The Institutions are Dead, Long Live the Institutions
You Can't Live Without Them, You Can't Live Beneath Them
This week, we begin some concluding thoughts about the role of institutions, beginning with the question of “Why institutions? Why not nothing?”
For several weeks, I’ve been noodling out the nature of institutions, suggesting that a) institutions don’t love you, by nature, b) institutions by and large aren’t capable of doing positive moral formation, and c) institutions, while transmitting values over a long period of time, will change that focus in light of a companion drive to continue doing that work, to survive.
As Jake Meador points out, one of the brewing crises around the question of institutions is not the ways in which they shape human life perniciously (you can revisit the earlier pieces here for that argument), but that many of the ones which Christians have depended on are dissolving. It’s correct: in my work as the Director of Baptist Studies, I’m in contact with many pastors, and the story is the same almost everywhere in terms of institutional decline, a dynamic accelerated by COVID, but one which I think COVID merely accelerated. The same story is true with Christian higher education, as well as Christian non-profits: lots of decline and attrition, with more to come.
Now, if what I’ve been arguing is correct, the loss of institutions is an internal feature of what institutions are: they have a lifespan which is connected to the value they propagate over time. And at some point, that lifespan ends. At some point in that lifespan, they either grow too big and become pathologically connected to the persons within them (precipitating their decline for reasons of moral judgment) or the value which they perpetuate no longer has adherents.
The easy route (and largely wrong judgment IMO) here is to say that most Christian institutions have become pathological: in a world drowning with Mars Hill takes, it’s easy to see all churches as microcosms of the worst instincts. But there are simply too many churches who just don’t have the resources, the people, or the time to be institutions that craven, and many others that just aren’t interested in that kind of institutionality. The harder route is to ask what it means that these institutions—which served a great purpose in the past—might simply be ending from lack of interest.
It’s not just a matter of birth rate decline (though it’s not not that), nor is it simply a matter of some mass deconstruction happening in which people are leaving churches in droves (though it’s also not not that either). Institutions grow up, transmitting their values, using particular adjacent values to promote their key value: an evangelical college, for example, grows up within a larger framework of having to compete in a market for students, eyeballs, and money. So, when the college declines, it’s not because there’s some dropoff necessarily in terms of Christian kids, but a dropoff in that kind of configuration of how values get transmitted: in an increasingly bureaucratic model in which the core values of “educating and training the young into a Christian sense of vocation” gets submerged into an ethos of “Yes, but you need to make a living first".
To return to Dorothy Day, then, let me offer postulate #1 regarding institutions:
Institutions cannot be done without, but they must be personalist.
As I’ve suggested already with Day, her account of institutions is one in which there are always mechanisms for decision, always avenues of distribution of goods and so forth, but that these mechanisms must match—in fact, be intentionally limited in size to—the good of the members. Large scale institutions are able to equate compliance with morality, or to equate quantity delivery of goods with goodness precisely because they are too big to do otherwise: to attend to the persons within institutions in a responsive or formative would slow down value promotion, or would be inefficient to delivering said value maximally.
But scale matters. An institution becomes, to use the biblical language, a principality when it delivers values over against the people within them, or in a way in which the institution becomes the reason for having an institution. Scale, whether for Day in the form of a house of hospitality in which persons are known and have deliberative presence in decisions, or a farm in which all persons are given work according to their ability, are time and labor intensive.
BUT. They are also the form in which institutions remain tethered inseparably from persons, values remain tethered to the virtues of their participants. The future of good institutions, thus, is not non-institutional, but small and responsive institutions, the little way of love which do their work in grounded, modest form. These are not the forms which will attract, in the old model, the most financial backing, and so it’s likely that the future ones will have to do without much money. I’m not optimistic of that condition being a temporary one, either—there will always be Bad Institutions willing to transmit values independent of the good of their members, and as new ones develop, it’s not as if somehow donor expectations will radically shift to the new models unless their also expecting growth of the old kind. The new kinds—of education, of churches, of non-profits—will have to do less with less. But the “more” that they will do, far from being a numerical impact, will be the good kind of effect: the care and change of souls.