did, the breakup was messy and I had good reasons for feeling taken advantage of, so I’ve never sensed it would be prudent for me to resume any kind of contact with him. As it happens, I felt unfairly driven out of the church by the breakup, but suppose I, not he, had been the one to “keep the church” in the split. Would I feel any less “good riddance” about severing ties? I can’t honestly say I would.
Self-defense involves exercising power. People can and do wrongfully appeal to self-defense in order to bully others, but unless they knowingly make that appeal wrongly, they won’t see themselves as power-seeking, but more probably as the less-empowered side simply trying to defend itself.
You can even point to the current “Star Wars” trilogy — Why did Disney and Kathleen Kennedy take the most successful long-term franchise in movie history and kill fan enthusiasm for it? Because it’s easier to find something that’s already there and has a huge group of fans/followers, and take it over, as opposed to trying to build something from the ground up you actually have to attract people to from scratch.
Whether it’s the Methodist Church, the Boy Scouts, a galaxy full of Skywalkers, ESPN’s prime-time programming, the Chick-fil-A marketing department — hijacking something already popular to insert your own personal political beliefs into it is a way to get an already established base of supporters. The fact that doing so either drastically weakens or kills the item being taken over in a short time period is immaterial, especially when they think what they have is a captive base of followers/fans/viewers. And when the fall inevitably comes, there’s always a dozen or so reasons other than the woke politicizing that’s blamed for it no longer being as popular as it once was.
As Robert Conquest has noted, any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.
How old were these women?
Disney wanted to take an existing franchise and via the magic of inclusivity and diversity and general-purpose weapons-grade wokeness grow that franchise to untold levels of popularity. That Kathleen Kennedy’s message would come across with all the entertainment value of a Jonathan Edwards sermon crossed with a Young Communists’ League May Day jeremiad never crossed their money counting minds.
Next up: a musical based on The Adventures of Robin Hood where Robin dresses as Maid Marian, not to sneak past the Sheriff of Nottingham’s men, but because it’s who he truly is.
So does anyone see any general techniques or approaches the people involved in an institution who do not want to see fundamental transformation can do?
Earlier in this discussion we have commented on the challenge that the change pushers have the advantage of narrow focus on specific issues, while defenders of the institution have the entire edifice with which to be concerned. The change pushers also generally have a level of passion (which leads to persistence) on their narrow focus that is hard to replicate in the institution itself.
Disney for the moment seems to have backed off — but not abandoned — their plan to make Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel into the Rey
PalpatineSkywalker center focus of the Marvel Cinematic Universe v2.0, because Larson alienated so many fans with her woke harangues. Supposedly, her part in “Avengers: Endgame” was cut drastically because after a decade of character development, fans saw the Captain Marvel character as basically cutting in line to be the one to save the universe from Thanos in order to tout a girrrl power message (Brie guest hosting Jimmy Kimmel last week on Disney’s ABC seems to be part of an effort to soften and improve her image with the public in the future. But if the do come back to Captain Marvel and make her the same all-powerful, zero flaws character as Rey was in the current trilogy, the woke story is still going to be unappealing, because people want to see characters overcome adversity, not be unbeatable from the outset for political messaging).They’d be better off plunking down another $4 billion to scoop up the rights to the Cats Cinematic Universe.
In the case of something like the Methodist Church, it’s probably going to take an extended separation, and then see if the ‘modern’ faction can keep it’s parishioners, or if they start dwindling like other progressive church denominations have. If they can’t, then it would be a matter of some future reunification, where the modernists need to return to most of the traditionalist tenants in order to survive. Passion without wide support will get you sooner or later, and many of the companies/organizations that have foundered in the past 10-15 years have done so because they’ve mistaken progressive passion for broad support, and have oiled the squeaky wheel while ignoring keeping the engine or the transmission in working order.
With private companies, it’s up to the people in charge not to let the firm go woke. The public can only get involved later, by voting with their feet and their wallets. If Chick-fil-A, for example, wants to stop funding the Salvation Army and start funding the SPLC because they think it’s going to open doors for future expansion into Europe and Canada, the only recourse annoyed customers have in the U.S. is to start buying chicken sandwiches from Popeye’s, Church’s or KFC (and even there, for large multinationals like Disney, the revenue losses from getting woke may take a long time to have any effect, because their size makes them too ubiquitous. But the public can make individual woke actions cost them profits).
