The Church Is Not a Meritocracy
What do you do well? Are you perhaps good at conversation? Skilled at playing music? Or, perhaps, a master at the specifics of your job? Next question: How much do you enjoy or even need to be told that you do something well? The pleasure of affirmation is a seductive pull. We all want to be appreciated and to be valued.
Since class and gender barriers started to break down during the latter twentieth century, we’ve had much more freedom to pursue that which we do well. From Martin Luther King’s, “I Have a Dream” speech to the modern mantra, “You can be whatever you want to be,” we embrace the freedom to pursue our talents, regardless of our beginnings. I am good at physics and being “good.” Bowed over books and scratching out equations, I was free (in a way my female forebears were not) to knuckle down, and then reap the rewards of affirmation and climbing the professional ladder.
Good. Do well.
Assessing what is good or done well is an act of comparison—looking at multiple things, we deem this one good because it is better than another that is less good. Comparison entails ranking. And when we rank our abilities with the assumption of freedom, it’s our fault when we’re not as good at something or as acclaimed or advanced or popular as we planned. However great it feels to be recognized for what we’re good at, if we overemphasize our freedom, it’s a small step from valuing what is good to believing that whatever happens to someone they somehow merited or deserved—a meritocracy.
Yet James tells us, “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above” (James 1:17). “Who,” asks Paul, “sees anything different in you? What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as though you did not receive it?” (1 Cor. 4:7).
Meritocracy Leaves No Room for God
By asserting that enough hard work will merit success is to also implicitly assert that those who fail merit their failure. It leaves no room for Divine providence as a cause of what happens and opens us up to crippling anxiety. When things go wrong, we despair of our capability. When they go well, we are subject to becoming proud and disdainful of the elements beyond our control that contributed to our success.
It is well appreciated that some have more material means than others—money, status, opportunity. It is perhaps less well appreciated that some have more in harder-to-measure areas—stable psychology, good genes, stable formative years, Divine providence, to name a few. Ultimately, “every good gift” includes our talents and our circumstances.
We’ve all met those who were passed over by the court of human adulation, for whatever reason. Dostoevsky was nearly shot before he wrote his masterpieces. Einstein failed to find an academic position after finishing study. What if they had both remained anonymous to history? How many have? Those quiet toilers who loved, worked, and served impeccably yet are never seen on the world stage. Those at the top may often be there by merit; you, after all, want a brain surgeon who’s competent and one who’s passed their training as opposed to another who may not have. But the correspondence doesn’t always hold.
Meritocracy Is Sneaky
Well, of course, you might be thinking. I know this. I know that I owe all that I am to God and that we are all made in his image and have worth. But do our actions agree with our mind? Does the culture of the world seep into our churches?
How easy it is to give preference to those who have useful or desirable traits. At church, those who are natural socializers, good evangelists, skilled musicians, or gifted preachers attract our attention. Invitations for fellowship and work are often preferentially bestowed on them. But correlating inclusion based on a ranking of personal preference or degree of usefulness is a meritocratic approach.
On the receiver, instead of the bestower side, most of us daily mount the affirmation treadmill. The modern world has a view so thrown wide by technology, it’s hard to let go of affirmation addiction. Spouses, houses, opinions, and projects are ranked, giving us joy when we’re noticed and frustration when we’re not.
I used to think I had bypassed the affirmation treadmill. I stayed off social media for decades. I knew from the start that science was not a high-status category—it was neither well-paid nor would it give me social capital. I didn’t care about being famous or making money. But I did care, a lot, about succeeding in my field. Listing the groups whose opinion you don’t care about doesn’t prove you’re off the affirmation treadmill. You have to eliminate them all, all the groups on whose meritocratic ladder you’re still clambering. Mothers well know the slight of being overlooked once you answer the “So, what do you do?” question with, “I manage a home and provide care for my children.”
But the solution is not to find a core group of Christian women and try to out-excel each other at homemaking and piety. That’s just shifting affirmation, not escaping it.
Meritocracy as Self-Building
It’s almost like we’re scared we’ll dissolve into the great mass of humanity if we don’t have human affirmation of our unique abilities. I think of the country clergy in RS Thomas’ poem:
I see them working in old rectories
By the sun’s light, by candlelight,
Venerable men, their black cloth
A little dusty, a little green
With holy mildew. And yet their skulls,
Ripening over so many prayers,
Toppled into the same grave
With oafs and yokels. They left no books,
Memorial to their lonely thought
In grey parishes; rather they wrote
On men’s hearts and in the minds
Of young children sublime words
Too soon forgotten. God in his time
Or out of time will correct this.
Whatever little notice others may take of us, however invisible we feel, God in his time will not forget us. The unseen toilers are seen and used by him. You. Me. The woman gazing up through olive branches in first-century Judaea lost to history. In contrast to God’s notice, human adulation is never permanent. And when we seek it as a means to bolstering our identity away from God we are trying to construct our own selves. Soren Kierkegaard, in The Sickness Unto Death, labels this grasping at an ever autonomous but always ethereal identity a type of despair. He writes of a “self which, in his despair, he wants to be is a self he is not . . . He wants to tear his self away from the power which established it.”
Such a self, as Kierkegaard recognized, is inherently unstable. Dependent on both the whims of collective society and also the unknowns of our life as it runs out its lines. I’d got ahead rising with first bird squawk and working past owl rise. Then, one month, my mind crashed, my brother died, my motivation plummeted, and I stopped “doing.” And people stopped affirming. My sense of worth shriveled accordingly. Outside of work, I was no longer “fun enough.” Being at the bottom of the meritocracy ladder may seem undesirable, but if you’re on it, you’ll always be waiting to fall.
The Haven of the Church
Up the gritty sandstone steps, I reacquainted myself with a church. My secular friends called it a crutch, but I thought better a crutch on a potential sure foundation than an untethered ladder. Floating smiles beckoned, and I wondered how long I’d be enough. Devout enough, fun enough, prayerful enough, active enough, pretty enough.
The minister’s wife separated from her family, a four-year-old on her hip, sat with me. Others listened. Proper listening, not just waiting-until-you-finish-talking-so-they-can-say-their-piece listening. Prayers were murmured, invites given. Time was gladly offered. Questions were welcomed then books given. It was a mentor in this church that handed me a disc of Timothy Keller sermons in response to my laments on suffering.
And the care didn’t stop after a few weeks. It didn’t stop when I revealed my doubts. It didn’t stop when it became clear I was persistently downcast and had absolutely no idea how to play the piano or sing and would never, ever pray publicly. I realized they wanted to know me, not as someone who could do something, but as a person in Christ. They were not bestowing attention on me because of what I might give them but because of what they believed Christ had already given me, qualification-free.
I see now that their calm responses to my relentless questioning and to community criticism of Christians in hyper-secular Sydney, they were modeling Paul. Paul said, “I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court; indeed, I do not even judge myself” (1 Cor 4:3, NIV). Though Paul does not care if he gets no affirmation from his fellow men, he also doesn’t care about giving himself adulation. He knows that God is the only judge worthy of our time. And God judged us and served the verdict on himself before we ever did anything. Believing in him is the act of putting on the “new self . . . after the image of its creator” (Col 3:10) and ceasing to construct our own self.
This church was not a meritocracy, and I am grateful for that every day.
Jessica T. Miskelly lives in Australia and is a member of Mittagong Anglican Church. She is forever thankful to Christians, present and past, who engaged with difficult questions. Her articles have been published at Gospel-Centered Discipleshp, The Unmooring, Mere Orthodoxy, and she writes occasionally at jessicatmiskelly.com.