Orthodoxy And The End Of The Personality Wars
Calling a truce and working together to build God's kingdom.
Let’s start off with a meme I recently came across:
As far as memes can quickly and humorously get to the truth, this one is perfect. I doubt anyone could improve on this, and I think it serves as a good introduction to a concept I will call the Personality Wars.
Different people have different personality styles, different natures. This is something everyone knows. While some people find it utterly boring to pore over taxonomies of personality, like the Four Classical Temperaments, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or the Enneagram, other people have a lifelong fascination with these same taxonomies. I’m in the latter group.
In a flourishing Christian society, different personality styles are recognized as noble creations of God and are valued about equally, each one having an important role to play in the building and maintaining of God’s Kingdom. American culture, however, has always played favourites, and as Susan Cain pointed out in her 2012 bestseller Quiet: “we make room for a remarkably narrow range of personality styles.” Because of this, cooperation between personalities often is rejected in favour of open warfare, and this is especially true in business, education and religion.
We can see that in this meme. While each of these three churches has a distinct theology that possesses tenets that the other two lack, each church also functions as a combatant in a war of personalities, in the sense that each of these churches is led by certain personality styles and attracts a laity which is usually from that same personality style.
Here’s an overview of our contestants, using the Four Classical Temperaments of Sanguine, Choleric, Phlegmatic and Melancholic.
Pastor Billy Bob represents the Church Of The Cholerics.
Common traits of the Choleric personality:
✔Tough and determined
✔Independent
✔Action-oriented
✔Honest and straightforward
✔Hardworking and driven
✔Logical
✔Pragmatic
❌Insensitive
❌Easily angered
❌Values winning more than being correct
Fictional Examples: Lucy Van Pelt (Peanuts), Dwight Schrute (The Office), Hermione Granger (Harry Potter), Mr. Krabs (SpongeBob SquarePants), Rabbit (Winnie The Pooh)
Country Example: United States
Christian Example: the Apostle Paul
Throughout most of American history, the Cholerics have reigned supreme in many of our institutions. It is the nation’s preferred personality. Ask a foreign author to describe a deeply American character and they will almost inevitably present you with a Choleric personality. Quincey Morris, the Texan adventurer and rancher from Dracula, written by the Irishman Bram Stoker, is a prime example.
Why did the Cholerics become preferred and not, say, the Phlegmatics? To this, I’d answer: first, Cholerics are usually Extroverts, and a “nation of immigrants” will always be disproportionately Extroverted, because immigrating to a new country is usually something Extroverts do. Second, the ethnic group at the core of traditional American culture, the Scots-Irish, is a devoutly Choleric culture; the English-Scottish border region they came from was an unstable warzone for centuries. It was the Scots-Irish whose story became America’s national narrative, giving us famous tough guys like Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, General Patton and John Wayne. Third, the Reformed Theology that many immigrants of the Colonial Era brought with them. Reformed Theology is generally a mixture of common Melancholic and Choleric beliefs, though the Southern Baptist churches, where many Scots-Irish make their spiritual homes, is more purely Choleric. Jonathan Edwards, Billy Sunday and John MacArthur have been popular manifestations of the Pastor Billy Bob archetype.
In recent years, the Church Of The Cholerics has been in decline in much of America. Many Exvangelicals, former Evangelical Protestants who’ve sometimes abandoned Christianity altogether, come from Southern Baptist or similar backgrounds. They will often cite the merciless, justice-obsessed, fire-and-brimstone teachings of these churches as something that inspired them to defect. Of those who stayed Christian, many migrate to Pastor Susan’s church, and some have also made their new homes with Pastor Brody.
Despite being in decline, the Church Of The Cholerics is still formidable today because it managed to influence Non-Church institutions in the United States far more successfully than the other types. This is the style that won Donald Trump two terms in the White House, and why his support is particularly strong among people who identify themselves as Christian, but don’t attend church very often.
Next is Pastor Brody, who represents the Church Of The Sanguines.
