Radix Fidem

In college, I hated standard sociology courses. That's not to say that a study of social trends, their causes and effects, is a bad idea, but it's been done so poorly most of the time. That's because the folks who came up with the idea of calling it "sociology" and making it an academic discipline were social activists, essentially communists at heart. Nobody has been able to pull the academic discipline out of their hands. But there is an underlying concept of using scientific discipline and tools to study social influences on human behavior that is actually rather useful. It blends nicely into history, economics and so forth.

I am in no position to untangle the details, and I have never found any evidence that someone better positioned has done a more detailed sociological study, but I have noticed some correlations in something that heavily affected churches in general, and still does. At the end of WW2, our nation's leaders had an industrial policy. The process of organizing and mobilizing for war had very good effects on the economy and our living standards in general. At least some of those leaders felt it was a good idea to take advantage of that bureaucracy to encourage veterans returning from war to go to college. It was a massive project that exploded the population involved in academics in the US. The colleges and universities could not keep up with the demand for seats in classes.

While it's well established that our nation's elite were hoping to turn the population into very productive drones who were motivated by their own rising standard of living, the colleges up that point were still rather honestly academic, and all these working class guys suddenly got exposed to serious intellectual pursuits. The result was an explosion in creativity that was not constrained by the elites. It took them another generation to get it all back under control. We can trace the dumbing-down of college education starting in the 1960s. The civil rights movement was partly a cover for that "correction". The natural rise in yearning among minorities who were getting real educations was seized by the communists as a way to force changes in our society and government.

Meanwhile, that sudden rise in people getting real educations opened doors among the American evangelical clergy. A part of this was the rise of lay ministries. There was a strong move in some circles to actually cultivate such a thing. This movement viewed clergy primarily as equippers, not simply leaders. A host of strong educational books were published to put some measure of theological and biblical expertise in the hands of the lay public. The idea was to engage the lay members in ways that got more of them involved in sharing their faith without the silly old door-to-door canvasing operations. Thinkers were looking for ways to broaden the concept of outreach so that any individual member could discover their unique faith and mission calling, and have support to practice it.

If you never heard about this move, which came out most strongly in the late 1960s-1980s, I'm not surprised. I felt like it was being squelched from all directions. I ran across it quite by accident, and discovered a huge number of churches trying to get this thing going, and nary a peep was heard from church staff news sources. The established elite were against it from the start.

Thus, the movement represented by the book The Purpose Driven Life was actually meant to stop the earlier lay ministry movement. The same with "Seeker Sensitive" and some other trendy terms that burst on the scene in the 1990s. All of it was a mask covering a behind-the-scenes movement among leaders to learn how to assert a more centralized control over church operations that turned the membership into passive idiots who waited for the leaders to decide everything. In small newsletters and exposés you could read the horror stories of how the leadership training that came with those "Forty Days of Purpose" programs specifically called for kicking out lay leaders and destroying anything they had built.

I was deeply influenced by the lay ministry movement. Now you can understand whence comes some of what I write.

That the "lay minister" movement started in the 1960s, sometime near the hippie movement (and Jesus Movement) started, might be coincidental, maybe not. Calvary Chapels began around that time, too. I went to a few of those, depending on where I was living at the time. They drew me in because the atmosphere was low pressure and casual, my peers endorsed them, and they weren't antagonizing to the types of things I was into (metal). I know a few pastors who actively supported stuff like that within the church. They were mostly apolitical, not liturgical, and evangelical-lite: you could get involved however you wanted. Definitely not perfect, but they were what I needed at the time. I might still go to one...there's three in the area but they're are all a bit of a drive.

I took an intro to sociology class one summer near home, when I was behind on college credits. The professor himself was fine, but I found sociology unappealing. I don't know if it was a particular kind he taught or something more mainstream. I didn't take any more sociology classes after that. His main point was that people are a culmination of all the influences upon them, and that a person's decisions aren't really theirs but a result of a battle of all their influences. I might agree with something like that, with some details and caveats, but the professor used that axiom to justify all sorts of grossly crazy government programs and overreach. He said, nearly in so many words, that a singular, global government is the only way humans can rid themselves of crime and psychological problems. That pretty much turned me off from learning more.

Yeah, that's just a symptom of what I wrote: sociologists have made their academic discipline a threat instead of an actual study of human nature.