Social Power: Anatomy of an Elusive Problem

What Could It Mean To Disavow Power?

Power in social relations has fallen on understandably hard times. It also can’t be eradicated. Some help from Ivan Illich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Power: The Slipperiest of Devils

Once upon a time, the word “culture” was the trickiest of terms. Most seminary students have, at some point or another, read H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, or some version of it. Since then, “diagnosing the culture” or “speaking into the culture” have become just common parlance, as problem-laden as these terms are. Because, while in the world of 1951 when Niebuhr wrote his book¹, you could afford to take it for granted that when someone said “culture”, this is no longer the case.

But if you thought talking about “culture” was hard, “power” has now entered the chat. For today, I want to leave behind power as a kind of personal agency, that which enables a person to accomplish certain ends, and focus on power in its social form. As Reinhold Niebuhr observed nearly a century ago, any social group immediately has to give up its pretentions to perfect relations. Kind of commonsense, but nonetheless important, particularly when we consider that power—that which makes it possible for a person to accomplish ends—runs into other people, making social relationships fraught with power dynamics.

In the world of moral discourse, “power” takes on a couple of common valences, which are important for us to distinguish here²:

1. Power as Domination. When power is described in a morally negative kind of way, this is the kind of power in view. Nearly as old as time itself, this is what Augustine described as the libido dominandi, the will to dominate. In this model of power, power exists to conform another person or entity to one’s own will, in order to fulfill one’s illicit desires. In this, it’s not so much that moving another person is bad, but moving another person to fulfill illicit desires that’s bad.³

2. Power as Action On Behalf of a Good. In contrast to the previous version, this is agency taken up over against another person to move them toward a good end which a) is consistent with institutional aims or b) the moved person doesn’t immediately recognize as good. In this model, power is exercised in a way which doesn’t directly benefit the one who uses it, even if there’s indirect benefits which accrue: when a police officer issues a traffic ticket, they’re making a salary, but the ticket-giving doesn’t come back into their own pocket.⁴

3. Power as Pathology. In the first two, power itself is not the problem so much as its use in malicious ways. But in this version, power of any kind which directs another person is the problem. Common in this version is the description of power as “dispossession” or “service”: whatever authority or ability I have to move another person should be used to free them to exercise their own discursive agency. It’s not so much the use of power that’s the problem, but the existence of socially-directing power itself. Once power exceeds its bounds of moving me through the world, it has become pathological.

The first two have fallen on hard times in Christian circles, the first one for obvious reasons: it’s how Augustine describes the internal working of sin, so let’s set that aside. The remaining two options likewise both use power for the benefit of others, disagreeing on whether power can be legitimately used to move another person when they don’t see the benefit or the good.

Sometimes, the latter will drift into arguments which make it sound like it’s not even self-directed power that’s the problem, but power itself. What seems to be the default assumption of power is that if it impinges on the volition of another, it is power-as-pathology.⁵ This is particularly interesting to me as a parent because this definition of power verges on somewhere between unworkable and nonsensical. To be sure, as my children grow older, they gain more agency over their own decisions, but because they are growing in wisdom, not solely because their scope of independent agency is growing.

For some things that they can’t do, it’s a matter of insufficient agency: they’re incapable of walking to school on time, or find their way to school, though they can hypothetically follow a set of instructions. But for a great many things, it’s that their agency needs wisdom to function, which seems to require restriction via my power. Their capacity to have agency independent of mine corresponds with this wisdom: they can play apart from my gaze, not only because I need to do other things, but because they’re trustworthy to behave, and they can go to the neighbor’s house on occasion in no small part because they’ve learned the skills and habits of being a good guest. The payoff here is that my directing power over them recedes in proportion , but does not seem to evaporate.

Does this analogy apply in other situations? I’d say that it should: the wise are the most capable of making good decisions, whether we’re talking politics, education, or the home.⁶ But this also means that power as a directing feature doesn’t recede entirely, for wisdom is a progressive virtue, not one which is ever absolutely attained.

