Inner Rings

I listened to How to Think by Alan Jacobs again. If you haven't read it, I strongly recommend it. If you have read it, it's worth rereading because we're still learning how to think well. At the very end, Jacobs gives the reader The Thinking Person's Checklist, which includes this:

"5. If you do have to respond to what everyone else is responding to in order to signal your virtue and right-mindedness, or else lose your status in your community, then you should realize that it's not a community but rather an Inner Ring."

The Inner Ring Jacobs is referring to is described in an address by C.S. Lewis in which he warns his hearers of the pull of the Inner Ring, the inner circle, the people in-the-know and the ones who really matter.  It may not be the visible authorities, but it is the power behind the throne, as it were. The main draw is the desire to belong to this select group, and its seductive power may cause us to do unethical things to gain and maintain membership. But once we are in,  the charm is gone. There is no real friendship but only the sense of us and them, the in-crowd versus the out-crowd. The Inner Ring exists for exclusion.

It's easy to think of politics and how a person with integrity and ideals can be seduced into compromise and maintaining the powers that be. But does Christianity have Inner Rings?

I thought of Inner Rings when I read the accounts of the child sexual abuse cover-ups in Southern Baptist Churches. What power structures were in place that would cause people to minimize and cover up a crime? What sense of belonging was at stake that it was better to pacify and uphold the status quo and let the perpetrator leave, only to victimize more children? What was so important to preserve? Was it the church of Jesus Christ or an Inner Ring?

I also thought of Inner Rings when I read about the fall of James MacDonald, a pastor who used to be on the TGC council and has now been fired from his church. Why was there so much loyalty and so little accountability? The handwriting was on the wall 6 years ago over the Elephant Room 2. Why did so many years pass with no one saying a word?

I may not be a celebrity preacher or pastor, but the lure of the Inner Ring can draw any of us, and that pull is insidious and often well-disguised. But we're warned in the Word about Inner Rings. They're a manifestation of the sin of partiality that the book of James calls out. They are antithetical to "whoever would be the greatest among you will be the servant of all." Inner Rings are also antithetical to the gospel because our standing isn't in how close we are to a source of temporal status and power but in being united to the God-Man who humbled himself to the point of death.

The following are quotes from Lewis' talk which are worth considering.

Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.

The desire to be inside the invisible line illustrates this rule. As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.

[Y]our genuine Inner Ring exists for exclusion. There’d be no fun if there were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion is no accident; it is the essence.

And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.