Part of my day job is parsing the human brain, as it is specifically applied to social thinking, group dynamics and communication. To that end, I’ve worked for 13 years with a colleague at the University of Texas26 on a cognition theory that harmonizes the pieces and parts of the human brain with social behavior, decision-making, and what we know of the human past.
I won’t bore you with the long words – not many of them, anyway – but in a nutshell, it is possible to profile any person by positioning them on three scales: social group model preference, sensitivity to risk, and openness to change. If you know where a person falls on each of those scales, you’ll be able to anticipate many of their behaviors and predict how they will interact in groups.
Authoritarian/Egalitarian. Some minds are more comfortable when their social group’s decisions are made by consensus, with everyone having input and no one person dominating – they prefer an Egalitarian social environment. Others prefer to be in an authority hierarchy, taking their behavioral cues from a strong leader and ceding decision-making power to that leader – we describe such people as Authoritarian.
Opportunity-Scanning/Threat-Scanning. Human minds differ greatly in their sensitivity to risk. People who are highly risk-sensitive tend to be very wary, uneasy with uncertainty, suspicious of strangers, and combative when frightened; we’ll call them Threat-Scanners. Those who are not risk-sensitive may be incautious, but tend to be hungry for exploration, risk be damned; they are more sensitive to Opportunity, and scan the horizon for it constantly – call them Opportunity-Scanners.
Novelty-Seeking/Uniformity-Seeking. Finally, there are brains that thrive on the new-and-different, and those that find comfort in the tried-and-true. The latter brain doesn’t care for change, and functions more effectively when dealing with the familiar: that’s a Uniformity-Seeker. At the other end, we find someone who loves to be surprised, whose quest for the unfamiliar and unusual is a driving force – a Novelty-Seeker.
Now, let’s be clear: almost nobody anywhere is all one way or another. We all are somewhat acquiescent to authority and somewhat open to consensus decision – we all obey the policeman and we all resent the friend who forces a restaurant choice on the group. There’s no all-or-nothing placement on these scales; we each exist in degrees on all of them.
But they’re a handy tool for understanding groups – because we tend to huddle into social collectives with people of our own cognitive type, when possible – to gather into cognitive clusters.
Why is he telling us this?
I’m telling you this because the two areas of life where we tend to huddle together with people of our own cognitive type are, coincidentally, the two domains of conversation your mother told you never to fall prey to when you are not in a group of people of your own cognitive type: Politics and Religion!
And we can understand why, advancing our ongoing discussion of Fundamentalism, using this model.
You probably have a Fundamentalist or two in your life, perhaps in your family – or, at the least, you’ve known a few in your life. Let’s see where they fall on our scales.
Is the person you’re thinking of more Authoritarian or Egalitarian? That’s a no-brainer; Fundamentalists/Evangelicals are very authority-driven, transparently so - always looking up for direction, always ceding decisions and behavioral choices to the authorities in charge of their group.
Risk sensitivity? Does the person you have in mind see a lot of danger in the world? Are they wary of strangers, or people unlike themselves? Do they stick with other Evangelicals more than they get out into the world among people who aren’t? Chances are this describes that person – they're a Threat-Scanner.
Finally, does this person embrace the new-and-different? Or do they have a very fixed idea of how the world should be? Do they welcome those outside the Evangelical fold, or treat them suspiciously? Odds are, the latter. They want their world to stay as it is – they're a Uniformity-Seeker.
Fundamentalist/Evangelicals tend to be (A)uthoritarian (T)hreat-scanning (U)niformity-seekers – ATUs.
In our discussions, we haven’t talked much about the personalities of the people we’ve encountered, because we’re taking it all in through the eyes of a young Midwestern boy growing up in another time. But this is the lens through which I see it all now – and it’s clear that the events documented here aren’t just to some extent about personality; they’re entirely about personality.
These attributes don’t just describe the Fundamentalist; they define the Fundamentalist.
It’s true that not everyone in a typical Evangelical church has exactly the same personality; walk into any one of them and you’ll find a significant range. But that range won’t be extreme; it will be wide variations on a theme.
To underscore this point, let’s look at the ATU’s opposite: the (E)galitarian (O)pportunity-scanning (N)ovelty-seeker – the EON.
Such a person isn’t interested in taking orders from on high; they want to work out decisions dynamically, in a group, with everyone’s input; they aren’t easily rattled, and might even be too casual about the dangers in the world; and they are fine with change, and with new people, even people very different from themselves.
You probably know some people like that. You may be someone like that.
How long would that person last in an Evangelical church?
Such people can sometimes be found in such churches, but they are very rare – the exception that proves the rule.
Finally, let’s apply all of this thinking to the churches we’ve talked about – the Campbellites and their estranged cousins, the Disciples of Christ.
The Campbellites are very ATU – submissive to top-down authority, with very little wiggle room in hierarchical autonomy; very wary of the world, seeing it as a dark, sinister place intent on destroying their church; and they are all about tradition, clutching their old ways fiercely.
The DoCs are very different. Where the Campbellites give lip service to congregational autonomy, the DoCs actually practice it, letting each group discuss among themselves what they think best. They not only embrace change, they are constantly monitoring what works and doesn’t in the context of the real world and adapting to it; and they are all about novelty – they welcomed women into ministry and leadership ages ago. They are EON, through-and-through.
Does this resonate with your own observations of the church?
I couldn’t see all of this, back in the day; I was too close to it. But when I got into the study of personality with my Texas colleague, our observations of the behaviors of congregational groups were very informative in developing our ideas about how the social brain works. More on that later...
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