Against the cult of education and intelligence in the Church

JMSmith is incorrect in thinking that any good could come from a relaxation of the ancient discipline of clerical celibacy. Anything that moves the Church toward the world, anything that will make the faith of our grandparents seem more alien to our grandchildren, should be dismissed for this reason alone. Anyway, as long as the religion preached is all-are-welcome Vatican Twoism, we’re not going to be attracting manly married priests like the Orthodox ones with big beards; we’re going to be get married priests like the Episcopalian ones (not the good, African, ones; the rainbow American ones).

That’s actually not the main thing I want to talk about. Something came up in that discussion, though, that I want to focus on. I mean this idea that 1) priests should be smarter than most of their congregation, and 2) this will make us respect them more. I suppose 2 is an argument for 1. I disagree with 1, but more importantly, although 2 might be factually true, it should not be true. If it is true, it means we need to correct our prejudices. Being a priest is a vocation like fatherhood (from which we take its title) not a job; it’s what a man is, not what he does, and respect for fathers is certainly not conditional on their intelligence. Insofar as it is a job, though, a priest’s job is to confect the Eucharist and grant absolution in the confessional. Why should this job require ministers with particularly high intelligence? One might say that one minor, unimportant clerical task, composing homilies, requires intelligence, but since innovation and creativity are demerits when teaching the faithful, and are the distinct temptations of the too-smart-for-his-own-good, I think a low-intelligence homilist is actually preferable. I think the real reason we think we need smart priests is because in our managerial society, intelligence (of the historically anomalous, abstract kind measured by IQ tests) is considered the measure of a man’s worth. Intelligence constitutes “merit”, and “stupid” is the great insult. That, and because we think that Christianity is a frightfully complicated thing, where doctrines are always “developing” into their opposites through a logic only those with PhDs can understand.

In fact, what we actually revere is not even intelligence itself but our Wizard-of-Oz proxy for it: educational credentials. Consider how a political party will boast of being favored by “educated” voters, when it would never boast of being favored by the aristocracy or capitalists. The latter, whatever their merits, clearly are also distinct social classes with interests which might not align with the rest of the population, so their approval naturally prompts skepticism in those with unaligned interests. We often forget that the credentialed are also a distinct class with distinct interests. One of their interests is to pass off their sort of knowledge or shibboleths as the highest or truest knowledge. It’s remarkable to think that until the Managerial Revolution a hundred years ago, training with abstractions was not expected in the ruling classes. Certainly not in kings, aristocrats or politicians, but not even in successful business owners, and certainly not in parish priests. The authority of bishops on matters of faith was grounded in apostolic succession and manifest loyalty to Tradition, not to any presumed expertise or wisdom. Vatican Twoism is a managerial religion, ruled by those with purported theological expertise. Liberals and Vatican Twoists revere college degrees and professional status, and they despise the trades/farming/laboring/servant classes, who are not “educated”.

This reproduction of the world’s status hierarchy in the Church will not last, because slowly but surely Christians are being expelled from “higher education” and all of the professional classes. This is clearly the purpose of DEI loyalty oaths and the HR apparatchiks. It’s an imperfect filter right now–one can imagine cases of orthodox Christians who are either members of recognized minority groups or feel a calling to work with such groups and could write honest and compelling DEI statements. Such cases are clearly holes that will be plugged as the years pass and the vice tightens. In fact, anti-Christian Leftist uniformity has already been nearly achieved in many fields, and all college programs beyond the associate’s degree and all professions are clearly tending in this direction.

What, then, will the Church of the future look like? Assuming it survives at all, it will be a Church with almost no one among the university-credentialed or professional classes. This does not mean that the faithful will be uniformly poor or uneducated; small-business owners and tradesmen can sometimes do quite well for themselves and can have more true knowledge of the world than blue-haired sociology majors. In order to thrive, the Church must not reproduce the world’s status hierarchy but must actually invert it. Having a college education should be at least mildly embarrassing, being the mark of a sucker who fell for the college loan scam and as a weak-minded conformist, and those who make a living manipulating symbols should be considered inferior to those who make a more honest living manipulating things. In particular, we of the university/professional class should have no pretensions of leading or “guiding” our non-college credentialed peers. We have certain skills, of an inferior sort, and we should put these at their disposal without imagining ourselves grander than we are.

Deflating the status of credentials is only the first step. Ultimately, we must deflate the prestige of intelligence itself, which is no higher a blessing than physical strength, endurance, or beauty, and is more morally hazardous than these others. I myself was once captivated by a desire to be intelligent and at least not to be thought foolish; it is a good sign that I grow ashamed of this worldly vanity.

Some say that an educated theologian class is needed to keep the Church from drifting into heresy from lack of institutional memory of all the matters that have already been settled by past teaching. Obviously, the theological guild has not served this purpose. Indeed, the idea that we are in need of brilliant or deeply learned theologians is tied to the idea that doctrine should “develop”. Determining what is the traditional teaching requires no great feat of erudition or reasoning; difficult mental acrobatics are only needed to “develop” the doctrine to prove that it means the opposite of what it says and has always been understood to mean. There is also the idea of exegesis, that the Bible is so difficult a text that only those with PhDs can be trusted to make sense of it. If “development” is the trick used to convince Catholics to surrender Church dogma, “exegesis” is the trick used to trick Protestants into thinking that only a special caste is qualified to interpret Scripture. A bit of Luther’s spirit would not be inappropriate if directed at this idea. To sum up, could those without college degrees possibly do a worse job preserving orthodoxy than those with college degrees have done?

In any case, whether losing access to the universities and professions is a good or a bad thing doesn’t matter. It’s happening. The only question is whether we accept a hostile class’s claim to superiority.