A Republican Catholic Bishop Violated God In Blocking Freedom Of Conscience

A salient aspect of the U.S. Constitution is the separation of church and state. A government cannot establish or show preference for a religion or sect thereof. Although church clerics can state a politically partisan preference, they risk their religious organization’s tax-exempt status. In the presidential election of 1960, John F. Kennedy was under sufficient popular pressure to publicly assure the American electorate that he would, if elected to America’s highest governmental office, let himself be an agent for the Roman Catholic Pope in Rome. So, when Bishop David Kagan of Bismarck, North Dakota urged his flock to vote for the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2012, Maureen Fiedler, a Sister of Loretto and a holder of a doctorate in government from Georgetown University, wrote, (I)t is flatly unacceptable for a bishop to be giving voting instructions to his flock.”[1] Interestingly, the instructions trump even the primacy of an informed individual conscience.

In 2012, Heidi Heitkamp, a former North Dakota Attorney General, beat Republic Rick Berg by just 0.9 percent. During the campaign, the Republican Party ran an ad referring to Heitkamp as likeable. David Kagan picked up on that adjective in writing a letter with instructions that it be read at all Masses to urge the laity not to vote for the more likeable candidate. Maureen Fiedler claimed in an article that such a de facto endorsement of Berg put the Catholic Diocese’s tax-exempt status at risk.

Fiedler points out that the partisan, or partial, orientation of the bishop is evident in his letter in that he “zeroes in on social issues.”[2] Specifically, Bishop Kagan states that the following should never be allowed legally: “abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, and not regarding the unique and special role of marriage as the union of one man and one woman.”[3] Fiedler points out that the letter does not mention “poverty, economic justice, immigration, peace in the world or human rights.”[4] Therefore, Kagan’s ideology cannot claim to embrace wholeness, and his partial orientation naturally invites ideological opposition. As is common in churches explicitly “on the left” or “on the right” politically/ideologically, whether in demanding that people “use their pronouns” or “oppose abortion (in order to receive communion),” people who might otherwise benefit in terms of religious faith by going to church don’t go. To willow the gateway using nonreligious criteria is dogmatic (i.e., arbitrary) from a religious standpoint. It is not good for a church in taking up monetary collections either.

In regard to Bishop Kagan, his exclusion of issues such as poverty detracts from his political and even religious credibility. Making matters worse for himself, he erroneously claims in his letter that informed consciences must conform to the magisterium (i.e., teachings of the Church), and thus to his partisan letter. Kagan declares that a “properly formed Catholic conscience will never contradict the Church’s teachings in matters of faith and morals.”[5] His statement contradicts the Roman Catholic Church’s Cathechism and the Second Vatican Council. The 1992 volume of the Cathechism states, “Man has the right to act in conscience and in freedom so as personally to make moral decisions.”[6] That freedom is denied if a conscience must never contradict the Church’s magisterium. The Vatican II document Dignitatis Humanae makes it clear that a person “must not be forced to act contrary to [one’s] conscience. Nor must [one] be prevented from acting according to [one’s] conscience, especially in religious matters.”[7] This does not mean that the magisterium (teachings) of the Church can be dismissed, for, the same document goes on to say, “the faithful must pay careful attention to the sacred and certain teachings of the church.”[8] To pay attention to something is to include it in the process of discernment of one’s informed conscience, rather than having to abide by the external teachings as if they were edicts that must circumscribe a conscience.

Bishop Kagan’s view of the relationship between conscience and ecclesiastical moral teachings on contemporary issues was erroneous, according to Tim Mathern, a Catholic and a senator in North Dakota’s legislature when Kagan was telling people in his churches to vote for the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate. Mathern issued a press release, which states in part, “A Catholic owes a duty to listen thoughtfully to the bishop, but if in ‘good conscience’ he or she cannot give assent, the Catholic must be free to follow his or her own conscience, which is the true moral responsibility.”[9] Even as God alone is the source that transcends even the magisterium in forming a person’s conscience, moral responsibility—that which a conscience discerns is a morally responsible position on particular contemporary political (i.e., partisan) issues is part of the created realm, rather than being sacred. That is to say, a person’s moral position on “social issues,” which may inform selecting whom to vote for, cannot be assumed to be God’s position, as if God takes sides. For a stance on a partisan issue as a matter of moral responsibility is a human construction, and God’s nature, and thus omnipotence (power), cannot be constrained by human artifacts, including moral principles. In fact, God transcends our conceptions of moral responsibility.  

