This small article in the Washington Post today made me think.  These kind of crises in the Evangelical world suggest something of the tensions that evangelical elites, especially younger evangelical elites, face in navigating the growing space between their core constituency of white evangelicals, in the general public moral space that elites in this culture are expected to Inhabit.

It seems to me that this confirms something of the truth of my colleague and friend James Davison Hunter's argument, in his To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, that even self-described counter-cultural and sub-cultural elites were still effectively participating in the mainstream culture and subject to cultural norms.  (Just like the masses of people the sub-cultural elites purported to be elites for.)  In other words, elites have a complicated place to play, as accountable both to their "populaces" and to the norms that govern all elites in the society.  They serve as the boundary-keepers of subcultural authenticity, but have to signal to their audiences that they merit their "elite" status in ways that at least echo, if not duplicate, other, larger, more central "elites" in the culture as well.  So they must simultaneously signal their substantive distinctiveness, while still not being too formally distinct.  They must be (legible) "in" the status system of mainstream society, while not "of" that status system.  They need a certain kind of general respect, I guess.

Hunter got attacked for this book, especially by establishment evangelicals, and he was accused of cynicism.  But I'm afraid what people called his "cynicism" was in many ways really a realism.  I had my disagreements about the over-symmetrization of rival positions that the book deployed, but I thought his analysis of evangelicals was pretty spot-on.

In some ways, much of what he had to say was an astute analytic application of the idea of cultural capital, a category first deployed, I think, in Pierre Bourdieu's book Distinction, a book probably every scholar in the humanities and social sciences ought to read, if only to understand the idiom in which much academic discourse in the humanities and social sciences is couched.  (And yes I realize that, by suggesting we all need to read Bourdieu, I am of course enacting the same kind of symbolic violence he talks about on all of us, myself included. Ouch.)  Hunter developed and modified that idea in many ways, and in some ways it goes back to Weber as well; but the core idea is that, no one gets to set the terms of who they are just as they wish in a society; everyone is always negotiating their identity with a larger socio-cultural framework in which they live, move, and have their being.  That larger lesson is one that many subcultural thinkers still don't like.  Witness the whole "Benedict Option" of right-wing white nationalist Christians these days.  And in an earlier moment, John Howard Yoder's Christian purism is another example of this particular misunderstanding of our situation.  It's true outside of Christian subcultures as well, as many non-Christian immigrant groups in the United States can tell you.

Anyway, there can be tensions between the general cultural norms and the local subcultural norms.  In the case of the Relevant magazine editor, or publisher, I think the significant thing--for my purposes in talking about the elite predicament he exemplifies--is not his misbehavior in terms of defensiveness, racial cluelessness, and verbal and psychological domination--I mean, those are bad, but I'm pretty sure they are not distinct to this one dude.  (I wouldn't have to leave my epidermis, in other words, to find different examples of those failures in another white dude.)  I think rather the significant thing for my purposes is this guy's attempt to be a trimmer--not in the marijuana sense, which I just discovered (umm), but in the Lord Halifax sense, of one who is governed in their political views not by inflexible core principles but by adapting to the standards common to their world.  As the article puts it:

Relevant wanted to avoid taking any strong stances that could be polarizing, especially to a white, male, conservative-leaning readership. Editors were encouraged to “stay above the fray” when it came to controversial issues, he wrote, reflecting the priority that white evangelical organizations place on presenting a unified front.

“They often employ centrist rhetoric about the alleged virtues of playing the middle,” [one critic] wrote.

I won't get into the frustrations about centrism here--the struggle for a real centrism is an interesting thing, but it would perhaps more likely infuriate most people, not mollify them.  Instead I want simply to note that the aim seems to have been "to lead," as it were for the sake of leading; not, that is, to bring your people to a promised land, but simply to be at the head of the crew, at least so that you don't have to eat anyone else's dust.  

Is that true leading?  I don't know.  But it's one difficulty that faces those who wish to be recognized as a leader in a culture such as ours.  Maybe we've confused leadership with popularity.  I would have thought evangelicals might have something to say about this.  Insofar as they don't, perhaps my friend James Hunter's argument was more right than wrong.  Which I wouldn't find surprising at all.

UPDATE: A new piece has dropped with more information about the crisis at Relevant magazine with which I began this piece.  It's worth checking out, if you're interested.