Abstract
This paper examines the consequences that follow when the patterns of elite exemption analyzed in the preceding paper are allowed to operate over extended periods within an institution. Where the previous paper described the mechanisms by which exemptions are produced, this paper traces the cumulative effects of those exemptions upon the institution’s legitimacy. The argument proceeds through four interlocking analyses: the gradual erosion of trust that follows from repeated observation of asymmetric accountability; the development of cynicism as the settled disposition of members who have learned to expect rather than be surprised by elite exemption; the phenomenon of institutional fatigue, in which the energy required to maintain ordinary participation in the institution exceeds the energy members are willing to invest; and the eventual collapse of moral authority, in which the institution loses its capacity to speak credibly to its own members or to the surrounding culture on matters of moral substance. The paper demonstrates that organizational legitimacy is not a static possession but a continuously renewed asset that depends upon the visible application of the institution’s standards to those who lead it, and that the loss of legitimacy through Teflon leadership is among the most difficult institutional conditions to reverse.
I. The Asset That Cannot Be Audited
Every institution possesses a number of assets that can be quantified, recorded, and audited. The buildings can be appraised. The bank accounts can be reconciled. The membership rolls can be counted. The personnel can be enumerated. The intellectual property can be inventoried. These assets, in their various forms, constitute what is ordinarily meant when an institution’s resources are described in formal terms, and they appear on the institution’s balance sheets in whatever form the institution’s accounting conventions specify.
There exists, however, another category of asset that cannot be audited in this fashion and that does not appear on any balance sheet. This asset is the institution’s legitimacy: the settled belief on the part of those who participate in the institution that the institution’s procedures, decisions, and demands are appropriate and worthy of voluntary acceptance. Legitimacy is not the same as effectiveness; an institution may be highly effective at producing its outputs without enjoying widespread legitimacy among those who interact with it. Legitimacy is not the same as authority; an institution may possess formal authority backed by coercive sanction without enjoying the legitimacy that would render the exercise of that authority freely accepted. Legitimacy is the voluntary acceptance, by those subject to the institution, that the institution may reasonably ask of them what it asks.
This asset is what allows an institution to function efficiently. A church that enjoys high legitimacy among its members can call them to costly action with a reasonable expectation of compliance, can address them on matters of moral substance with a reasonable expectation of engagement, can ask them to bear the inconveniences of institutional life with a reasonable expectation of patience. A church that has lost its legitimacy among its members must rely on lesser instruments: emotional manipulation, social pressure, the residual habit of attendance, the inertia of long-standing involvement, or in extreme cases, the implicit threat of exclusion from the community. Each of these substitute instruments produces some measure of compliance, but each of them produces compliance at significantly higher cost to the institution and significantly lower commitment from the members. The institution that has lost its legitimacy can sometimes continue to function, but it functions on borrowed time and at increasing expense.
The relevance of this consideration to the analysis of Teflon leadership is direct. Teflon leadership is not, in the first instance, a moral problem for the leaders themselves, though it is also that. It is, in the first instance, an institutional problem for the organization that contains the leadership. The exemptions produced by the mechanisms examined in White Paper 6 do not affect only those who benefit from them or those who suffer their immediate consequences. They affect the institution as a whole by destroying, over time, the asset upon which the institution’s functioning depends. The leader who has arranged matters so that the standards do not apply to him has not merely served his own interests at the expense of others. He has placed the institution itself in a condition of legitimacy depletion from which recovery, if it can be accomplished at all, is laborious and uncertain.
The first cluster of papers in this volume established the biblical standard. The previous paper described the mechanisms by which institutions violate that standard. The present paper traces the consequences of the violation. The consequences are not theological abstractions; they are observable institutional dynamics that produce predictable patterns in the life of the affected organizations. The recognition of those patterns is the diagnostic work this paper proposes to undertake.
II. The Erosion of Trust
The first consequence of Teflon leadership, in the order of its appearance, is the gradual erosion of trust. Trust does not collapse all at once. It erodes through a series of small observations, each of which by itself would not warrant a wholesale revision of an individual member’s confidence in the institution but which together, over time, produce a substantial revision.
The erosion proceeds through a recognizable sequence. A member observes a single instance in which the standards applied to ordinary members appear not to have been applied to a leader. The first observation is typically discounted. The member assumes that there must be context he does not know, that the situation was more complicated than it appears, that the leadership has likely handled the matter appropriately even though the handling was not visible. The institution receives the benefit of the doubt.
