Parker T. Williamson: Sign of the times

History tells us that most institutions do not die gracefully. When threatened by extinction, institutional managers instinctively fight for survival, even at the cost of the organization’s own founding principles. Typically, the final phase – when an institution’s demise is imminent – becomes (to borrow from Hobbes’ state of nature) “nasty, brutish and short.”

The world saw an example of this in the last years of the Soviet Union. Decades before the fall, the Marxist vision had lost its hold on the hearts and minds of the Soviet people. Economists in Russia’s universities knew that Communism was untenable. Peasants in the streets were skeptical of rhetoric coming out of the Kremlin. Their vigorous black market constituted a daily no-confidence vote.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described those final years in his Gulag Archipelago. Managers of a system that was thoroughly discredited in the eyes of its own people held their empire together by the only means left to them: coercion. The KGB was never more cruel than during its final years. Police brutality shored up the teetering structure for a time, but ultimately the state’s intellectual, moral and economic bankruptcy forced its collapse.

An institution called the Presbyterian Church (USA) is manifesting similar ungracious behavior. Historically, denominational leaders could count on a three-legged stool to support their claim on their churches. The first, and primary leg, was a common faith, anchored in Scripture and the Confessions of the Reformed tradition. Its leaders having weakened the essential leg of Scriptural authority in their pursuit of cultural relevance, the denomination’s structure became unstable.
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