Traits of the Sanguine personality:
✔Optimistic
✔Sociable and makes friends easily
✔Affectionate
✔Generous and gregarious
✔Adventure and experience-oriented
✔Lots of fun to be around
✔Loves being in the spotlight
❌Shallow/superficial
❌Hedonistic
❌Easily bored and distracted
Fictional Examples: Snoopy (Peanuts), Michael Scott (The Office), Ron Weasley (Harry Potter), SpongeBob (SpongeBob SquarePants), Tigger (Winnie The Pooh)
Country example: Brazil
Christian example: the Apostle Peter
In recent years, the backlash against Pastor Billy Bob has benefitted Pastor Brody, who has seen his flavour of Protestantism become the dominant one in America, the flavour of the Non-Denominational Church, the Pentecostals and Charismatics. Like Pastor Billy Bob, whose worldview is tied to the American South and Appalachia, Pastor Brody also has his regional tie. His style of church originates in Southern California in the 1960s, with the rise of the counterculture-inspired Jesus People movement, and pastors like Chuck Smith, Rick Warren and Greg Laurie. Anytime you see a group of bubbly, hip young people living a “surfers/skateboarders for Jesus” lifestyle, you know you’re on Pastor Brody’s turf.
The Sanguine personality functions in America the same way that a junior partner functions in a law firm: while they do rule over some institutions (aforementioned contemporary Protestantism and also much of Hollywood and the music world) and while they are considered more desirable than average, especially for women, they rule less than the Choleric senior partners who call most of the shots. In circumstances where the Choleric style falls out of fashion, the American people are likely to nominate the Sanguine as its replacement.
Pastor Brody usually has an intense grudge against Pastor Billy Bob and views his personality and theology as the biggest reason why people leave Christianity. While Pastor Brody usually believes in the existence of hell, he also sees Pastor Billy Bob as too quick to send people there, and too gleeful towards the prospect of their torments. Whatever truth there is in Pastor Brody’s claim, he often refuses to be held accountable for how his efforts to turn Christianity into an entertainment-driven, emotionally overwrought circus, desperate to hitch its wagon to contemporary pop cultural trends in the quest to be liked by others, has led to many of the same results.
Finally, there is Pastor Susan, who represents the Church Of The Melancholics.
Traits of the Melancholic personality:
✔Brilliant
✔Analytical
✔Artistic
✔Perfectionist, has high standards
✔Cautious and Introverted
✔Sober and skeptical
✔A detailed planner
❌Depressive
❌Anxious
❌Pessimistic
Fictional Examples: Linus Van Pelt (Peanuts), Pam Beesly (The Office), Professor Snape (Harry Potter), Squidward (SpongeBob SquarePants), Eeyore (Winnie The Pooh)
Country example: Russia
Christian example: the Apostle John
Unlike the highly-preferred Cholerics and Sanguines, the American mainstream has always had a pronounced, obvious dislike of Melancholics. While New England has a Melancholic tint to its personality, with its glut of universities and intellectualized approach to theology, the Puritan migration of the early 17th century would be dwarfed by the later migrations of less intellectual groups like the aforementioned Scots-Irish, and it didn’t take long before New England, and the Melancholics generally, found themselves firmly thrust out of the American mainstream.1
In American public schools, outnumbered Melancholics are often at the bottom of the social pecking order, mocked as “nerds”, and less interested in athletics than the other three temperaments. In their working lives, the usually Introverted Melancholic is disadvantaged by the explicit preference for Extroverts maintained by many corporations, a deficit of good jobs for artists as a result of philistine Cultural Calvinism, and a general public that seems more interested in amusing itself to death than thinking deeply and carefully about the world.
Many Melancholics respond to this angst-ridden depression and low-status marginalization by adopting a leftist worldview, declaring the status quo unjust and allying with anyone who sees themselves as marginalized or inferior, against their nation’s own culture. This is a big reason why the intellectual or artist is assumed to be liberal by default in America. Note how on The Simpsons, the show’s most obvious Melancholic character, Lisa, is also the show’s liberal. More conservative Melancholics often look to writers like C.S. Lewis, Dostoevsky, or even European-style Nietzscheans, fascists and neopagans, for ideas on how to set the world right.
