Meritocracy

“For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” – Romans 5:7-8

We live in a moral ecology, writes David Brooks, built on assumptions that include “the centrality of accomplishment”: we are not measured by how well we conform to code, or the “thickness” of our relationships, “but by what we have individually achieved… promoting the self is the prime mission.” One New Yorker article describes how this works when it comes to education: up to high school, you just need to show up. But college is different. It’s a bottleneck, a sorting mechanism. “You are either selected or rejected. And it matters where… The narrower the entryway, the broader the range of opportunities on the other side. College, in turn, sorts by qualifying some students for graduate and professional education… And graduate and professional education then sorts for the labor market. It’s little gold stars all the way up.”

Little gold stars all the way up. Even as someone who has outwardly stepped off the escalator of career ambition, I’m finding that it’s incredibly difficult not to apply some system of meritocracy to everything else: my parenting, my housekeeping, my marriage, my ministry, my hobbies. My spiritual life. Soaked deep into me is the assumption that my accomplishments determine my value. I like to think, oh, I’m beyond wanting to get into Harvard, but really, it isn’t that simplistic, and it never was. There’s a good thing in me, that wants to be excellent, that thrives best with challenging goals, but I live in a world based on meritocracy, so immersed in it that we can’t even tell we are. I have to constantly distinguish between good thing for God’s glory and good thing that makes me good. Between effort and fruit, between self-justifying works and holy discipline. And the line between those things can be thin.

The most spiritually formative experiences in my life have been those that cause me to hit the limits of my merit. Marriage. Parenting. And now I can add to the list: quarantine. Even starting off with all the advantages I could have—a spacious house, no need to work, a healthy family foundation—I am struggling to accomplish it all, to homeschool, parent, housekeep, cook, write, self-care, support a necessarily absent spouse. I’ve let creep in, as I so easily do with any new venture, this silent but deadly belief that I ought to be able to, even that I am measured by how well I do it. Part of what this time is doing is confronting me with the functional meritocracy in my life. This is what Paul was trying to do in Romans. He is saying, the way that God loves you has nothing to do with what you have accomplished. More than that, it has nothing to do with how you have messed up. Jesus says you alone are worth his life, completely apart from anything you have or haven’t done. How would my life look different if I truly believed this?