The so-called “conservative” Roman Catholic clergy who have placed such emphasis on their moral stances on a few select social issues are guilty of conceptualizing God in their own images, and, as Pope Francis said, of a sort of misordered concupiscence: the placing of a lower good above a higher one. In this case, the error lies in placing a few social issues, and even particular positions on those issues, above focusing primarily on preaching the Gospel. The particular social issues being obsessed over are not even mentioned by Jesus in the Gospels! Not only have those “conservative” clergy members severely diverted their attention, but also, as stated above, some souls that could have been saved undoubtedly stopped going to church because those people had opposing political ideologies and positions on the vaunted social issues and perhaps even antithetical notions of moral responsibility. No one likes to feel like an outsider; in fact, in a Christian context, serving rather than attacking outsiders is at the very least valued. In the religious sphere, moreover, partisan political issues and even a person’s notion of moral responsibility are transcended rather than allowed to be become sticking points or road-blocks.

Interestingly, the “conservative” Pope who made Kagan a bishop was a follower of Cardinal John Henry Newman. Unfortunately for Kagan, Newman wrote, “I shall drink to the Pope, if you please, still to conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards. . . . Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ.”[10] So Kagan could not even appeal to the patron saint of “conservative” Catholic clergy in validating the attempt to prevent Catholics from exercising freedom of conscience. To be sure, Kagan could have appealed to his own conscience in going against the Church’s position on conscience, but then so he would have been a walking contradiction. As such Kagan’s stance was unethical according to the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s ethical theory (the first formulation of his categorical imperative). Kant must have hated logical contradictions. Furthermore, it would be the height of arrogance were Kagan to have believed that only his conscience matters—that those of other people, especially the laity, are inferior and thus don’t deserve to be free.

Even more seriously, in attempting to violate the consciences of the laity in his bishopric by artificially and exogenously blocking the innate freedom, which is given by God, Kagan violated God. Another Vatican II document, Gaudium et Spes, states, “Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. For a man has in his heart a law inscribed by God . . . His conscience is man’s most secret core and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths.”[11] A person’s conscience is formed by a sacred source, and yet David Kagan felt the need, and indeed presumption, to tie a person’s most sacred core to a partisan position on social issues. I wonder if the bishop at least respects himself. To violate a person’s sanctuary, where a person is alone with God (and David Kagan), is a violation not unlike molesting a child due to a dysfunctional wholesale repression of an intrinsic and basic instinctual urge—a violation that more than one bishop has covered up.

In the spring of 2013, for instance, news broke that the Catholic Church of Illinois, where Kagan had been a pastor at a church and, before that, an administrative assistant to a bishop, had underreported instances of priests molesting children. As far as I know, Kagan was not accused of being involved in the cover-up; my only point is that he would have been at home in an organization in which violations of the fundamental, God-given dignity of people get covered up. While the archbishop of Munich, Joe Ratzinger, who would go on to become Pope Benedict XVI and elevate Kagan to a bishopric, had written a letter refusing to defrock a pedophile priest because the scandal would hurt the reputation of the “universal Church.” So, Ratzinger directed that the priest be transferred to another parish, where the priest was allowed to be the youth minister.

Shortly before Kagan was appointed as a bishop, he had told his congregation in a homily on the Assumption of Mary holy day of obligation (i.e., the Virgin Mary goes to heaven bodily as well as soul) that if any of the four mysteries of Mary are difficult to understand, you should “just obey.” Included in his congregation were business executives, lawyers, and physicians. Just obey must have gone down like a lead pipe even though the congregation had the reputation of being “very Republican.”  Kagan should have been quite popular there rather than an insult, and yet he was elevated to a bishopric in another state. As of 2023, more than a decade since Kagan had become a bishop, Pope Francis has not promoted Kagan; the bishop is still in North Dakota.

