by Andy Crouch
Perhaps the most characteristic idol of our time is online pornography because it fuses two of the most powerful idols of our time: sex and technology. Available at a click are vicarious experiences of sexual knowledge and conquest—authority that begins with the ability to see others in naked and vulnerable states, and escalates, in “harder” forms of porn, to more extravagant and ultimately demonic forms of domination. But these experiences of godlike knowledge and control are almost always consumed from a position of complete invulnerability, in isolation and secrecy.
The irony is stunning: the twentieth-century sexual revolution’s promise of “freedom” has given way to a twenty-first-century epidemic of attenuated, mediated sexual escapism. Even most secular observers now admit that pornography undermines the capacity of men and women to maintain healthy levels of sexual desire for their actual partners, let alone experience the true authority and vulnerability of embodied encounter. Who could have predicted such an outcome? Anyone could have predicted it—anyone who understood the power of idols to promise freedom and deliver slavery, to offer authority and deliver vulnerability, to whisper fantasies of power but end up with us completely in their grip.
While some of us, by the sheer grace of God, manage to escape the lure of the most powerful idols, not one of us does not have some habit, some recurring pattern of thought, substance or device that we turn to when we are feeling vulnerable—something that assuages our vulnerability and elevates our sense of capacity to act. They offer us, in a word, control—for the very essence of control is authority without vulnerability, the ability to act without the possibility of loss. Control is the dream of the risk- and loss-averse, the promise of every idol and the quest of every person who has tasted vulnerability and vowed never to be exposed in that way again.
Control is the dream of the risk- and loss-averse, the promise of every idol.
But control is an illusion. In fact, all of the quadrant called Exploiting is an illusion. There is, in the long run, no such thing as true authority without true vulnerability. Our idols inevitably fail us, generally sooner rather than later. And as they begin to fail, we begin to grasp ever more violently for the control we thought they promised and we deserved. This is why the end result of life in this quadrant is exploitation—ripping from the world, and especially from those too weak to resist, the good things our idols promised but are failing to deliver.
As a few people pursue and even for a season grasp the idol of control and exploitation, the community around them falls into the poverty that exploitation always brings.
Phil and Leslie
My friends Phil and Leslie are driving home one night after a full day of work as campus ministers at the University of California, Berkeley. They stop for a few groceries, turn the corner onto the avenue where they live, and see the flashing blue and red lights of a police car behind them. Do we have a taillight out? Phil wonders.
Within minutes, six police cars have appeared, lights flashing and sirens wailing. Later Phil would write about what happened:
A voice from a loudspeaker told me to roll down my window. The voice told me to open my car door, keeping my hands visible at all times. Take four steps away from the car, keeping your hands clearly visible, I was told. The instructions went on: Face the car. Bend down on both knees. Put your hands on the ground. Lie face down. Turn your face to the right.
Lying on the ground, Phil is handcuffed and placed in one police car. Leslie is subjected to the same procedure. Now they are in separate police cars, watching as police search their vehicle (turning up groceries and Bible study materials, and nothing more). Someone has been robbed at gunpoint a couple of blocks away, an officer tells Phil, and he and Leslie “match the description” of the robbers. The officer ignores Phil’s offer to produce the time-stamped receipt from the grocery store that could clear them of suspicion. Instead, Phil is removed from the police car, still handcuffed, so the victim can attempt to identify him. His neighbors watch from their porches as he stands in the glare of headlights and flashlights.
Half an hour later, with a brusque, “Sorry for the inconvenience,” and a pointed reminder that they have not been cleared from suspicion, the handcuffs are removed and they are allowed to leave.
There is something you’d never guess that makes this story ironic, and something you should be able to easily guess that makes it all too common and tragic.
What you’d never guess is that Phil’s father-in-law—Leslie’s father—is the chief of police in a city just a few miles away from where they were detained. She grew up knowing the great dignity of police work, along with its dangers and demands, and seeing her father honored for his courageous and faithful leadership.
What you probably could guess is that Phil and Leslie are black.
The Military and the Police
One vulnerability every community faces is crime. Some crime emerges from the frustration of the quadrant called Exploiting, the failure of idols to deliver, the indulgence of the deadly sins of lust, greed and the rest, and the exploitation that follows. Some crime may come from the deprivation of Suffering, a desperate bid to obtain some means of authority in the world. But because crime depends on secrecy and violence, it can never offer the real flourishing that its perpetrators seek. Crime leaves the whole community, including its perpetrators, wounded and further from flourishing.
