The founders of our constitutional republic knew what it was like to journey into in the lair of the great dragon, that ancient beast who has hunted and maimed the human race since before the dawning of written history. The lair is always filled with dead men’s bones and the beast’s rotten, living breath. The founder’s investigation pressed on into the darkness and stench with paper and goose quill in hand; they reeled and retreated only after their weak lantern finally flickered against the now gaping sharp-toothed mouth. Now fast behind them, the dragon’s serrated claws slashed at their calves and back as they made their safe exit.

That small band of educated, adventurous revolutionaries wisely discerned the threat of this ancient beast, and they became the repositories of a truth that was then so fresh yet today so easily forgotten: communities need not fear the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Communities rather need fear that ancient beast, that lust for power latent in the hearts of all men. As the constitution’s founders prepared their document, they could peer into the dragon’s lair by looking to themselves and to their neighbor.

The founder’s intimacy with this dark enemy gave them the wisdom they needed to fashion a government of laws and not of men, a government balanced between the will of the majority and the rights of the person.   Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. There could not be a stronger situationist statement.  The corrupt man does not corrupt the community. Rather, power corrupts the man. A bad tree puts forth bad fruit, and by a similar statistical relation, a bad barrel is where we find the ‘bad apples.’ Power just is the social situation in which one man or one dominant group owns the technology of control. 

Later in life, after a visitation from this ancient monster, some of us come to learn that it is this dragon’s lair that gives meaning to those droning grown-up words we recall from junior high: ‘checks and balances.’ It was far too easy to understand ‘checks and balances’ in terms of the ‘stocks and bonds’ of the class after and the ‘x and y axis’ of the class before. The checks and balances of social power – political power – is something far more sacred than this; checks and balances of political power is a correlate of our judicial system’s taming of the Furies. We hang by a thread over the twin fiery pits of vengeance and tyranny. How sweet yet how delicate is that thread of checks and balances.

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By means of our community-living here in coastal North County San Diego, I came to find out about the historical checks and balances of a medium sized congregation just up the 101 highway from here, Carlsbad Community Church.    For eighty years the constitution of this church provided stability. Power was divided between three equal branches of church government. The dragon had been making appearances within the church walls for a decade, but it was over the last two years that the beast was entirely unleashed. A small dominant group surrounding a vicious politician – who was then their new pastor – gained too much power, and the techniques for collapsing three branches of government into one were wielded with praiseworthy success.  After years of steady news coverage of the Bush administration, these techniques would have been all too well known, but the efficiency and stealth by which these men worked is to be commended. 

Former President Bush’s brain is same in type to all human mammals. It should not be surprising, then, that the successful grasp of power by the new dominant males at Carlsbad Community Church would release the same reason-numbing brain chemicals. The new leaders blinded themselves to the inventible aftermath. As the checks and balances quickly disintegrated, so did the attendance and so did the money. The congregation shrank from 1000 to 400! 

Were there protests?  Well, of course. . . . . (more…)