A second observation occurs at some later point. The member notices that another situation appears to have followed the same pattern. Again, the asymmetry between the treatment of leadership and the treatment of ordinary members is striking. The member, having previously extended the benefit of the doubt, now feels some pressure to reconcile the second observation with the first. He may continue to extend the benefit of the doubt, but the extension now requires more effort than it did the first time. The member begins, almost without conscious decision, to construct an interpretive framework that allows the two observations to coexist with his continuing confidence in the institution. The framework typically involves some combination of contextual explanations, charitable interpretations, and the deferral of judgment until further information becomes available.
A third observation occurs. The member encounters the pattern again, this time perhaps in a circumstance that affects him personally or that affects someone he knows. The personal proximity makes the pattern harder to discount through contextual explanation. The framework he has constructed begins to strain. He may, at this stage, begin to seek out conversations with others who have made similar observations, partly to test his own perceptions and partly to determine whether the pattern is as widespread as he has begun to suspect. These conversations often produce confirmations from others who have made similar observations but have, like him, been hesitant to articulate them.
A fourth observation occurs, or perhaps the cumulative weight of the previous three reaches a tipping point. The member now perceives the pattern as a pattern rather than as a series of disconnected incidents. The interpretive framework that had allowed the previous observations to coexist with his confidence in the institution collapses, and is replaced by a new framework in which the pattern is recognized as a feature of how the institution actually operates rather than as a series of aberrations from how it normally operates. The trust that had been gradually depleted is now decisively reduced. The member’s relationship to the institution has changed at a fundamental level, and the change is unlikely to be reversed by any single corrective action the institution might subsequently take.
The dynamics of this erosion are particularly significant for the present analysis because they are largely invisible to the institution itself. The leadership typically does not see the erosion occurring. The members who are losing trust rarely announce that they are doing so. The institution continues to receive their attendance, their financial contributions, and their formal participation throughout most of the erosion period. The leadership, observing these continuing participations, often concludes that the institution is in good health. By the time the depleted trust manifests itself in observable behavior — in declining attendance, reduced contributions, the departure of long-tenured members, the difficulty of recruiting volunteers, the resistance to leadership initiatives — the erosion has already progressed to a point at which simple remediation is no longer possible.
The biblical anticipation of this dynamic is present throughout the prophetic literature. The repeated complaint of the prophets that the people no longer believe what the religious establishment proclaims is, in institutional terms, the report that legitimacy has been depleted. The institution continues to operate. The sacrifices continue to be offered. The festivals continue to be celebrated. But the people have ceased to believe that the institution speaks for God, and the institution itself is the last to recognize what the people have come to understand. The prophet, who sees the depletion before the institution does, speaks the warning that the institution is unwilling to receive. The historical pattern is that the warnings are not received in time, the depletion proceeds to completion, and the institutional consequences follow with a thoroughness that the institution had been unable to anticipate.
III. The Development of Cynicism
The second consequence of Teflon leadership is the development of cynicism as the settled disposition of those who have learned to expect rather than be surprised by elite exemption. Cynicism is not a temporary mood. It is an interpretive habit, acquired through repeated experience, by which an individual comes to anticipate the patterns he has previously observed. Once the habit is acquired, it shapes the individual’s perception of all subsequent institutional events, including events that might in themselves have been encouraging.
The development of cynicism follows naturally from the erosion of trust. The member who has revised his interpretive framework to recognize the pattern of elite exemption as a feature of how the institution actually operates will now anticipate that pattern in any new situation that arises. When a new instance of leadership misconduct comes to light, he will not be surprised; he will recognize the situation as a confirmation of what he has come to expect. When the institution announces a new initiative to address concerns about accountability, he will not be encouraged; he will recognize the announcement as the standard institutional response that produces no substantive change. When a leader publicly acknowledges past failures and expresses commitment to reform, he will not be moved; he will recognize the acknowledgment as a managed performance that will be followed by the resumption of the patterns it ostensibly addresses.
The cynical member is not necessarily mistaken in these anticipations. The patterns he has observed are real, and the institutional responses he has come to expect are typically the responses that actually occur. The cynicism is, in this sense, an accurate descriptive understanding of how the institution operates. The problem with cynicism is not that it produces inaccurate perceptions. The problem is that it forecloses the possibility of any genuine institutional change being recognized as such. If the cynical member encounters a leadership response that is, in fact, substantively different from the patterns he has come to expect, his cynicism will interpret the response as another instance of the patterns he expects, and he will fail to recognize the change that has occurred. The cynicism becomes a barrier to the very institutional reform that, if it were widely implemented, would address the conditions that produced the cynicism in the first place.
