Authority and Democracy—II

Extract

A democratic Church? Last month, in the first part of this article, I discussed certain studies on attitudes to authority and the psychological components of such responses. My point was that awareness of the psychological mechanisms which may underly some of the antagonisms in the Church can perhaps help to ameliorate them. There is however a further and more fundamental question to be raised concerning the structure of the institutional Church. On the one hand its hierarchical organization has the advantages of apparent historical continuity, the visible demonstration of unity and the fact that it is congenial to a considerable proportion of its membership, on the other hand its very attractiveness to people of authoritarian personality has its dangers. People so attracted may try to mould it in their own image, as indeed seems so have happened from time to time in history, so that their preoccupations almost reverse the emphasis of Christ’s teaching on the spontaneous exchange of love.

At this point it is worth recalling the outcome of Lewin, Lippitt and White’s experiment, where spontaneous and mature behaviour was a feature of the democratic group rather than the autocratic group. It may seem facile to draw comparisons between the behaviour of groups of small boys and behaviour within vast and complex organizations like the Church. Furthermore, evidence has been cited that the cultural predispositions of some nations and the personality characteristics of some people mean that they may actively prefer the autocratic situation.

However, a lot of evidence has been accumulating in a variety of disciplines to show that in large organizations as well as small,