On ethical leadership: "Ethical Leadership" 

On spiritual leadership: "Spiritual Leadership in Business" 

On Christian leadership (in terms of stewardship, shephardship, and servanthood): "Christianized Ethical Leadership in Business"

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[1] Maureen Fiedler, “Catholic Senator in North Dakota Challenges Bishop’s Election Letter,” National Catholic Reporter, October 25, 2012

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Patsy McGarry, “Conscience Takes Priority Over Church Teaching, Says Catholic Catechism,” Irish Times, June 3, 2018.

[7] Ibid., italics added.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Maureen Fiedler, “Catholic Senator in North Dakota Challenges Bishop’s Election Letter.”

[10] Patsy McGarry, “Conscience Takes Priority Over Church Teaching, Says Catholic Catechism.”

[11] Ibid.

Behind the Prejudice Against Educated Clergy

Among Quakers (many congregations of which refuse to record ministers), some evangelical congregations, and other faiths such as Baha'i (which does not have a clergy), there seems to be an underlying anti-intellectual bias regarding ministers educated in theology and ministry. I think the prejudice is out of anger, whose root is the errant assumption that knowledge, even in faith seeking understanding, causes the educated person to think he or she is better than others. Relatedly, expertise is assumed, falsely again, to bring with it a more general elitism.These flawed assumptions give rise to the prejudice that being educated in theology and ministry are not of much value, as being uneducated or self-educated in the field are actually preferred qualities in cases in which ministers are used (e.g., many evangelical congregations). All this is a slap on the face to those of faith who have spent years of their lives in seminary or university, and such passive aggression goes against Jesus's message on how to treat others.

No one would suggest that the expertise of a physician from study at university is something to be spurned. No one would say that a lay healer has as much medical knowledge, at least when the person himself is ill, and yet once some people turn to the religious domain, expertise is out, even fair game for insults, in favor of the false notion of equality that affirms that it is at odds with the inequalities in expertise. I'm so used to deferring to the expertise of others whose knowledge I don't have that the refusal seems foreign to me. I do not of course deny that ministerial gifts can be outside the "faith seeking understanding" that takes place in a seminary or university. So I do not suffer from clerical exclusivity, but it is not true that the only alternative is throwing the rascals out, for their knowledge goes with them. A good cleric values his or her theological knowledge/education without being an elitist (yet while fully admitting that not everyone has such an education).

What I shake my head at in utter astonishment is how some Quakers, in refusing to record ministers even to Quakers who have studied for ministry, thereby limit the theological expertise available to Quakers. The assumption in Baha'iism is that every member is an expert; this assumption, however, does not follow from "the priesthood of all believers." Evangelical Christian congregations that prefer uneducated applicants (even those who can speak well) lose the benefits that would come from having educated ministers who can preach well.

People who have studied for years to be a minister should go elsewhere, where people would not only stand to benefit from their theological and ministerial knowledge, but would appreciate rather than feel threatened by the knowledge. Of course we are all the same relative to God, but this does not mean that we don't have different specialized knowledge areas and that some people have more knowledge than others within a field. In fact, to prefer uneducated clergy as a general preference risks a congregation being held captive by ignorance that cannot be wrong. The assumption that stifling accountability comes only from educated clergy is severely faulty; in fact, to the extent that seminarians and divinity students are taught negative theology, which holds that God is in essence unknowable, more not less humility is likely in speaking of God as well as in guiding people.