One could argue that we could concieve of a power-free kind of social relation, that maybe we could exist alongside one another in situations of pure persuasion, both in church and world. Insofar as persuasion still remains a verbal act of power, it’s not clear to me that we can talk about a power-free situation. But—and this is important, I think—I don’t think we can talk about a world which is free from the second kind of power, either: that which acts toward others on behalf of a perceived good. To say that we never exercise toward one another in power seems to negate the possibility of both acting on behalf of a perceived good, as well as the possibility of acting on those perceived goods in confrontational ways, when confrontation is required.

This infinite recession but not disappearance of socially-directing power is interesting, because increasingly, it seems to be one which recent Christian literature on the question doesn’t know how to address apart from pathologizing directing-power as such: that whenever there is directing power, what we must have is not a disagreement over power’s use but a form of power which must be disavowed or made into a pathology.

Sticking it to the man, I guess? When all you have is a negation of power, any resistance to bad things winds up looking toothless….like this.

Directing Power: The Conflations of a Definition

All of this gets really dicey, because the directing nature of power has frequently been found hand in hand with abusive power. In Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer’s book, A Church Called Tov, you find this kind of (unintentional, I think) equation:

When leadership became a craze in the 1980s and 1990s, it irritated many in the church, but the irritated ones lost. I, too, chafed against the idea, and when I was asked one time to write a short essay on leadership, I wrote it on “followership” instead. In an effort to subvert the whole notion of church leadership, I pointed out that Jesus never said to anyone, “Come, become a leader.” He said, “Come, follow me.”

The form of leadership presumed by Willow Creek is seen here as the kind which inevitably succumbs to the narrative of Bill Hybels, not because Hybels was particularly prone to power abuse, but because the directing form of power was impossibly broken. But McKnight and Barringer are not alone in making this connection, I think.

Frequently, the preferred end of these conversations⁷ around social power is consensus, which a) avoids the directing kind of power in favor of autonomy, in that the directing power, as that which inhibits or directs us, is presented as a pathological kind. This isn’t an absolute rule for the literature, but it’s an increasingly common move: when disagreement remains—particularly when power is unequal—the power in play is described as a kind of pathology, even if doesn’t become the kind of sexually abusive form described in McKnight and Barringer’s book.

To be crystal clear: sexual abuse is bad, whatever form of power it piggybacks on.⁸ Having said that clearly, I want to return to the question at hand: is directing power possible to eradicate?

When we act in the world, if we are acting toward God, we are acting toward others because of a good which we see, and want to see in the world. When we pray, we are asking God to bring the kingdom, which is a very power-laden kind of prayer. When the kingdom comes, it’s not as if anyone will welcome it perfectly, insofar as it will rearrange the world as it is, and in ways which will surely undo those elements of human organization which I think both innocuous and worth preserving.

What we find in this prayer is, I think, indicative of the larger problem here: power doesn’t go away, but remains a surd within our own creaturely relationships, whether we see it in terms of hierarchies⁹ or of persuasive rhetoric.¹⁰

The Peril of Forgiveness

In the opening chapters of Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, he points us toward this problem: that in the church is made up of persons with unequal power, as an enduring feature of any church. The way forward, he writes, is not to negate what makes us human—namely, our wills and the agency for good that comes with it—but to bring these into a mediated body, with Christ as the one who mediates together weak and strong.

That Bonhoeffer recognizes the problem, and yet does negate power or valorize it, seems both counterintuitive, and perhaps perilous for us to take up today. Except that Bonhoeffer makes a key assumption unlike the power-church discourse: most of the writing about how to negotiate power in church seems to assume that we face each other directly, with another person’s agency as a threat to mine. Bonhoeffer, by contrast, assumes that any vision of Christian vision of relations, particularly because of power differences, must involve people connecting not directly but only connecting with one another through Christ.

It is this way, and only this way, which allows for a directing kind of power in pursuit of the good—whether in rhetoric or forms of authority—to persist well, and it is this which enables the powerful to be confronted in a way which allows them be a part of Christ’s body at all. Their power is envisioned as that which is used on behalf of all and not for their own gain, and their goods are reconceived as that which is for the good of all. The ongoing power differential, one in which some direct and others are directed, must pass through a matrix which brings together all parties involved: Christ’s own mediation of the weak and the strong.

