The Crowd: Gold Coins for the Future

We all know the madness of following the crowd, and yet…in the moment, when all the pressure within a certain group reaches a boiling point, it feels inevitable to succumb and obey.

We may be well aware that the person or topic we’re being asked to condone is slanted sideways or even outright foul. Nevertheless, that pressure increases when we know that resistance will cost us and then, even more horrifying, cost those we love in very tangible ways. In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn painted this human frailty so brilliantly:

• At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up…For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the “stormy applause, rising to an ovation,” continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin. However, who would dare be the first to stop? …After all, NKVD men [state security] were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who quit first!
   
• And in that obscure, small hall, unknown to the Leader, the applause went on – six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! …The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man!
   
• With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! …Then after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. 
   
• …That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different.
   
• But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of his interrogation, his interrogator reminded him: “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”

Reflecting upon why some individuals were able to resist the pressure of the socialist party and their demented ‘new world’, Solzhenitsyn wrote, “Without even knowing it ourselves, we were ransomed by the small change in copper that was left from the golden coins our great-grandfathers had expended, at a time when morality was not considered relative and when the distinction between good and evil was very simply perceived by the heart.”  
 

Oh, the nostalgia for simpler times of morality! Those are not our days, but perhaps they weren’t our grandparents’ days either.

Social pressure often gets talked about as if it’s phenomenon exclusively in the lives of modern teenagers, but we face it at all stages of life, almost regardless of where we are. It has existed in all times from the days of Noah building his ark alone to Daniel being offered contaminated meat to our grandparents in the decadence of the Roaring Twenties. What’s more, social pressure isn’t always a bad thing. At times, it encourages a group to uphold standards, whether it’s a workplace that requires all employees to fulfill their hours and job duties or it’s a church that requires its leadership to maintain moral standards among one another and in their own households.

The Apostle Paul frankly charged his young protégé Timothy to uphold a firm standard of faith and discipline among the believers. “I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry” (2 Timothy 4:1-5, ESV).

Other places in scripture back up this command, showing it was not exclusively for Timothy alone. “He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it” (Titus 1:9).

In his letter to Timothy, however, Paul also pointed out that there would inevitably come people who would cause difficulties for believers because they would appear like they belonged, “having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. …Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so these men also oppose the truth, men corrupted in mind and disqualified regarding the faith” (2 Timothy 3:5,8).

Tyndale House notes, “…you find that these names appear in the literature from the Qumran community (the Dead Sea Scrolls), in several other Jewish sources, and even in the Latin language writers Pliny and Apuleius. They seem to have been names given to the sorcerers who worked for Pharaoh at the time of the Exodus.” Paul is comparing some people in the church who seem to have considerable influence over other believers to the two magicians who supported Pharoah against Moses. That’s a pretty stiff indictment, but then again, Paul wasn’t the sort to mince words.

Social pressure can move people to conform to the will of another in an unhealthy way, whether it’s overworking and neglecting family members to fill work quotas or building a pharisaical ‘accountability’ structure in our church that quietly promotes hollow relationships and backstabbing social jockeying for positions of power and favor with leadership. Leaders or believers like the sort that Paul called out can become consumed with self-interest or hidden sins and end up opposing godly leaders and demanding that others follow them.

How do we tell the difference between enforcing principled standards and crushing others’ will in favor of our own? What is the road-marker for rebuking arrogance or sin in fellow believers and unfairly silencing critics or crushing the weak? Where is the line between requiring due honor for leaders as the Bible commands and punishing the first person who stops clapping? We want to prepare ourselves and others to stand against the tide of an evil culture and perverse demands, but in order to do so, we cannot mirror a secular style of leadership within the church.

As the United States’ culture rapidly spirals toward the depravity that Solzhenitsyn witnessed within his own country, the church must find the balance between maintaining that morality is not relative and yet also not falling into demanding blind conformity from its people. This is not simply to stand out, although it will certainly do that too. In finding this healthy balance, the church could prepare believers to readily discern cults of personality, true biblical ethics, and unhealthy pressure to kowtow in order to flatter egos and make other people more comfortable.
 

We could prepare a generation to not applaud evil at all.

Too often solutions to these types of issues are oversimplified, either by necessity of space and time or by simply the overwhelming magnitude of the problem faced. How do we prepare the church to resist a dictatorial and evil culture without replicating its tyranny internally through legalism? Solzhenitsyn alludes to the answer that is both painfully simple and its own level of complex when he references what his people’s great-grandfathers gained for them in terms moral direction. The Apostle Paul also pointed to the answer. “As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry” ” (2 Timothy 4:5).

Christian psychologist Henry Cloud put it this way: “…the nature of reality is that we can only deal with it to the level of our integrity of character. There are no shortcuts, tricks, ‘fooling it,’ or any other way to be successful if we do not possess the stuff that each situation is demanding from us. We must bend the knee to the necessity for personal development… Instead of compensating for incompleteness by asking our areas of strength to do things they were not designed to do, we can begin to gain the strength that real integrity provides: no cracks in the armor.”

This is no generalized solution or easy task. In fact, it will be a lifetime of work.

Part of this work begins by wrestling with the complex issues of our day and not shying away from them with pat moralizing answers that we expect others to not challenge. If the latter had been the best way to follow God and develop holy character, Jesus would’ve been on the side of the religious leaders in his day. As it was, he never criticized their dedication to God’s law; instead, he constantly underscored their pride, hypocrisy, and lack of grace and compassion for the fallen. It was a state that the Apostle Paul, former Pharisee himself, might’ve had in mind when he wrote, “Never be wise in your own sight. Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all” (Romans 12:16-17).

This constant labor toward integrating God’s commands into every aspect of our lives, every relationship, every interaction with other people is what lends us the intuitive ability to resist both secular social norms and religiously dictatorial mindsets.  “Solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil” (Hebrew 5:14).

This work seems small and thankless, performed over many unseen conversations and interactions through the course of years. It is the websites we do not go to, the topics of talk we do not indulge, the fearmongering we do not weld against others to make them agree with us, the truths we hold to despite other’s frustration with it and us, the grace we hold for brothers and sisters in pain, the forgiveness and thoughtful love we offer those who lash out at us, the quiet disciplines of prayer and study in scripture we continue day after day. We must operate in both impossible strength through the Spirit and little, mundane choices minute by minute.

Suddenly, the curtains are torn back. Our convictions and practices are now upon a public stage. A crowd watches and howls that we bow to the bent standards they have created and by which they are being crushed. “Join us! Join us! Don’t you dare make us stare our own feebleness in the face!” Long seasons of discipline are our firmest friends and the starch in our spines. However, it is that and far more.

Our character, forged by the Holy Ghost and purified again and again in the crucible of resisting the crowd’s mindless sway, will be the gold coins we impart to our children and the future generations.