To say we all have the same expertise demands psychological rather than religious explanation, and to say that knowledge learned from scholars is not of value (in any field, even in religion) reflects a very prejudiced attitude that has all the disrespect and arrogance that is presumed to be in educated people. To be sure, theological and parish ministry knowledge is not the only beneficial ingredient; it does not guarantee good pastoral care even though the schooling includes this area too. To be more educated in religion does not mean that a person has a more compassionate heart. So, again, I am not claiming that only people educated in theology and ministry should be ministers. Rather, I am arguing that the preference, borne out of prejudice and resentment, for uneducated (or self-educated) clergy, all else equal, is unwise.

Religion as a Credible Academic Field of Study

What is religion? What does the domain of religion cover? What is excluded? Does opinion eclipse knowledge in marking the boundaries? Should we allow empirical self-identification claims from self-proclaimed religionists to veto any offending established knowledge of what the religion is? I contend that an atheist who claims he is nonetheless a practitioner of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam does not alter the fact that the three Abrahamic religions are monotheist. Atheist Judaism, for instance, is an oxymoron born of an arrogant subjectivity that offends reason itself and therefore cannot be valid. 

An opinion of a religious practitioner as to what core beliefs a religion should include does not mean that the knowledge we have of that religion is obliged to truncate itself or make room as if the opinion counts as much as the knowledge. For one thing, knowledge has more to back it up than does opinion. Knowledge of Christianity as a religion from Christian Scripture, for example, need not make room for a practitioner’s opinion that Christianity includes atheism, for that view is diametrically opposed to the existence of a deity in the scripture. An opinion seeking to remake or turn a religion against itself may insist on being recognized as valid, but this does not mean that the knowledge we have of Christianity (i.e., what it is as a religion) need be altered or contradicted.

Surely knowledge of something is not on par with opinions, for the basis of knowledge is not an aggregation of subjectivities. Rather, knowledge has a basis that is not so flimsy, so knowledge can serve as an anchor by which subjectivities can situate their respective opinions. For example, Christianity is classified as a monotheist religion. This theological classification does not come from subjectivity, but, rather, what the Old and New Testaments state, even if they are not considered to be the inerrant Word of God. That there is one god is a major theme rather than the offspring of an interpretation. Even though an interpretation can be said to be an opinion, even an informed one, the knowledge we have of Christianity is too certain to be a bunch of opinions shared by even many people. It follows that starting from the assumption that every opinion is valid with respect to knowledge is problematic. We are indeed an impious lot with regard to our religious opinions, supposing them to trump that which is known. Such arrogance belies any claim of being a monotheist.

I submit that knowledge in the religious-studies discipline is vulnerable to the presumptuous onslaught of religious ideologues who wrongly view knowledge of a religion to be subordinate to their individual self-identifications, ethnographically. Moreover, the problem is that some practitioners give ethnography a veto over other sources of knowledge of religions. They may even claim that the very term religion is up for grabs even though the fact that a discipline exists is predicated on there being some idea of what religion means (i.e., of what counts as religious).

Also, knowledge of a religion may be transmitted by biased scholars who allow their own respective religious opinions to overrun the duty to teach knowledge unfettered. We may even ask: Does knowledge of religion (and particular religions) exist, or have scholars of religion merely been spouting their own opinions through the lenses of reason? I submit that although scholarly subjectivity has played a role in the accumulated knowledge of religion, this pathogen can be constrained by the academic methodologies on how knowledge can legitimately be acquired.

For example, a scholar who is Christian may want a survey to show that a lot of a city’s residents are Christian, but that same scholar would be obliged to use random sampling and calculate  “N,” the sample size using a method that cannot be bent by the scholar’s own preferences. Such a survey could thus be replicated by other scholars. The scholar may be ideologically in favor of the self-identification of a respondent as an atheist Christian, but other scholars could invalidate that data-point because the knowledge we do have of the Christian religion includes that it is monotheist, and therefore a person who self-identifies as an atheist cannot be classified as a Christian. 