The institutional dynamics produced by widespread cynicism are particularly damaging because they are self-reinforcing. The cynical member withholds the kinds of constructive engagement that might contribute to institutional improvement. He does not raise concerns through official channels, because he does not believe the channels will produce any response. He does not volunteer for committee work, because he does not believe the committees will accomplish anything substantive. He does not contribute his particular skills to the institution’s work, because he does not believe his contributions will be valued or used appropriately. The institution, deprived of his constructive engagement, becomes less capable of the reform that might address his concerns. His withholding of engagement, individually rational given his perceptions, contributes to the institutional condition that vindicates those perceptions. The cycle proceeds at the cost of both the member and the institution.
The members who do remain engaged, under conditions of widespread cynicism, tend to fall into a few characteristic categories. Some are members whose investment in the institution is sufficiently deep that they continue to engage despite their reservations, but whose engagement is increasingly tinged with the very cynicism they have not been able to suppress. Some are members who have particular ideological or relational reasons for continued engagement that overcome their cynicism in specific contexts but that do not generalize beyond those contexts. Some are members who have themselves moved into the leadership class and now occupy the position of those who benefit from the patterns of exemption, with the corresponding shift in their interpretive framework. Some are members who are simply new enough not to have observed the patterns that produce cynicism in longer-tenured members, but who are on the path toward acquiring the same disposition as their tenure lengthens.
The leadership of an institution in which cynicism has become widespread typically observes a few specific symptoms without recognizing the underlying condition. Recruitment for volunteer roles becomes difficult. Capital campaigns underperform expectations. New initiatives receive less enthusiastic engagement than projections had anticipated. Younger members do not transition into committed long-term participation as previous generations had done. The leadership, seeking explanations, often attributes these symptoms to external factors: changes in cultural attitudes, the busyness of contemporary life, the decline of institutional commitment in general, the particular characteristics of younger generations. These external explanations have the convenient effect of locating the cause of the symptoms outside the institution itself, thereby protecting the leadership from the recognition that the symptoms are a response to dynamics the leadership has produced. The displacement of explanation onto external factors is itself one of the recognizable signs that an institution has entered a condition of legitimacy depletion.
IV. Institutional Fatigue
The third consequence of Teflon leadership is the phenomenon of institutional fatigue, in which the energy required to maintain ordinary participation in the institution comes to exceed the energy members are willing to invest. Fatigue is distinct from cynicism, though the two often coexist. Cynicism is an interpretive disposition; fatigue is an energetic condition. The cynical member knows what to expect from the institution and has adjusted his expectations accordingly. The fatigued member, whether cynical or not, has reached the point at which continued participation has become a burden disproportionate to the benefits the participation produces.
Institutional fatigue develops through the accumulation of small costs that members of an institution are required to bear in the course of ordinary participation. Each cost, by itself, is manageable. The cumulative weight of many such costs, sustained over extended periods, eventually exceeds the capacity of even the most committed members to continue absorbing them. The pattern of elite exemption contributes substantially to this accumulation by adding, to the ordinary costs of institutional participation, the additional burden of bearing standards from which the leadership class is exempt.
The asymmetry of burden is the specific contribution of Teflon leadership to institutional fatigue. The ordinary member of the institution is asked to conform to standards of conduct, to contribute financially to the institution’s work, to volunteer time and skill for the institution’s projects, to defer personal preferences to the requirements of community life, and to bear with various inconveniences and frustrations that institutional membership entails. The willingness to bear these costs depends, in significant part, upon the perception that they are shared. The member who believes that the leadership is bearing analogous costs in its own life is willing to bear his portion. The member who comes to believe that the leadership has constructed exemptions for itself, while the burdens have been concentrated upon the ordinary membership, finds that the same costs that were previously bearable have become unbearable. The objective magnitude of the costs has not changed. The perception of their distribution has changed, and the perception of distribution determines the willingness to bear.
The phenomenon is intensified by the moral character of the burdens. If the institution were merely a voluntary social club, the perception of unequal burden would be a matter of mild annoyance rather than fatigue. The member could withdraw or could simply adjust his contribution downward to match what he perceived as the leadership’s actual contribution. Religious institutions, however, frame their requirements as moral obligations grounded in divine command. The member is asked to bear the costs of participation not on the grounds that the institution requires them but on the grounds that God requires them. When the same God who is invoked to require costs of the member is observed not to be invoked to require analogous costs of the leadership, the member is faced with a more disturbing question than ordinary disappointment would produce. He must either conclude that the divine requirements he has accepted are not, in fact, requirements that bind universally, or he must conclude that the leadership has appropriated divine authority for the imposition of requirements from which the leadership has quietly exempted itself.
