Faith in institutions

I'm going to be in a training seminar till late afternoon, so light blogging for most of the day. I did want to say one thing, though.

I'm nearly 40 years old, which makes me part of the generation that was politically acculturated under Ronald Reagan. For as long back as I can remember, I resented the Boomers for their corrosive mistrust of institutions. These people make our country weak, I thought.

Now, though, I identify with them. I have found myself for some time incapable of trusting the Roman Catholic Church institution, because of the child sex abuse scandal. The two things that most undermined my trust: 1) when I said to an archbishop in 2002 that I didn't trust the bishops to take care of the scandal, and he replied that he didn't understand why, if I didn't trust the bishops' competence to handle the scandal, I remained in the Catholic Church; what was so undermining about that was that archbishop's apparent belief that the office of bishop was the substance of the Catholic faith; I thought, "If that's how he sees the faith -- as something defined primarily by blind trust in institutional competence -- then we are in much worse shape than I thought." And 2) when I thought my family had found a good, conservative parish where we could trust the priests, but we later discovered that one of the priests had been formally accused of sex abuse, and the pastor had concealed this from his bishop and most of the parishioners, putting the accused priest to work in violation of church rules.

Given what's happened in Iraq, I find it very, very difficult to trust the president or the political leadership of this country. I'm currently reading "Fiasco," which documents chapter-and-verse the deceit and cowardice from on high that got us into this damn war. I'll be blogging extensively on it when I'm done, but let me strongly encourage all of you to read it, especially if you, like me, supported this war because you believed what Bush, Rumsfeld and others said about it. Especially if you, like me, voted for George W. Bush. Reading that book is for me to feel all the trust that Reagan had built up in my generation collapsing under the weight of the outright arrogance and deceit of government officials. God help the poor Army, which is going to have to relive the post-Vietnam rebuilding all over again.

And let's not even mention the government incompetence regarding New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina. In fact, the very moment that turned me off Bush was "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

The point I wish to discuss here is not whether or not it's right or wrong to lose faith in the Church as an institution, or the US Government, or the military. What I'd like to know is if others are feeling the same way, and if so, what does that mean? What do we do about it? After I started digging into the Catholic sex abuse scandal, I concluded at some point that I would be depressed as hell if one of my boys went into the priesthood under this kind of leadership; I would support him in his calling, but I would be against it in my heart, and would fear for him and grieve for his suffering as he submitted himself to such rotten leadership. It occurred to me as well after reading "Cobra II" (and "Fiasco" is by far the more readable of the two books) that I'd feel the same way if my boys were old enough to enlist right now. I would be proud of their nobility, but I couldn't feel good about them serving their country under such leadership as George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld.

I say these things as a conservative who never imagined he'd be in this place. How many others feel the same way? And what do we do about it? Society can't go on without faith in its institutions. What will it take to renew and rebuild that faith? Are we wrong to have lost it in the first place? (Note well that I'm not talking about having lost faith in the idea of the Church, or the Military, or the Presidency; I'm talking about the institutions as they currently exist, under the present leadership.)

I think I'm turning into the same kind of acid skeptic as an old friend and professor of mine who served in Vietnam, and who came back despising the government. I used to think his skepticism-bordering-on-cynicism was an eccentricity; now I'm thinking it was hard-won wisdom. What do you think?

UPDATE: Out of one meeting, back into another here in a sec. I wanted to clarify that what I'm talking about is not coming to accept that Humans Are Flawed And Life Is Tragic. That's something all grown-ups do, or should do. I'm talking specifically about what happens when you, for good or bad reasons, have come to the conclusion that you cannot trust the leadership of a particular vital institution to do the right thing? I mean this particularly when the stakes are extremely high. It doesn't matter to me all that much that I've given up on expecting good service at my neighborhood drug store. The failure of that institution matters very, very little. It matters to me a lot more that it's hard to trust public schools in Dallas to do the right thing. It matters to me still more whether or not I can trust the news media to give me balanced, accurate and useful information, because I form my opinions based largely on what I learn through the various media. But when you get to the point of not being able to trust the Church or the Commander-in-Chief -- well, that's a very big deal indeed, at least to me as a father of boys. Guiding my reading of "Fiasco" is the thought: what if my sons were older, and were fighting under arms in Iraq now? How would I feel about what I'm reading? What if the stakes involved the lives of my children? Because they involve the lives of a lot of people's children -- and husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, and so forth. What if I came to believe as a soldier or the close relative of one that the military and civilian leadership of this country -- including Congress -- had sent me or my loved one to risk his life on pretenses they knew, or had every reason to know, were false. And had sent them into battle with an abysmal plan, because their own ideological blinders kept them from seeing what they didn't want to see, and listening to informed voices of dissent that tried to make them understand what we were getting into?

I don't see how we can get along as a society without fundamentally trusting key institutions like the Church (and not just the Roman Catholic Church), the Government and the Military. Of course we recognize that they are flawed institutions, and will always be, but there's a such thing as fundamental trust that, on balance, they'll do the right thing on the most important matters. What happens if you lose that?