So every human community has to find a way to limit, prevent and punish crime. But the approaches we take to crime say a great deal about which quadrant governs our imaginations. What Phil and Leslie encountered that night, and what so many African Americans encounter routinely in their interactions with the police, is a form of policing that seeks greater and greater authority with less and less vulnerability—which leads, as all attempts to move into this quadrant do, to others experiencing what Phil and Leslie did that night, the suffering of vulnerability without authority.
Police work is inherently high in meaningful risk, especially in a country like the United States, which has as many guns as citizens. The police officers (not all of whom were white) who stopped Phil and Leslie were in a potentially vulnerable situation themselves, knowing that there were armed robbers somewhere in their precinct. Few other professions call their members to expose themselves to danger in the way that police must routinely do. It is entirely reasonable, and good for everyone’s flourishing, that we seek to manage the risks that police face on our behalf.
But in recent years many American police forces, encouraged by lavish federal grants, have added weapons and tactics previously only used by military units. Military weaponry and armor aim to vastly reduce vulnerability while vastly increasing authority. A man in body armor in a military-style tank has more capacity for action, and less vulnerability, than the traditional police officer patrolling on foot or even in a vehicle, armed only with a baton and pistol. And while everything the police did during their stop of Phil and Leslie may have been legal, it is not hard to see that it was all designed to create a situation where the police were in complete control.
Control is a valid military objective. Indeed, the ultimate goal of military action is conquest—all authority for the victor, no remaining capacity for meaningful action for the loser (to “surrender” is to be incapable of meaningful action). The goal of military forces is to “control the theater”—to be the only actor with the capacity for meaningful action.
But the goal of a police force can be neither conquest nor control. The goal of police power is flourishing—actually increasing the capacity for meaningful action in a community. In a community with effective policing, more people have more authority. Military authority is zero-sum; police authority, properly used, increases the total authority in a community.
The move toward militarized policing is an asymmetrical increase of authority rather than a simultaneous increase of authority and vulnerability. And so it is very likely to be a movement in the direction of Exploiting, not Flourishing. Indeed, some experts on
law enforcement argue that effective police patrols were undermined when they began to be conducted by car instead of on foot. Patrols by vehicle are a significant move away from the meaningful risks taken by departments that emphasize what is called “community policing,” an approach to law enforcement that emphasizes interaction and relationship between police and the neighborhoods they serve.
And like all attempts to secure authority without vulnerability, the pursuit of quadrant IV-style policing often fails to deliver what it promises. Police forces that distance themselves from their own community find that they are less and less capable of meaningful action and more exposed to risk. Armor protects, but it also restricts. A law enforcement officer in a tank has only a very few options in relating to a crowd, most of them violent—so while he has undoubted firepower, he may actually have less authority than a lone individual standing face to face with the crowd. Over time, any police force that relies on such asymmetric power will find itself losing the authority that really counts, the ability to prevent rather than just punish crime and disorder.
The Vulnerability of Others
In high school physics we learn (or at least hear about!) the physical laws of conservation—of mass, energy and momentum. The universe is designed in such a way that we cannot actually get rid of or create mass or energy, only move them around.
I am not sure there is a “law of conservation of vulnerability” in the same strict sense, but it is still a general rule: vulnerability shed by one group of people is inevitably borne by others’ suffering.
Vulnerability shed by one group of people is inevitably borne by others’ suffering.
Or to put it another way, the pursuit of authority without vulnerability always comes at the price of causing others to live with vulnerability without authority. In fact, the pursuit of authority without vulnerability multiplies vulnerability without authority. The resulting suffering is always far greater and longer lasting than whatever momentary benefit came from exploiting.
So the criminals who committed an armed robbery in Phil and Leslie’s neighborhood, grabbing goods they had not earned from someone vulnerable to their weapons of force, caused an entire community to suffer increased vulnerability. Likewise, though the police may have acted within the law and with the best of intentions, the tactics they used to restrain Phil and Leslie reinforced all kinds of vulnerabilities.
The person addicted to drugs purchases sensations of godlike power and control—but their family suffers neglect, at best, while they are high and exposure to their explosions of anger when the high wears off. The person addicted to pornography pursues sexual authority—or at least a simulation of it, “knowing” others in graphic detail—without sexual vulnerability, without being known. But this experience of sexuality without vulnerability comes at the price of the exploitation of people who are exposed, literally and figuratively, to the porn user without the authority that would be granted them in a genuine relationship of love and intimacy. Often the person made most vulnerable of all is the porn user’s spouse, neglected in the quest for a relationship of one-way fantasy and control. Instead of living in mutual authority with vulnerability, the choice by one partner to seek out Exploiting ends up consigning the other to Suffering.
The first things any idol takes from its worshipers are their relationships.