Either conclusion produces fatigue, but the second conclusion produces a more thoroughgoing variety. The member who concludes that the divine requirements are not universal can at least retain his confidence in the institution as a social enterprise, even as his confidence in its theological claims diminishes. The member who concludes that the leadership has appropriated divine authority for self-interested purposes loses his confidence in both dimensions simultaneously. The institution loses its theological credibility and its social cohesion in a single recognition. The fatigue that follows is not merely the depletion of energy for continued participation; it is the loss of any framework within which continued participation would make sense.
The behavioral manifestations of institutional fatigue are familiar to any observer of contemporary religious life. Membership transitions from active engagement to passive attendance. Attendance transitions from regular to occasional. Occasional attendance transitions to special-occasion attendance only, and special-occasion attendance eventually transitions to formal disaffiliation. The trajectory does not follow a fixed timeline, and individual members vary considerably in the rate at which they progress along it. The trajectory is nevertheless recognizable, and institutional leaders who have learned to observe it can often identify members at various stages along the path. The intervention required to arrest the trajectory becomes more difficult at each stage. The member in the early stages of fatigue can often be reengaged through targeted attention from someone who recognizes the situation. The member in the later stages, who has already substantially disengaged, cannot typically be recovered through institutional outreach; his disengagement has progressed past the point at which institutional resources can reverse it.
The cumulative effect of institutional fatigue across the membership produces what might be called the demographic correlate of legitimacy depletion. The institution does not lose its members all at once. It loses them at a rate consistent with the progression of fatigue across the membership, which produces a steady but not catastrophic decline in participation over extended periods. The decline is often slow enough that no single year’s losses prompt institutional alarm. The losses become alarming only when they are tallied across a decade or more, by which point the cumulative depletion has reached a level from which recovery would require resources the institution no longer possesses.
V. The Collapse of Moral Authority
The fourth and most consequential consequence of Teflon leadership is the eventual collapse of moral authority. Moral authority is the capacity of an institution to speak credibly on matters of moral substance, whether to its own members or to the surrounding culture. It is the standing the institution possesses when it addresses questions of right and wrong, when it calls its members to particular forms of conduct, when it offers commentary on the moral life of the broader society in which it operates. Moral authority is a derivative asset; it depends upon the legitimacy that has been previously established through the consistent application of standards within the institution. When that legitimacy has been depleted through the patterns examined above, the moral authority that derives from it collapses, and the institution loses its capacity to speak credibly on the very questions it had previously been understood to address with particular weight.
The collapse of moral authority manifests itself in several recognizable ways. The first is the internal recognition, among members of the institution, that the institution’s own moral teaching has become difficult to take seriously. The teaching itself may be unchanged; the same scriptures are read, the same doctrines proclaimed, the same exhortations delivered. But the members who hear the teaching have come to perceive a disjunction between the content of the teaching and the conduct of those who deliver it. The teaching becomes, in their perception, an exercise in the imposition of standards upon them by those who have exempted themselves from the standards. The teaching may still be received in form, but it is not received in substance. The member nods along during the sermon, but he has ceased to allow the sermon to function as authoritative direction for his own conduct.
The second manifestation is the loss of the institution’s standing in the surrounding culture. Religious institutions have historically enjoyed, in many cultural contexts, a particular credibility when speaking on matters of moral substance. The credibility depended upon the assumption that the institutions practiced what they preached, or at least made serious efforts to do so, and that their teaching could therefore be taken seriously even by those who did not share all of their underlying theological commitments. When the public perception of the institution shifts from this assumption to its opposite — when the institution comes to be perceived as one whose leadership systematically exempts itself from the standards it imposes upon others — the cultural credibility collapses. The institution’s pronouncements on public questions cease to carry weight. Its objections to cultural developments cease to be taken seriously. Its calls to public moral action cease to mobilize anyone outside its own diminishing core membership. The institution that was once consulted on matters of public moral consequence becomes a curiosity whose pronouncements are noted in the news with mild interest before being set aside as the predictable output of a institution whose moral standing has been compromised.
