A Crisis of Credible Authority

Diagnosing A Modern Crisis

I think it’s safe to say that the national climate in the US is one of quite extreme polarization, fear, uncertainty, instability, and general cultural cohesion. The political spectrums have further run amok towards their poles, such that we can speak of the far-left and the alt-right coherently (while many of us who were center-left or center-right now look like traitors to the respective parties).

What in the world is going on?

I don’t like intellectual genealogies (I’m looking at you, Carl Trueman…). I also don’t like hasty generalizations. So what I’ll attempt to do in this post is to diagnose a crisis in our modern culture rather than stating the crisis of modern culture. Social existence is complex, and the ails of any given social world will inevitably be more complex than any one “thing” or “problem” can comprehend. Hence, in this post, I will give one issue I see pervading several different cultural phenomena. This crisis is a crisis of authority—we, at least in the US, have largely lost trust in the authorities held up as icons in our varying cultural circles. In this post, I intend to argue for this.

Q-Anon, Mass Graves, Flat Earth, Climate Denialism, The Facade of Fascism—oh….my………

Are there common themes running through these movements above? Yes: distrust in prevailing sources of authority.

Q-Anon is a far right-wing conspiracy that promotes notions like “well politicians in Washington are sacrificing children via blood rituals” and other such things. It is bolstered via insularity from prevailing sources of media, such that an echo-chamber is formed where such ideas face no challenge.

But then…this phenomena isn’t really unique to Q-Anon. In 2021 and 2022, the Canadian government promoted claims that the Catholic Church, along with other Christian bodies, had interred the bodies of Native children in unmarked mass graves as part of its boarding school program. Now, while it’s true that the boarding school program was concentrated on assimilation, no evidence of these graves has yet been found. Another left-wing conspiracy includes the claim that pro-life advocates broadly and widely seek to reinstate a hand-maid’s tail type situation where women don’t have any sort of public rights whatsoever.

Conspiracies abound across political lines (conservatives are all fascists or liberals are all Marxists), scientific lines (e.g. the evidence is unambiguous that the earth is round and that much of climate-change is driven by human-caused activity). So what’s the common thread?

I believe that many of these movements are fueled by an overarching public lost of trust in familiar sources of authority. Of course, I am not saying that this is the only such fuel. However, I do think it’s undeniable that institutions habitually viewed with a sense of respect are now under the critical public eye. And frankly, they’ve often deserved it.

Take Q-Anon. Q-Anon is characterized by a wide rejection of prevailing narratives pushed by both traditional conservative and liberal media outlets. They distrust any records published by the government. Why? Well, these authorities have actually made very public mistakes. “But Sean, that’s not new!” Sure, but what is new is the rapid transmission of abundant information: the mistakes of various institutions are more public and less hidden than they have ever been. Authorities have always made mistakes. But now the average person can see just how mistaken authorities can actually be.

The widespread belief that there were mass graves the Catholic Church hid was bolstered by a grain of truth: Christian churches (not just the Roman Catholic Church) have made very public mistakes. But what’s shocking is that for the first time in history, the information that, say, some priest in x town is a sexual predator can now be publicized throughout the world in a single day. The truth is that there have always been such predators in every institution. There are, of course, sexual predators in secular non-profit institutions as well. But it is obviously more egregious for a priest to be a sexual predator given the call they’ve claimed to take on, and that egregiousness now can be spread in an hour or less throughout the whole world.

Flat-Earth theory is similar. The affirmation that the world is flat thumbs its nose at counter-evidence as manufactured or deceptive. But why do such claims gain traction? Because the scientific community has often misled the public. For instance, you might have a prominent biologist like Richard Dawkins state that we know consciousness is purely physical, but then you find out that this is simply incorrect. We know so very little about consciousness (and, of course, I’ve argued that we actually have strong reason to think it’s not purely physical—and there are plenty of voices who agree. See here). Consider the fact that, for a while, evolutionary biologists largely believed in the intellectual inferiority of African peoples. The establishment was obviously wrong.