What about the teaching of religion? At seminaries and even some divinity schools, the study of Christian tends to be skewed in a sectarian direction. At Yale’s school of divinity, for example, an evangelical Christian assistant professor (who did not get tenure) told students who were asking questions that they professor deemed exogenous (i.e., outside the contours of the dogma) that only students with a good character receive the school’s masters of divinity degree. To be sure, that degree is chiefly though not exclusively ministry-oriented, but Yale itself was by that time not a Christian university. It was originally founded in 1703 by Congregational ministers who resented the Unitarian influence in Harvard’s divinity school (that influence has its own biases, often at the expense of religion itself). In fact, when I attended Yale, the president, Rick Levin, was Jewish. At one point, he attempted to move the divinity school closer to the main campus from being located on top of a hill—a city on a hill. One opposing divinity student said in a seminar, “But they are relativists” at the bottom of the hill, and “Hitler was a relativist!” Suffice it to say that the Divinity School was able to remain on the fringes of Yale’s campus. Perhaps this continued to thwart Yale’s administration from being able to act as a check on its divinity school’s academic bias. That the department of religious studies was located at the heart of the main campus meant that academic standards could be protected in the study of religion from non-sectarian standpoints.

Yet scholars in departments of religious studies are hardly objective; we are, after all, subjective beings, and we all have our biases, whether religious or political. Many years after I had graduated from Yale, a retired instructor from Arizona State University’s department of religious studies fraudulently misrepresented himself to me as a scholar even though he did not have a doctorate in the field. I became suspicious because he contended that how people “self-identify” themselves in religious terms trumps how a particular religion is classified theologically. According to the man with a masters in church history, ethnographic surveys decide the content and contours of a given religion even in regard to how it is classified theologically. “The theology doesn’t matter,” he told me. So if someone self-identifies as an agnostic practitioner of Judaism (i.e., a religious Jew), then scholars are obliged to consider agnostic Judaism to be a part of Judaism rather than as Jews with a weak religious faith.

I told the pretend-scholar that Judaism is classified as a monotheistic religion. “That’s just your opinion,” he relied dismissively. Just as he had dismissed the fact that scholars in the liberal arts have doctorates, he dismissed theology even as regards a theological classification! Why, I wondered, would he stoop to misrepresent himself as a scholar how little he respected actual scholars and knowledge itself. He was an ideologue who wanted to defend people who feel oppressed by religion. God forbid that a scholar might reply, “agnosticism is exogenous to Judaism rather than a type of it.” Like Socrates’ interlocutor Euthyphro, the modern-day interloper suddenly decided he no longer wanted to talk to me and said, “I’ve never approached you” in the café where we met. He had also said at the end of one of our conversations, “After the ten minutes I gave you, the rest was charity.” Such must be the arrogance of non-scholars at Arizona State University that even authentic scholars are considered lower.

That a university would allow an ideologue who relegates inconvenient knowledge as subservient to opinion even just to teach caught me by surprise, though admittedly Yale had been allowing Christian scholar-ministers to teach at that university’s divinity school in a way that delimited questions to those that fit within those professors’ own interpretations of Christian scripture. The difference is perhaps that those scholarly priests respected knowledge, for the pretended scholar from Arizona State University so obviously did not. “Some religious Jews self-identify as atheist Jews, so there is a type of Judaism that is not monotheist,” he told me once. He bristled at my reply that such Jews could be wrong. To the pretend scholar, it was the knowledge that would be wrong if confronted with a conflicting self-identification.

The knowledge we have of a religion should not bow to a convenient self-identification by a practitioner because knowledge trumps opinion. That is to say, we can legitimately have more confidence in knowledge within the academic field than in the opinions of non-academic practitioners. Scholars do not throw out knowledge simply because it runs against an ideology, especially if the ideologue is not a scholar in the field. The pretend-scholar I met had no problem misrepresenting himself as a scholar because he had no respect for the knowledge in the field. What mattered to him was that no one could refute a self-identification as incorrect from the standpoint of what we know of the religion based on itself rather than any other religion.