The first things any idol takes from its worshipers are their relationships. Idols know and care nothing for the exchange of authority and vulnerability that happens in the context of love—and the demonic powers that lurk behind them, and lure us to them, despise love. So the best early warning sign that you are drifting toward Exploiting—seeking authority without vulnerability in your work, in your entertainment, in alcohol or coffee or chocolate (or whatever may be your drug of choice, in pornography or in romance novels)—is that your closest relationships begin to decay.
It is those relationships, after all, that could grant you the greatest real capacity for meaningful action. But they also demand of you the greatest personal risk. And as you drift up and to the left, those who depend on you for love, friendship and support sink down and to the right. Worst off are those already at great risk—the youngest, the oldest, those who contribute the least to our sensations of power and who expose us to the greatest sense of our own limits. They can only flourish if we resist the temptations of the quadrant called Exploiting—and the more we pursue Exploiting, the more they are swallowed up by Suffering.
In the long run, though, it is not just the most vulnerable who suffer from those who pursue the idolatry of Exploiting. The scathing biblical critique of idols and their makers is that those who make them become like them—dull and ultimately dead. The idol that begins by promising authority without vulnerability inexorably ends up delivering vulnerability without authority. The drink that initially delivers such a sensation of ecstasy and freedom ends up robbing its users of the most basic capacity for action. Tyranny is the most powerful form of government in human affairs—until, one day, suddenly it is the weakest. Rare is the tyrant who goes to his grave secure in his power—let alone having created a system that would allow his heirs to hold on to their power generation after generation. The country of North Korea, in its third generation of tyranny, is the exception that proves the rule. There is almost nothing so certain in international affairs as that the North Korean regime, one way or another, will fail and fall. The only question is whether its collapse will, by God’s grace, be merciful and relatively peaceful or involve one last spasm of brutality. The more complete the flight to the upper left corner, the more certain the final judgment.
Indeed, one way to understand the pervasive theme of judgment and hell in the New Testament is that those who would have authority without vulnerability ultimately cannot be trusted with authority at all. In the end, the justice of God will abolish the authority of those who have purchased their power at the price of others’ flourishing, those who refuse to enter into relationship with the God who is authority and vulnerability together. Very often, idols drag us down to hell on their own in this life. But if those who seem to end this life having sustained and benefited from tyranny are not ultimately brought to account, the world is the cruelest possible charade. If there is no hell for those who cling to tyranny and refuse mercy, there is no such thing as justice.
But if there is no mercy for those of us who have sought out and benefited from idols, no path out of their grip and back to the flourishing for which we are made, we are desperate people indeed.
Interlude
The Path to Flourishing
What have we learned from this journey around the 2x2 grid?
We have ended up at the real root of the problem: the quest for authority without vulnerability. This quest, which began with our very first parents, haunts the human story and generates the axis of false choice, the line from Exploiting to Suffering, the only alternatives we have ever really known. We live in a world where sin has been, in the fullest sense, institutionalized—where for generation after generation, the privileged and powerful rule without risk, exposing others to the deepest vulnerability while excluding them from true authority. Exploiting and Suffering sum up the tragedy of our whole human history.
But this is not the way it was supposed to be. Our calling is up and to the right. We are meant to experience more and more of the full authority intended for human beings, which can never be separated from the full vulnerability—the ultimate meaningful risk—of entrusting ourselves to one another and to our Creator.
Even in our sin-infested world we get glimpses of this story, too. A healthy human childhood is spent in Safety—protected from risk, not yet invested with authority. As we grow, our parents give us more and more authority, while also allowing us more and more exposure to risk. By portraying our first human parents in a divinely planted garden, Genesis suggests that the whole human drama was meant to follow the same pattern—from the protection and innocence of Eden to the full flourishing, multiplying
and dominion that God intends for his image bearers. Safety to Flourishing is the way it was always meant to be.
How do we move from the story of Exploiting and Suffering to the story of Safety and Flourishing? How do we make space for the safety of childhood without retreating into the apathy of affluence? How do we elevate every member of our communities to the dignity and responsibility of image bearing without succumbing to the temptations of idolatry?
If you have started to ask these questions, you have already begun to be a leader.
Leadership does not begin with a title or a position. It begins the moment you are concerned more about others’ flourishing than you are about your own. It begins when you start to ask how you might help create and sustain the conditions for others to increase their authority and vulnerability together. In a world where many people simply withdraw into safety, where others are imprisoned in the most extreme vulnerability, where others pursue their own unaccountable authority, anyone who seeks true flourishing is already, in many senses, a leader. Isabel, the house cleaner in Santa Barbara whom we met in chapter three, is such a person. Her concern extends far beyond her own circumstances to those she serves, affluent homeowners and immigrant women alike.