The third manifestation is the institution’s loss of its own capacity to discipline its members. The institution that has retained moral authority can call members to costly forms of conduct with the expectation that the call will be received. The institution that has lost moral authority issues the same calls but observes that the response is significantly attenuated. The members may comply in formal terms, but the compliance is grudging, partial, and accompanied by the resentment that follows from being asked to do what those who ask are not themselves doing. The institution can no longer accomplish, through the ordinary exercise of its teaching office, what it had previously accomplished. It must increasingly substitute other instruments — emotional manipulation, social pressure, the residual habit of obedience — for the moral authority it has lost. These substitute instruments are individually less effective and collectively more corrosive of the relationships between the institution and its members. The institution that relies upon them increasingly resembles a coercive structure rather than a community of voluntary moral commitment.
The fourth manifestation, and the most difficult to reverse, is the loss of the institution’s capacity to attract and form the next generation of members and leaders. The young person who is considering a vocation in religious life observes the patterns this paper has examined and draws the conclusions that any honest observer would draw. He concludes that the institution is not what it claims to be, that its leadership operates by principles different from those it teaches, and that vocational investment in such an institution is unlikely to produce the spiritual or social outcomes he would seek. He directs his vocational energies elsewhere. The institution, observing the difficulty of recruitment, attributes the difficulty to external factors — cultural change, secularization, the difficulty of religious vocation in the contemporary world — without recognizing that the difficulty is in significant part a response to dynamics the institution has itself produced. The pipeline of leadership formation, which depends upon the continual entry of capable young people into the institution’s formative processes, narrows progressively. The institution that does not arrest the dynamic will eventually find itself unable to staff its own positions, at which point the question of moral authority becomes moot, because the institution itself has become structurally unable to continue in its existing form.
The biblical anticipation of this collapse, as suggested in the discussion of Eli’s house in White Paper 3, is severe. The institution that has so thoroughly depleted its legitimacy through the indulgence of elite misconduct can sometimes proceed past the point at which internal reform is possible. The judgment that follows in such cases is not always a dramatic external intervention; it is often the slow institutional collapse that proceeds from the cumulative consequences of the patterns the institution has tolerated. The faithful remnant departs. The institutional forms continue for a period after the substance has departed. The eventual closure of the institution is acknowledged with some sadness by those who remain, but the closure had been determined years earlier by the patterns that produced the depletion of legitimacy, and the closure itself was simply the eventual manifestation of what had already been decided by the institutional dynamics that had been allowed to operate unchecked.
VI. The Difficulty of Reversal
A final observation regarding the difficulty of reversing the legitimacy depletion examined in this paper is appropriate before the paper closes. The dynamics described here — trust erosion, cynicism, institutional fatigue, and the collapse of moral authority — are not easily reversed by institutional decision. They unfold over extended periods, are produced by the cumulative weight of many small events, and become embedded in the interpretive frameworks and energetic capacities of the institution’s members. Reversal, where it is possible at all, requires correspondingly extended periods, correspondingly numerous corrective events, and the deliberate reconstruction of the interpretive frameworks the previous patterns produced.
The institution that recognizes itself in the analysis offered here and undertakes to reverse the dynamics it has produced faces several specific challenges. The first is that the corrective actions required are themselves likely to be interpreted by the cynical members as another iteration of the patterns they have come to expect. A leadership announcement of new accountability procedures, a public commitment to reform, the appointment of a review committee — each of these standard institutional responses has been deployed so frequently as a cover for the continuation of the patterns it ostensibly addresses that the responses have lost their capacity to communicate genuine intent. The institution that genuinely intends reform must therefore demonstrate the reform through sustained action over extended periods, rather than through announcements that will be received with the cynicism the previous patterns have produced.
The second challenge is that the leadership class that has benefited from the patterns has typically developed sufficient informal power, in the sense described in the previous paper, to resist substantive reform from within. The reform that would address the dynamics cannot be undertaken by the very leadership whose continued tenure depends upon the maintenance of the dynamics. External intervention — by denominational authorities, by external review bodies, by the gradual replacement of the existing leadership with leaders not embedded in the existing patterns — is typically required, and the institution’s resistance to external intervention is itself often a manifestation of the dynamics that produced the need for the intervention in the first place.
The third challenge is that the time scale of reversal does not match the time scale on which the affected members are willing to suspend their disengagement. The member who has reached the later stages of institutional fatigue cannot typically be asked to remain engaged for the extended period during which reform would gradually demonstrate itself. He has reached the point at which his continued participation is no longer sustainable, and he will depart whether or not the institution has begun the corrective work. The institution that delays reform until the cumulative depletion has become alarming has typically delayed past the point at which the membership upon whom successful reform depends will remain engaged long enough for the reform to produce observable results.
