The evangelical worldview does not accept the idea of institutions as legitimate social forces that shape our choices and decisions. Every action that you take is strictly interpreted through the lens of individualism, based on the following premises:
- You made a decision to take a certain action
- You had the ability to choose any alternative action
- There were no external social or institutional forces at play
So, you got addicted to drugs? Entirely your fault. You're getting divorced (for a reason other than infidelity)? You're not mature enough to handle a serious marriage commitment. You're struggling to pay your bills? You're not being responsible with your money.
This is essentially the perspective that psychologist and pedagogue Jordan Peterson espouses: If your life is out of balance (chaos), then it is on you to clean up your own act (or your room, more accurately)1.
While there is indeed always a component of individual choice and responsibility to every decision, this framework ignores any external forces upon individuals that influence their decisions, or may even limit the options available to them at all. In other words, premise #3 is false. The framework assumes that institutionalized racism/sexism/other -isms don't exist; instead, individual actors are racist/sexist/other -ists. Heteronormativity doesn't exist (or, if it does, it's the way things should be anyway). Fiscal policies that have encouraged stagnant wages don't really affect your ability to make a livable wage. You chose to go to college, and you chose to take on obscene amounts of debt. If you got shot by the police, you should have complied with the officer's orders.
This framework influences how evangelicals (and I guess many Americans, too) think about making change in the world. I remember that in the first lecture of my "Principles of Sociology" undergraduate course at my public university, the first thing my professor said was, "Institutions are how we make social change." My automatic mental response was, "Well, no, social change is made through the changing of individuals' hearts," which I believed at the time. This is why converting others to Christianity is so important to the evangelical: it is seen as the only way to improve society. And, critically, funding social programs intended to better people's lives are seen as futile and a waste of taxpayer money.
When an institution fouls up, this worldview naturally requires that the focus be on getting rid of individuals--"a few bad apples"--rather than reforming or overhauling the entire system (because such systems don't exist). Instead of examining the structure and the policies that might have created the conditions precipitating the foul-up, the assumption is that individual actors within the system made bad decisions. The institution is left unchanged, while the bad actors can be substituted with better actors.
The framework also lends clarity to an incident I experienced at my Christian high school. The school had rules about the length of boys' hair: it could not extend past the eyebrows, ear lobes, or back shirt collar; and until my senior year, ponytails were prohibited2. In the first couple of months of my junior year, I knew my hair was either close to or already violating the rules (curly hair's length can be ambiguous and deceptive), but I decided to defer action until a teacher explicitly told me to cut it. One day, a fourth period classmate and I were the only two students in a class of about 30 who received invitations to a lunchtime assembly for an unspecified purpose. The assembly ended up being a group of about 40 boys who had been secretly cited by their teachers for having hair potentially out of dress code. During the assembly, the handbook was displayed on the screen and the hair-length rules were read. Then the principal, vice principal, and a Bible class teacher called each student in attendance to the front of the room, one at a time, sat him down, evaluated his hair length in each of the three measuring points with a ruler, and prescribed a minimum haircut to be completed by the following Monday. The student was then permitted to leave, only to be mobbed by other students who had crowded around outside the room and were desperate to know what the mysterious assembly was about.
I had no qualms with cutting my hair; I knew the rules and that my hair was out of dress code. But the assembly was a humiliating experience. I had been wronged in a public way by an institution. There was not an individual whom I could hold this incident against. So I took to the most public way I could think of to voice my anger: I posted a Facebook note detailing the scenario and how I felt about it. It created quite a stir, garnering about three dozen comments by the end of the day merely from my Facebook friends. About 85% of the commenters completely missed the point of the note, saying that I had agreed to abide by the school rules and needed to honor that commitment (with a sprinkling of a Romans 13 justification thrown in there).
Over the next few days, some of the school faculty with whom I was Facebook friends engaged with the note. The vice principal also met with me at lunch on campus. The school staff (sort of) acknowledged that they did not handle the situation in the best way; but they did not make that admission without also pointing a finger. They said that instead of posting a public note, I should have followed the "Matthew 18 principle" of confrontation: one-on-one first, then a small group of two or three if the individual did not listen, and only then in front of a larger community if the individual still did not listen. Somehow, I had ended up committing the greater wrong in this situation by not following the proper grievance-airing procedures.
The Matthew 18 principle can be reasonable to follow if the parties involved are peers, and there is no power differential. But this was not such a situation: I had been publicly humiliated by a religious/educational institution. Presumably, a group of school staff or board members had agreed on this course of action, and I had no idea who these decision-makers were.3 Furthermore, all the teachers in the school had participated in the scheme to rat their students out. (By the logic that I was served, should not the teachers have confronted their students one-on-one first?) Although though the actors involved in the assembly were the principal, vice principal, and a Bible class teacher, none of them were personally or fully responsible for what transpired. There was no one or nothing with whom I could perform a one-on-one confrontation.
Because the evangelical worldview largely does not acknowledge the existence of institutions or power structures, of course it makes sense that they claimed I should have confronted an individual. There were only individuals who had wronged me. There was nothing rotten in the state of Denmark, because there was no state of Denmark.
In addition to pointing the blame back at me, the vice principal also told me that if I wanted to see change in the underlying rule that triggered the incident, then I should craft and present a specific and reasoned alternative policy for the administration to consider. The responsibility to make change fell entirely on me. The institution was not going to engage in self-reflection, nor would it take the initiative to sample student opinion.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the story ends there. Yes, I could have crafted an alternative policy and presented it to the principal and vice principal, but I think I knew on some level that this was bigger than me presenting a case to two people. It was not as simple as the vice principal made it out to be. I knew the school board had a much heavier hand in such issues than the administration was letting on, and that I would not get an audience with the board. Indeed, I was fighting an institution, and that was a battle I was not willing to fight.
1Actually, I guess more broadly, this is really the American perspective on the world. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps and shit like that. The myth of the "self-made man".
2This change in the handbook was snuck in there with no announcement to the student body that the policy had changed. But every year, I neurotically fastidiously read every word of that damn handbook and made notes on the rules and policies that I thought were stupid. I wonder if the teachers even knew that this policy changed...or that it was a policy in the first place.
3What I would pay to this day to have been a fly on the wall for: (1) the meeting(s) in which they decided this was how they should handle the many boys out of dress code; (2) the meeting(s) in which the teachers were asked to compile a list of their students out of dress code and provide it to the administration; (3) the meeting(s) in which my note was discussed.