My mother belonged to a Unitarian Church in the ’70’s. One day a member proposed putting something (I don’t remember what) someplace in the church that featured an image of Jesus Christ. The idea got shot down because it was “too religious.”
My objection isn’t a separation per se. But, I think it should be the responsibility of the faction that wants the institution to change in fundamental ways that should set up a new institution. My problem is that the opposite usually happens – the faction that wants the institution to change ends up with the institution’s name, physical property, and people, while the faction that wants to retain the institution’s history ends up having to form a new institution in order to retain the prior institution’s values and principles.
Then the “traditionalists” have to watch as their former institution dwindles as the institution pursues “new” or “progressive” values and policies, and people figure out the institution no longer is the institution it used to be.
And so we end up with a substantial waste as the shell of the original institution collapses at the same time that the traditionalists have to expend a lot of time, money, and effort building a new institution to carry on what the former institution had been doing.
The best path will be very dependent on the specific situation, but in general, it seems that being disagreeable about it might help. Don’t ignore significant disagreements when they start to arise. Advocate for the values and beliefs of the institution, and try to force a decision early, before the infiltration proceeds too far.
The Southern Baptist Convention had a long struggle between between — what terminology to use — let’s say conservative traditionalists and Leftist reformers — in which the conservatives prevailed. It began in the 1970s, and by 1979, a systematic replacement of the reformers by the traditionalists began. The traditionalists essentially prevailed by 2000. Here is a Wikipedia article on the issue, which might be instructive.
Wikipedia reports a couple of splits within the Southern Baptists. In 1987, some Leftist/reformer churches left to form the Southern Baptist Alliance, now called the Alliance of Baptists. Wikipedia reports that the Alliance of Baptists is pretty small, with 65,000 members. In 1991, some more moderate among the Leftist/reformer churches left to form the Cooperative Baptist Alliance, which Wikipedia reports to have 700,000 members currently. There may be some overlap between the two departing groups — meaning that some local churches may be affiliated with both of the break-away organizations.
The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination, with 14.8 million members in 2018 (per Wikipedia). This is a decline from a peak of about 16.6 million in 2005, though there was growth during the period of dispute between the 1970s and 2000 (10.8 million in 1965 to 15.8 million in 2000).
I happen to belong to a church affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, though this is not really advertised at my church. I had to look it up online to figure it out.
To some extent consistent with my thesis here, I might be glad the proposal the proposal to put up an image of Christ in an overtly not-Christian church got shot down. Putting an image of Christ in a Unitarian church might be a sign that the member is trying to change the congregation from a not-Christian institution into an institution that is more Christian – a change that seems rather fundamental. If the member who made the proposal wanted a church that celebrates Christ (i.e., looked more “Christian”), then the member should seek a church that is more overtly Christian, rather than trying to force a “church” that is not Christian to become more “Christian.”
It’s hard not to keep coming back to Belt’s second point:
Which changes count as getting “the institution to change in fundamental ways”? Who “wants to retain the institution’s history”?
After all, churches change all the time. For example, worship in some of America’s most socially-conservative congregations looks radically different from how worship did 50-100 years ago. (And to today’s social conservatives, arguably none of those changes are “fundamental changes” — but a time-traveler from the past might need quite a bit of convincing to see it that way.)
Right now I attend a church whose politics I have… mixed feelings about. What I can say is that it seems fairly devoted to retaining the institution’s history in many ways that apparently matter to me. (Not all ways, but can I make peace with that? Maybe.) Whether the many ways in which it retains its history are the most fundamental ways is, in fact, hotly contested, and already a matter for schism.
