March 12, 2021
Learning from WASPs. Conflicted, frightened elites. Who are "genuine" evangelicals? Harari: Political lessons from COVID-19. Old-fashioned slapstick.
Elites Will Be with Us Always
Several pieces on elites caught my attention this week. Let me clarify that I do not use that term derisively. We need elites. Every society—every organization, for that matter, even the most egalitarian—has an elite, whose members enforce (both formally and informally) society’s priorities and values. Pure democracy degenerates into anarchy unless some smaller group takes up social and political leadership.
Elites exist within each subculture of society. Take for example, the evangelical elite, represented by what might be called establishment evangelical institutions—among others, World Vision, World Relief, InterVarsity Press, Baker Books, Zondervan, Wheaton College, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, the National Association of Evangelicals, and of course, Christianity Today. Elites are defined more by their influence than their economic status or power.
The specific makeup of elites ebbs and flows, depending on factors that are both internal (how well they manage their leadership) and external (social and political changes). This edition of GR looks at pieces that helped me think in fresh ways about elites.
“Rediscovering E. Digby Baltzell’s Sociology of Elites” by Aaron M. Renn will reward even a careful skim, giving insight into Baltzell’s study of past elites (in particular, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, or WASPs) and how that study sheds light on the challenges of our nation’s current elites.
Baltzell, the leading authority on the American upper class, was among the WASPs’ fiercest critics. He turned “WASPs” into a household term in a book savaging them for their exclusion of Jews (and also Catholics) from society’s upper ranks. Baltzell believed that an upper class must reflect the ethnic makeup of the country as a whole in order to retain legitimacy. By failing to assimilate worthy new men of non-Protestant ancestry into its ranks, he argued that the WASP upper class had devolved into a caste.
“The Miseducation of America’s Elites: Affluent parents, terrified of running afoul of the new orthodoxy in their children’s private schools, organize in secret” by Bari Weiss is a case study in anxiety and confusion among one group of American elites (HT to Barb G).
In a backyard behind a four-bedroom home, ten people sat in a circle of plastic Adirondack chairs, eating bags of Skinny Pop. These are the rebels: well-off Los Angeles parents who send their children to Harvard-Westlake, the most prestigious private school in the city….
So it strikes them as something more than ironic that a school that costs more than $40,000 a year—a school with Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right hand, and Sarah Murdoch, wife of Lachlan and Rupert’s daughter-in-law, on its board—is teaching students that capitalism is evil.
For most parents, the demonization of capitalism is the least of it. They say that their children tell them they’re afraid to speak up in class. Most of all, they worry that the school’s new plan to become an “anti-racist institution”—unveiled this July, in a 20-page document—is making their kids fixate on race and attach importance to it in ways that strike them as grotesque….
“The stories some have expressed since the summer seem totally legitimate,” says one of the fathers…. What he has a problem with is a movement that tells his children that America is a bad country and that they bear collective racial guilt.
“They are making my son feel like a racist because of the pigmentation of his skin,” one mother says….
The parents in the backyard say that for every one of them, there are many more, too afraid to speak up. “I’ve talked to at least five couples who say: I get it. I think the way you do. I just don’t want the controversy right now,” related one mother. They are all eager for their story to be told—but not a single one would let me use their name. They worry about losing their jobs or hurting their children if their opposition to this ideology were known.
“The school can ask you to leave for any reason,” said one mother at Brentwood, another Los Angeles prep school. “Then you’ll be blacklisted from all the private schools and you’ll be known as a racist, which is worse than being called a murderer.”
Returning to evangelical elites, we have “How the Study of Evangelicalism Has Blinded Us to the Problems in Evangelical Culture” by Christopher D. Cantwell.
I’ve been wondering about the ways in which the study of evangelicalism itself may have blinded us to those truths that were revealed upon the Capitol steps. Because, as it has become increasingly clear, the majority of those who think of themselves as evangelical support Trump, not in spite of his racism, chauvinism, and Christian nationalism; they support him because evangelicals have long served as one of white supremacy’s greatest allies. Yet for too long the study of evangelicalism has sanitized the political and racial elements of American evangelical history by focusing solely upon its piety and theology. It’s well past time to change that.
He doesn’t put it this way exactly, but the problem has been that evangelical elites, represented by historians like Mark Noll and George Marsden and journals like Christianity Today (and its former editor in chief) have assumed an image of “genuine” evangelicalism (urbane, intellectually sophisticated, moderately progressive—that is, an evangelicalism that can be respected by our nation’s elites). We have not deliberately misled readers, but as elites, we have this image of what an evangelical is and is not, and it is the air we breathe when we have written about “genuine” evangelicals. This air does not include the odor of “those so-called evangelicals” who hailed Donald Trump as a messiah-like figure, invaded the Capitol, believe in the QAnon conspiracy, and say they will not take the COVID-19 vaccine.
The problem is that “those evangelicals” make up a much larger portion of American evangelicalism than does the elite described above. This disconnect has been responsible for a lot of the confusion surrounding the conversation about “evangelicals.” I’m not sure how to unravel all this. While I might quibble with some points (e.g., I don’t know that Noll and Marsden denied the substantial existence of “those evangelicals”), I think there is something to Cantwell’s argument that deserves wider discussion.
Finally, I offer “Yuval Noah Harari: Lessons from a year of Covid: In a of scientific breakthroughs — and political failures — what can we learn for the future?” Political successes and failures are, of course, the province of elites. So this is another case study of how our current elites have managed one of the greatest crises of our times. Much has been said already about how badly they’ve done, but Harari brings less condemnation and a little more understanding about why this pandemic at this time was so hard to manage politically, especially when compared to previous pandemics.
Oops!
For some strange reason, this video of slapstick humor struck me as an appropriate way to end an edition of the GR full of long and earnest pondering.
Grace and peace,
Mark Galli