Were self-identifications permitted to set the contours of a religion, it could change beyond all recognition into another religion even as it retains its sacred texts, symbols, and rituals. A religion could be turned on its head. This has in fact occurred. The General Conference of Friends (Quakers), which covers the Northeast of the United States, has declared itself not to be Christian because enough Quakers there do not self-identify as Christians. From my visits at those Meetings while I studied at Yale, I suspect that the ideological opinion that Christianity has historically been dogmatic and oppressive to heretics and other religions was a factor in a significant number of the self-identifications at odds with Quakerism being a Christian denomination/sect.  In contrast, Quaker Meetings west of the Mississippi River tend to be evangelical Christian. Friends there doubtlessly do not recognize the faiths of the Friends in the General Conference. Indeed, Quakerism as paganism is not recognizable, for the reason that self-identifications of especially new practitioners have been allowed to be determinative for what Quakerism is.

What if enough religious Jews were to self-identify as atheists? Would there be such a thing as atheist Judaism—Judaism without God? An ideological stance wherein Yahweh is deemed to be oppressive and even cruel to people of other religions could prompt some religious Jews to self-identify as atheist observant Jews (i.e., practitioners of Judaism). Would scholars be obliged to reclassify Judaism from being monotheistic in spite of the Hebrew Scriptures? I submit that the answer is no because ideology, as highly subjective, is not sufficient to trump knowledge, especially if the latter is based on the religion itself rather than being from a comparative classification scheme that ignores the knowledge we have of the religions themselves.

This is not to say that scholars are objective founts of knowledge. Because the knowledge learned by scholars of religion does not reduce to opinions, those of the scholars themselves should not bias the knowledge, just as self-identifications by practitioners of a religion should not. Universities, whether Yale or Arizona State University, are responsible for seeing to it that scholars and especially non-doctoral instructors do not treat knowledge as mere opinion in order to privilege certain opinions that are not in keeping with the knowledge.

It may be that religious practitioners generally are vulnerable to this propensity to disvalue knowledge when it contradicts a religious belief or interpretation. For example, some evangelical Christians claim that Christianity is not a religion, whereas all other religions are. In the academic field of religious studies, Christianity is indeed classified as a religion nevertheless. It would be sad indeed were scholarship to serve the interests of the religious ideologues rather than serve existing knowledge and reason seeking greater understanding.

The man from ASU who misrepresented himself as a scholar (i.e., holding a doctorate in the field) reflected the culture in Arizona wherein "book" knowledge is not respected generally and especially when it runs afoul of ideological opinions. For instance, many riders of the light rail could be seen not wearing a mask as protection against the coronavirus in 2020. Also, the ideological claim that climate change does not really exist so the scientists are wrong has had considerable currency there. Scholarship can be easily dismissed if it is at odds with an ideological stance even when a theology is funneled to serve an ideology or as a defense-mechanism to protect the ego. 

Religion (including theology) can indeed be regarded as a credible field in academia, for the constraints in scientific methodology and logic can both be used to resist the encroachments of ideological bias and other exogenous agendas that can admittedly easily warp the pursuit of knowledge.  My only degree in the field is the Masters of Divinity, which is really a bachelors degree (just as the MD and JD are actually bachelors) because it is the first degree in a school (e.g., Divinity). So I cannot regard myself as a scholar of religion. Even so, I greatly value knowledge that has not been warped by ideologies or other vested interests even of scholars of religion, and I disvalue the intellectual dishonesty that is involved in claiming as knowledge that which is really an instinctual urge to promote one's own worldview. 

Preaching, for instance, should not be done under the explicit auspices of scholarly inquiry. Schools such as Yale's divinity school whose mission includes educating scholarly ministers and priests should take pains to distinguish the two pursuits while holding that both are of value. Professors of divinity who are themselves ministers or priests need to be especially self-aware so as not to yield to the temptations to 1) restrict academic discourse to the ideologically comfortable confines of their preachments, and 2) present those preachments as though they satisfy the criteria for academic knowledge. It is quite common, for example, for Christians to conflate the faith-belief that Jesus of the New Testament was a historical (empirical) person in the ancient Middle East with historical knowledge that comes from historical accounts rather than faith narratives. The latter prioritizes theological points, and thus can ethically adapt (rather than merely adopt) historical events to make such points. 