What Belt describes as “adapting to changing cultural winds but remaining true to God’s will” is also called “preserving the fundamentals”. So Belt makes a good point that a division can be a sincere dispute over what the fundamentals even are. That doesn’t preclude one side from having the genuinely better argument. But it opens the possibility that what appears to be the other side’s defection from the fundamentals might more charitably be described as disagreement over fundamentals (which fundamentals, whose fundamentals?…)
(This can get complicated. Where I am, greater involvement in racial reconciliation works against sexual liberalization, for example. Should traditionalists therefore give a little on being racially “woke” in order to limit the sexually “woke”? From what I’ve read, a similar trade-off may also be at play in the Methodist split, but I’m not well-informed enough on today’s Methodism to be sure.)
I’ve heard this before, but with a qualifier:
“Any conservative organization will become liberal over time unless it’s actively conservative every single day.”
I think the primary motivation of reformers to take control of the institution in question is that the foot-draggers are wrong, wrong, wrong!!!
Seriously, why would any reformer want to reward the troglodytes by leaving the deplorables in control? Drive the bitter-clingers out!
Your question is easily answered when you act like a woke progressive. Be sure to use epithets in place of any reference to traditionalists.
That doesn’t sound like the United Methodist Church that I know.
The pro-gay Leftist faction which
Almost 100% of the Lutheran churches around here are the more conservative Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod churches rather than Evangelical Lutheran Church in America churches. The only exception I think are a few extremely rural historical churches with only a handful of members.
…
You can say that it is about other things just like you can say the that American Civil War was about other things, but it largely about that one topic. I think it started, at least around here, with the Episcopal Church. The local tiny church split into the Orthodox Anglican Church with I think most of the members sticking with the original church and its building due to traditional, if nothing else. In 1976, Senator John Danforth, an Episcopal priest, ushered the Republican Party of Missouri back into existence here when he was the first Republican U.S. Senator elected in 30 years; he presided over the funeral of Ronald Reagan at Washington National Cathedral. Back in the 1970s, the Republican Party was still the more Northern and suburban party.
…
It’s all basically Justice Anthony Kennedy’s doing along with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. That’s what? Two liberal Catholics and three liberal Jews against what? Three more conservative-minded Catholics and Mr. Swing Vote John Roberts? I shouldn’t complain, but when non-Protestants essentially get to destroy the largest Protestant church in the United States outside of the Southern Baptist Convention, that’s kind of annoying.
Almost ever vote taken in the United States just a few years ago was against homosexual marriage including the Clinton-era Defense of Marriage Act, but that couldn’t be allowed to stand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_legislation_in_the_United_States#Efforts_to_ban_same-sex_unions_by_constitutional_amendment
It seems to me that the nicer architecture of a church is, the more hollow it is inside. Think of the cathedrals in Britain and Western Europe. The Disunited United Methodists will probably keep the nicer buildings, but they might not keep much else other than a few important Leftist donors.
One of our local news outlets recently had a story about a girl who had proudly started an all-female Boy Scouts troop. The story, of course, presented this as something to be applauded, although it did acknowledge that there had been some “backlash.” At no point did the story acknowledge the basic insanity of the whole idea, or point out that Girl Scouts already existed.
So yeah, as others have pointed out, the objective is not schism, but rather the destruction of the original institution. Starting a new, competing institution would not be satisfactory, because for these people, the very existence of an institution they disapprove of is unacceptable.
In a recent podcast Rob Long was talking about how he lives next to or near the building that Obama’s friends blew up.
What?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich_Village_townhouse_explosion
I looked the place up on googlemaps.
The map shows it being next door to a church also. A church in Greenwich Village? I wonder what type of church they have in Greenwich Village. You can’t tell as it is completely obscured by Rainbow flags. I noticed something similar for churches in the San Francisco area. Are Rainbow flags an image that certain churches must display not to be attacked or protested? The word “pride” is one of the seven deadly sins, and promoting rainbow flags instead of traditional Christian images seems to be a bit of a Ten Commandments violation to me, but what do I know.
I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a real rainbow flag, but I don’t travel to the big city often. When I look back at all the Methodist Church stories from a year ago, the ministers all seem to be wearing rainbow stoles and vestments. I’ve never seen that either.
One of the differences between the Left and conservatives is that conservatives are more likely to support boundaries. I feel like the rainbow brigades, not the 42nd Infantry Rainbow Division, has hostility invaded my space while they have been claiming peace, love, and openness.