What makes all of this possible, then, in a very practical way is a vision in which reconciliation and forgiveness, the giving and receiving of pardon is an ongoing feature of the community, and not only when a grievous harm has been done. Because power persists, the need for ongoing repair is also in play all the time. Both Niebuhr (who would have us wield power “wisely”¹¹) and those who would opt for power's banishment miss this important point: that power is both a feature of human desiring of the good, and that which goes awry, meaning that forgiveness and pardon-asking is the substrate upon which any account of power has to operate.

Ivan Illich and the Limits of Power

If this offers an alternative internal to the church, a corresponding model for church relation to society is something like what Ivan Illich offers in his essay “The Powerless Church”, and it’s wise counsel I think:

I believe that the specific task of the Church in the modern world is the Christian celebration of the experience of change. In order to fulfill this task the Church will have to renounce progressively the “power to do good” she has had and see this power pass into the hands of a new type of institution: the voluntary and ever-controversial embodiments of secular religion.

At first blush, this looks like the “renunciation of power” kind of thing: that the only kind of power is to lose all power. But look more closely: for the Christian church to have a specific vocation is to not renounce all power, but to limit the scope of its directing power.

Illich has in mind here a kind of “world coming of age” model, that there are versions of humanizing the world which do the job better than church versions, and that is what it is. But in one way, he’s not wrong: the church being able to exercise its agency well means not treating power as something to be avoided, but taking it up in the right form, one of wisdom-building, counsel, and celebration. If it were to abjure all power, it will also get rid of the thing which it does best: celebrate God’s activity in the world in clear words and definite tones.

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Reading: Deep in the weeds with Howard Thurman. Finishing up Richard Reeves’ On Boys and Men, which is my kind of wonky, non-reactionary, “we can walk and chew gum at the same time” book about the kind of things that can and need to be done to address the needs of men culturally. Not a topic I think about much, but came recommended. John Patrick Leary’s Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism starts off really strong, and then fades by the end, but still lots of insights about how the language of the market really has dominated our psyches.

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1. In 1951, this probably meant something like “Just look at whatever the New York Times is publishing.”

2. Typology, obvi. Not exhaustive.

3. There’s a healthy debate as to whether there are conditions in which one person can use power to move another person which don’t succumb to that tendency, or aren’t, in some readings, just coded instances of doing something for someone’s “own good” which are really just what you wanted. This is an interesting problem to hack at, I think: whenever we act on another person, it’s because we think that they should be doing something other than their intended action, for better or worse. Their new direction may or may not directly benefit you, but does moving another person toward a direction that you agree with count as something that benefits you?

4. I’m side-stepping the question here about policing as a form of social power for this post. For the sake of argument, their ticket-distribution is a good example of upholding institutional values which they may disagree with, but which are corporately useful rules to have. It’s a good thing to have red lights and to corral knuckleheads who jump red lights in the intersection.

5. Much of the “religion as trauma” discourse seems to assume this as a baseline. I’ve written about this conflation that trauma discourse produces before, and will again, but not today.

6. If you’ve been reading long, I’ve referenced Ivan Illich repeatedly on this topic.

7. Not particularly in their book, but in other more recent titles.

8. Simply having consensual relations doesn’t prevent sex from being abusive: hopefully, we’re not naive to think that.

9. Leaving the hierarchy question to the side here, as like the abuse-power conflation, I think this is also subject to conflating terms. Another day perhaps.

10. I’m not saying that leaders are like God, but it is important to affirm here, I think, that if the conditions of God’s engagements with the world are the ones which create the possibilities of human relations. As such, we could talk about counterfactuals all day long, but this is the world we have: the one in which we pray for God to bring the kingdom, a kingdom which will not cohere perfectly to what I might desire.

11. Let me signal my skepticism about the self-deceptive nature of people to evaluate their own wisdom here.