The conclusion that follows from these challenges is sobering but unavoidable. The reversal of legitimacy depletion is significantly more difficult than its prevention. The institution that has not yet allowed the patterns to develop has the opportunity to construct, through the implementation of the structural countermeasures examined in the previous paper, an institutional life that does not produce the depletion in the first place. The institution that has allowed the patterns to develop to advanced stages faces a substantially more difficult task and may, in some cases, find that the task is beyond the institutional resources available to it.
The biblical critique articulated in the first cluster of papers and the institutional analysis offered in the present cluster converge upon a single practical implication. The standards of reciprocal accountability examined in White Paper 1 are not optional aspirations that institutions can adopt at their convenience. They are structural requirements whose violation produces consequences that operate independently of any subsequent moral exhortation. The institution that has decided that the implementation of these standards is too difficult or too disruptive has thereby decided to accept the consequences that follow from the patterns the standards would have prevented. The acceptance of those consequences, whether deliberate or by default, is the path along which Teflon Christianity becomes the actual operating condition of an institution that continues to profess the biblical standard it has practically abandoned.
The papers that follow in this cluster will examine additional aspects of the institutional dynamics that produce Teflon leadership and the contemporary forms in which these dynamics manifest themselves. Each subsequent analysis will assume the foundation supplied by the present paper, that elite exemption produces, through predictable institutional mechanisms, the depletion of the legitimacy upon which the institution’s continued functioning depends. The argument is not that institutions affected by these dynamics cannot recover. The argument is that recovery requires the deliberate undertaking of structural reforms that the affected institutions are typically unwilling to undertake, and that the failure to undertake the reforms produces, with depressing predictability, the institutional outcomes that the present paper has described.
Notes
Note 1. The distinction between legitimacy and authority, as used in this paper, follows the standard analytical convention in the sociology of institutions, in which legitimacy refers to the voluntary acceptance of an institution by those subject to it, while authority refers to the institution’s formal capacity to exercise power. The two are related but not identical, and the relationship between them has been the subject of extensive analytical literature. The use of the distinction here does not depend upon any particular theoretical framework within that literature.
Note 2. The pattern of gradual trust erosion through cumulative observation, described in the second section of this paper, has been documented in empirical studies across a variety of institutional contexts, including corporate, governmental, and religious organizations. The recurrence of the pattern across such diverse contexts suggests that the dynamic is structural rather than specific to any particular type of organization. The application to religious institutions does not, therefore, depend upon any claim that religious institutions are uniquely susceptible; the dynamic operates wherever institutions exist.
Note 3. The development of cynicism as an interpretive habit, described in the third section, should be distinguished from the more theoretical concept of cynicism in philosophical or political analysis. The usage here is closer to the ordinary language sense, in which cynicism describes the settled disposition to expect ungenerous outcomes from human institutions. The ordinary language sense captures the institutional dynamic this paper is examining without requiring commitment to any particular philosophical analysis of the concept.
Note 4. The displacement of explanatory blame onto external factors, mentioned in the section on cynicism and elsewhere, is a recognized institutional defense mechanism that has been documented in the literature on organizational decline. The pattern serves to protect the leadership from the recognition of its own contribution to the institution’s difficulties, but at the cost of foreclosing the possibility of corrective action that would address the actual sources of those difficulties. The pattern is particularly persistent in religious institutions, where the explanatory framework can readily incorporate references to cultural secularization, the difficulty of religious life in the contemporary world, and other external factors that absolve the institution of responsibility for its own condition.
Note 5. The phenomenon of institutional fatigue described in the fourth section is related to but distinct from the burnout literature in psychology and organizational behavior. Burnout typically refers to the depletion of individual energy in the context of work; institutional fatigue refers to the depletion of energy that members are willing to invest in voluntary participation. The two are related, because the dynamics that produce one often contribute to the other, but the institutional analysis is the more relevant framework for the present argument.
Note 6. The collapse of moral authority, described in the fifth section, has been documented in a number of specific cases across the recent history of Western religious institutions. The specific cases vary in the particular precipitating events, but the underlying dynamics described here recur with sufficient regularity to suggest that the phenomenon is structural rather than incidental. The paper has avoided specific case references in order to focus on the underlying dynamics, but the empirical record of the collapse of moral authority in particular religious institutions in recent decades provides substantial confirmation of the analytical framework offered here.
References
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