The Episcopal Church is frequently advertised as a thinking person's church. Surely we have all seen the tracts and the clever posters that market us that way. We like to contrast ourselves favorably to those fundamentalistic churches in which independent thought is discouraged for the sake of group identity and policy. "The Lord don't cut off your head when he saves you" is a saying to which many in the Episcopal Church could subscribe (once they had corrected the grammar, of course). I wonder, though, how truly our image of ourselves matches our reality.

The description of ourselves as a thinking person's church is an exaggeration. From the bishop in his or her chair to the lay person in the pew, we are hesitant to think for ourselves. We value conformity over personal conviction. For example, if one wanted to create a process designed to produce "group think," one could not do better than the typical ordination process in the typical Episcopal diocese. It seems diabolically designed to snuff out any capacity for independent thinking possessed by the entering aspirant. By the time the aspirant comes out the other end, he will probably not know what he actually thinks but rest assured he will be certain of what he is supposed to think.

Someone who had the power to recommend me for a job asked me recently what I thought of the diocese in which I was seeking employment. I lied by saying that it had a lot of talented and sophisticated people in it. That was a lie of omission, not commission. What I omitted (for obvious reasons) was that it was also the most systemically dysfunctional place I had ever visited!

This seemingly odd pairing of talent and dysfunction is not so odd when seen from a systems perspective. It is common for creative and talented people to become predictably uncreative when caught up in systemic dynamics that enforce conformity (and they all, by definition, do). Systems have rules that make them the systems they are, and we all find it easier, more natural, to conform to these rules than to think beyond them and, perhaps, transform them.

Further, it occurred to me that the dynamic of this particular diocesan system that linked talent and dysfunction was that of politics (so what' s new?). By politics I mean actions and/or words that are intended to appeal to the perceived preferences of the majority. So defined, politics is a negative dynamic wherever taking a personal stand, regardless of the preferences of the majority, is considered to be a virtue.

In order to take such a stand, one must either think for oneself or simply choose (for various psychosocial reasons) that which everyone else doesn't, and because they don't. My concern here is not with those who choose the latter, although they can be irritating, but with the independent thinkers, for there are frighteningly few in the church today. I am distressed that church members rarely take such non-political stands, and that we so rarely think for ourselves.

The diocese to which I have referred reflects the national culture, and I can imagine someone from there protesting that we are drowning in individualism, and that the problem is precisely the reverse of that which I have described: There are too many people thinking for themselves and taking personal stands. Our grounding in community has been washed away in the tide of rampant individualism.

While there is obvious point to this protest, paradoxically, the individualism that is being protested is not that of a distinct individual self, but that of the crowd, an individualism that is consistent with Soren Kierkegaard's category of the aesthetic. Within an aesthetic lifestyle, as Kierkegaard envisioned it, one is free from the ethical commitments that would inhibit one from doing as the impulse of the moment dictates. One simply follows the interests of the moment, no matter how fringe they may be. While such a lifestyle certainly gives the impression of individuals doing as they please, Kierkegaard would argue that beneath the superficial seeming, there is no individual there at all; a distinct self has not yet emerged to direct the flux of passions that is the person.

Such apparent individualism is simply conformity to a culture that prizes aesthetic "freedom," a freedom that is nothing more than a reflection of the values and thought patterns of the crowd. Within this crowd there may be many characters, but no individuals of character and so no independent thought and no authentic personal stands.

In a manner reminiscent of Kierkegaard, Murray Bowen, the brilliant and enigmatic family systems theorist, would perhaps argue that our problem is that church members today are not very differentiated. That is, we have difficulty being a self within a social system. Instead, we tend to fuse with the group and lose, or never realize, a distinct identity. The reason, he might propose, for this fusion is that we allow the anxiety of the moment to overwhelm us, and we react from our emotional system, rather than from our intellectual system. The emotional system houses our instinctive reactivity to the emotional flow of our social group.

Imagine the way that anxiety flows through a herd of antelope when a lion is nearby and you get a good picture of how the emotional system works. The intellectual system, on the other hand, directs the uniquely human (or so we assume) capacity for independent and rational thought. It enables us to decide rather than simply react. Because of it, we have the possibility of saying, "I think, I believe," etc. One can only guess at the reasons for the anxiety that is flowing through the church at this moment, but it is overwhelming us, leading us to bypass our intellectual system, and making us a jumpy, and not very thoughtful, herd.

Finally, while Jesus does call us into community, he also, and first, calls us as individuals, to be individuals. He calls us by name. The requirement of his call is the grace of it: to become a self, an individual, and a thinking one at that. Indeed, "the Lord don't cut off your head when he saves you." On the contrary, he gives you permission and power to use it, perhaps for the first time.

I am concerned that in the politically charged atmosphere of today's church, our anxiety is preventing us from hearing and obeying this call. In spite of our marketing slogans (aimed at the crowd, of course), we are becoming a reactive church rather than a thinking one. o

The Rev. Patrick Barker is a priest of the Diocese of Arkansas residing in the Diocese of Los Angeles.