Failing
I am hoping for failure in theological education.
By all metrics of institutional and financial success, we know that progressive academic theological education in the US is failing. After decades of decline, enrollment across ATS schools seemed to stabilize in 2014. That’s in the aggregate. Look closer, and you’ll see that some schools are growing exponentially. Students are flocking to theologically conservative seminaries like Liberty University (widely known to be founded by racist segregationists), but not to schools where you’ll find impassioned teachers of liberation theology or advocates of social transformation in the name of queer love and racial justice.
Notwithstanding a temporary influx in 2020, enrollment at mainline Protestant seminaries in the US has been circling the drain since 2002.
We know the causes of this kind of failure. Membership and participation in mainline Christian institutions have been in decline for decades. Denominations have been torn apart by theological divides over whether to ordain, marry, or even recognize the human dignity of LGBTQ+ folks. Add to this a very public marriage between Christianity and a political movement built on violent devotion to American exceptionalism, militarism, capitalism, and white supremacy. In this context, many Americans are suspicious of Christianity. Demand for an education that helps you become a Christian leader committed to justice and the church is barely alive. For many, such revolutionary religious leadership is simply inconceivable.
And yet, there are faithful people organizing and fighting for a different and better world: dreamers who pursue alternative economies, building networks that refuse to grant additional returns for billionaire technocrats; healers who are forging new circuitries of care and education, democratic communities of belonging that do not hinge on or reproduce the racism, sexism, and classism that got us here. But those people who are changing the world every day in big and small ways are no longer interested in attending seminary to learn why or how to do that work.
I echo my colleagues and share their critiques of contemporary theological education as well as their hopeful call towards different futures. Too often, we prioritize authoritative approaches rather than seeking invitational models. We rely on bureaucracy and administration when we should be pursuing practices of humanization and conversion. We privilege revenue over revival. We assume the instruments of institutional governance are neutral, even as they discipline us into the worlds we say we faithfully oppose.
In our current configuration of progressive theological education, we are failing to meet metrics of institutional success, failing to provide the formation needed by transformational leaders today, and failing our own professed commitments to justice and liberative futures. Theological education is failing, but it’s failing in the wrong ways.
Perhaps we need to reconceive and recover ways we can pursue and practice failure. Maybe we can fail differently, and better, and otherwise.
There are other kinds of failure that attend and empower communities to construct new worlds instead of capitulating to the powers and principalities that control this dying one.[1] If we can attend carefully to the work of leaders who aren’t in seminary, we might see forms of refusal and failure that harbor revolutionary political and spiritual import.
Artists are failing mainstream metrics of “success” by refusing commodification and algorithmic co-option in favor of communal joy, solidarity, and wild, untethered creativity. Community advocates are obstructing the violent incarceration of their undocumented neighbors and building mutual aid networks to feed families who are not “authorized” to receive government aid, thus failing to be “good” U.S. citizens while concretely practicing hospitality and interdependence.
Generative failure is not always spectacular. It’s messy and mundane. And it’s certainly not always pleasant or comfortable.
I hope that spaces of theological education can pursue these kinds of failure even as we remain entangled with systems that yield only profit for the powerful. We have resources in the traditions we teach that testify to faith that motivates people to abandon hegemonic family, economic, and political structures. Often, despite our lack of support or acknowledgment, our students are modelling such radical forms of failure, betraying and refusing pathways that promise “good citizenship,” “family values,” and “economic security.” Beyond the classroom, they pray at protests and pray in protest, refusing to practice a faith that authorizes genocide or for-profit warmongering.
If we center such failures and refuse success, prestige, and loyalty in the ways that our extractive systems demand, what will we have to relinquish? What forms of expertise and administration must we unlearn or forget for seminaries to become spaces of righteous and revolutionary failure rather than sites of well-managed decline?
A turn to radical failure requires devoted attention to where life is already flourishing elsewhere and invites us into an abiding love for what remains sacred in our relations with all beings when governments, markets, and democracy fail.[2]For public theologians and educators, the question remains: will we join our students, neighbors, and kin in the risky work of failing otherwise?
[1] I am thinking here with queer scholars like Jack Halberstam and Sara Ahmed.
[2] Thinking this way about failure returns me to the apophatic movements of long-dead theologians like Dionysius and more contemporary apophatic thinkers like Fred Moten, who are keen to outline ways failure, refusal, rupture, and impossibility allow us to encounter the divine and the divine in others. As Marika Rose has pointed out, such a theological reconsideration of failure can be generative without reinstating purity or redemption.