Pastor Susan is what you get when these more liberal Melancholics entered the clergy of the Mainline Protestant Churches, especially the Episcopalians, the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. and the United Church Of Christ, who have to varying degrees rejected the shared Christian beliefs of two millenniums. As preposterous as it sounds to imagine Christian clergy who view the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ as an irrelevant distraction, or deny it as mere literary metaphor, it’s important to remember that such heresies are the province of powerful minds who’ve decided to use their considerable brainpower to rationalize and deceive. The simpler and more conservative members of these congregations have either left for less heretical sects, or have passed away, and the membership declines of the Mainline denominations are steep enough that their very survival is now in question. Pastor Susan has her power, but the trade-off is a near-total collapse of influence.
Famous Pastor Susans include Harry Emerson Fosdick, Hans Kung, Desmond Tutu and Rachael Held Evans.
All three of these churches seem immensely different but they do have something in common: a narrow, sectarian appeal that cannot reach the entirety of America, let alone the world. By their fruits you will know them, and the inability to find a universally appealing fruit should be an indicator of their overall Truth value.
This is where Orthodoxy, a fast-growing religion of converts in the West, comes in. Years ago, when I started learning about the Orthodox Church, one thing that struck me about it, is that it’s a perfectly balanced Church. It has great appeal to both Extroverts and Introverts. It’s neither Anti-Intellectual or Overly Intellectual. It recognizes that Law comes from God and following it is important, yet is not Legalistic. Its description of God seemed to me a perfect balance of Justice and Mercy.
Orthodoxy retained the mystical and masculine aspects of religion that were long ago pushed to the periphery in the West, causing mystically-minded personalities to abandon Christianity for New Age and Eastern religions, and causing men to loathe the idea of attending Church at all. As my time in Orthodoxy grows longer, this sense of balance has only seemed to strengthen. It’s been profound to contemplate, and I increasingly feel like I’ve solved some giant riddle.
Hierarchies have their place, we do live a hierarchical universe after all, but the Monadnock Review’s opinion is that hierarchies of personality, the Personality War in other words, is completely unnecessary and deeply harmful to the souls of both the victors and the defeated. Winners of the personality wars become prone to the sin of Pride, the losers become prone to the sin of Envy, and both sides nurture the sin of Anger against one another. If a truce were called, all three sins would grow drastically weaker, not just in the Church but in other institutions. The way we call the truce, is to be Orthodox in belief and to live the Orthodox life. As a weekly Orthodox churchgoer for over 6 years, I can confirm that this personality balance is exactly how my parish functions.
The situation for the Melancholics is one I’m especially sympathetic to. Over 60 years ago, historian Richard Hofstadter lamented the lack of religious institutions in the United States which were amenable to deep thinkers and opined that this was a root cause of anti-intellectualism nationwide. There is simply a very tragic scarcity of institutions in America where being Introverted and Intellectual is considered high-status and mainstream. The Orthodox Church is destined to expand in the United States if, for no other reason, that it has great appeal to deep thinkers, and these people need and want religious guidance too. Furthermore, my current belief is that the healthiest Churches have a disproportionate amount of Melancholics among the clergy, just as the healthiest States might have a disproportionate amount of Cholerics at the helm.2
I should also say something about the as-yet-unmentioned Phlegmatic temperament here. Phlegmatics are the “chilled-out” temperament: easygoing and highly adaptable, great at creating harmony between people, but also more prone to apathy or nihilism. While Buddhist culture is stereotyped as being Phlegmatic-dominant, within American Christianity, there doesn’t seem to be a large Church Of The Phlegmatics. The Quakers probably functioned as Phlegmatics centuries ago, but how many Quakers do you know personally?
America doesn’t flat-out dislike Phlegmatics in the same way they dislike Melancholics, but it’s still seen as merely an average temperament, and rarely is chosen for leadership. I would imagine that Phlegmatics are commonly found within all 3 styles of Protestantism, mostly in lay positions.
There’s a time for every purpose under heaven: a time for war and a time for peace. Especially when there was never a good reason for different personalities to ever be at war.
As early as the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the New England states, motivated by a loathing of President Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, attempted to secede from the Union. They tried again when they felt greatly harmed by the War Of 1812.
Lee Kuan Yew, the Founding Father Of Singapore, who reigned as Prime Minister for over 30 years, was a Choleric Statesman and someone I have great admiration for.