The synoptic gospels differ on which night of Passover the Last Supper was on; putting that event on the second night serves the theological metaphor of Jesus as the lamb to be slaughtered for the forgiveness of sins. The writer would not have been bothered in the least had he known that the event actually taken place on the first night because he would have known that he was not writing a historical account. This is not to say that the field of theology is not as credible as a field of knowledge than is history. It is to say that the two fields have different criteria (and source-types) and thus should not be conflated. A historian would look for historical accounts that are as objective as possible (e.g., not from the disciples) to answer the question of whether the Last Supper actually took place (and, if so, on which night), whereas a theologian would assess the fit of the metaphor to soteriology (i.e., Jesus Christ as Savior). 

Lay Christians and even many preachers may be surprised to learn that the only historical reference to Jesus, that which the Jewish historian Josephus made, is suspect as it regards Jesus as having preached the truth. Rather than being written by a Jewish person, the sentence was more likely inserted by a Christian copyist. Historians know to look at the credibility of a source that is presumably a historical account, for slyness is not a small part of human nature.

In conclusion, religious studies as an academic discipline can be distinguished from that of history and the ministerial profession of preaching.  Moreover, academic pursuits should not succumb to the lure of ideology or preaching. Given the omnipresent desire that others adopt one's ideology or religious faith, the towers of knowledge that we construct should be subject to critique on a regular basis and by people of different vantage-points. 

The Coronation of King Charles III: A Case of Elitist Leadership

 Is elitism ethical when it seeks to portray itself as favoring racial diversity after having been accused from within of being racist against black people—and even a multiracial member of the leadership cadre? Moreover, can elitism itself be ethical? Furthermore, can it be Christian? By elitist, I have in mind the motive to exclude. In attending Yale University, I was surprised when I discovered that exclusion was practiced within the university among and by the students. It was not enough to have been selected to attend the highly-selective university; some students felt the instinctual urge once within to exclude other students. I discovered this when the chairman of the political party in the Yale Political Union that I had joined lied to me that if I would come to a Friday night party held in the Yale clock tower that I would be tapped to join the secret society owned by the party. That chairman and his surrounding inner cadre misled party members into coming. After all, what good is tapping friends if there are not other people watching and thus to be excluded? Regarding the coronation of King Charles (Winsor) in Britain in 2023, I contend that at the very least, the royal planners can be charted with multiple levels of exclusion in Westminster Abbey. Furthermore, I strongly believe that “the Palace” employed a public relations firm, a significant part of whose strategy it was to combat Prince Harry’s charges of racism. This can be inferred from extent of “photo ops” highlighting good “product placement.” Specifically, people of the “Black” race were, intentionally, I submit, situated around the royal family both in the coronation itself and at the related concert in the royal box. This tactic played off the commonly mistaken inference that if someone is seen next to people of a given group, he or she could not possibly harbor ill-feelings toward that group. Although beyond the argument covered here, I suspect that this cognitive fallacy is commonly taken advantage of by public-relations firms the world over.  As applied to leadership, the tactic is geared to softening the hard corners of elitism as evinced in leadership roles. I turn first to the blatant, yet strangely unspoken layers of exclusion permitted and exasperated in the coronation itself, then I shall turn to the matter of ideological product placement, which, by the way, can be distinguished from the ethic of diversity in terms of participation. Claims of encouraging diversity can easily be used as a subterfuge to cover the real motive—that of product placement used to redress any hits to a person’s or institution’s reputation (i.e., reputational capital). I come to the conclusion beyond the ethical dimension that the passive aggression of exclusion is antithetical to Christian leadership, such as could be expected from the titular head of the Anglican Church.

The full essay is at "Elitist Leadership."

For more on ethical leadership: "Ethical Leadership"

For more on Christian leadership: "Christianized Ethical Leadership"

For more on spiritual leadership: "Spiritual Leadership in Business"