Once again, one might say “well Sean, these institutions have always made mistakes”—yeah, but once again, the information age means the rapid and widespread publication of these mistakes. What accelerated this problem was, of course, COVID-19. We were told by the scientific authorities that the spread of COVID would be curbed after a few weeks of lock down. Weeks became a few months, and months stretched and stretched…and there were questionable policy decisions made. Mandatory vaccine policies, which—as the peer-review article linked argues—were not obviously justified, cast a shadow of doubt on the credibility of the authority as a whole. Often time, policy which would make sense for a high-risk demographic was imposed for all demographics at once. And COVID-19, obviously, affected the whole world pretty dramatically. So the failure of the relevant institutions to handle it rightly was widely and quite immediately publicized.

So what is the cumulative effect here? What happens when the failure of institutions we’ve relied on for centuries—the church, the academy, the scientific guild, the government—are known not only to be fallible (which we’ve always known), but are known to be radically fallible? That is, what happens when it is known that they not only make mistakes, but they make as many mistakes as they do which often have significant negative consequences for the world?

The temptation (the one that, I think, is one funding-source for polarization) is to silo into communities where new sources of authority replace old ones. Hence, people turn to the fringes. They look to Q-Anon, the alt-right, the far-left, Christian Nationalism, the Flat-Earth Society, etcetera (widely discredited by the old sources of authority). In these circles, anyone who is viewed as part of the system of the old-guard—the collective comprising the old sources of respected authority—is viewed with suspicion and hostility. And so, people cipher off into their silos (which is only abetted by social media algorithms, which exploit this human-tendency and add fuel to its fire).

Okay…but what’s the Solution? Jesus. Seriously.

Here’s the problem: any given society will necessarily be a collective of various collaborating authorities. Why? Because no one can be an expert on everything. I rely on my doctors when thinking about medical procedures—they have knowledge I simply don’t. And given my finitude, I don’t have the time to gather the equivalent of a medical degree. Our finitude is the ground for our need of competent authorities—authorities act for the good of the collective of which they are a part from the knowledge unique to their sphere.

But how do authorities win trust? In part, they win trust by acting competently given the claim to knowledge they have. When they don’t act competently, we start to suspect that they really have the knowledge and skill that would justify their sphere of authority (e.g., if someone asked me to do surgery, and I botched it, they would rightly suspect my competency to be a medical authority).

The way to meet all crises is the Gospel, of course. But this is an obviously unhelpful answer, as the Gospel is the solution to everything. But lest we think that it’s therefore a solution to nothing, we need to think through how the Gospel is a solution to this modern crisis. So here, I want to ask: how can the Gospel restore confidence in needed institutions?

Another way an authority may gain credibility is by admitting its limitations. That is, if an authority figure says “you know what, I was wrong” or “I don’t know, let me look into that”, then that actually can garner respect. The Gospel funds humility in the human heart by training it to say, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me—a sinner.” Repentance is the act of admitting one’s mistakes and errors, and turning to the way of truth; humility, which gives rives to repentance in relation to sin, admits its own limitations in order to serve the other. That is, a humble person is not, to use CS Lewis’s memorable phrase, one who thinks less of themselves but one who thinks of themselves less—or, in other words, one whose life is oriented towards the actual good of their neighbor and not towards self-protection. If I care about the good of my neighbor, I won’t try to mask my own limitations from them in the knowledge that such masking can actually harm my neighbor. If I love my neighbor, I will also admit to them when I’ve made mistakes.

An ancient problem with many institutions (which has now, again, been publicized widely in the information age) is the failure to actually acknowledge error. This is, of course, one reason I don’t trust the Roman Catholic Church the way Rome would have me do so—not because I think Rome is Apostate (they are a communion of brothers and sisters in Christ), but because the way they’ve gone about change is by sweeping the very fact that they are changing under the rug. But that approach to institutional change is not unique to Rome (and it’s only uniquely a problem for Rome because she claims to be infallible in certain relevant utterances…but I digress).

The Gospel issues a summons to repentance. And repentance is a particular medicine in our crisis of authority not because of some vague fuzzy goodness inherent in repentance, but because repentance is borne of the virtue of humility—which, out of a love for another, orients itself towards service. This orientation towards loving service will involve acknowledging my faults, especially when I know my faults threaten the well-being of my neighbor.

Repentant authorities, then, are a (not the) prescription for the modern malaise. And it’s the kind of repentance to which the Gospel summons all people, and in which all people can find the loving care of a gracious God who deigns to sanctify broken people in the light of the Son’s perfect humble rule.