Why Our Institutions Fail Us

Thursday, July 9, 2026

Trust in our institutions is eroding rapidly.  Is it any wonder?  Yesterday Graham Platner dropped out of the race.  Something in our electoral system failed, deeply, for him to get as far as he did.  Whoever replaces him as the Democratic candidate will be the result of a process other than the one we expect – another institutional fail.  We saw the same fail in the last Presidential with the Biden/Harris swap.  How is it, in a free country, we keep getting dictated to?  What’s gone wrong when a regulatory state makes things grossly more expensive, but can’t keep us safe in the stands for a soccer match?  What we think we know, we don’t…justice seems impossible…media spews nonsense…our public servants turn out to be self-serving.  The evidence is strong that our lack of faith in institutions is well deserved.

Yesterday we looked at “cheap grace” as the concept relates to the now failed, always flawed, MOU with Iran.  I summarized the idea, borrowed from Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

I would summarize it by saying cheap grace is cheap because it fails to understand just why grace is necessary.  It views God’s grace as saying the easy “Bless you” after a sneeze rather than as the overcoming, through massive sacrifice and discipline, of the deep and abiding evil that resides in the human heart that it actually is.

We fail to see that evil primarily because to see it in the other, we are forced see it in ourselves.  And so we exhibit “suicidal empathy.”  Our institutions fail us because we seek to express ourselves rather than improve ourselves.  We accept the unacceptable in the name of love rather than understand that love should protect us from self-harm.

The analogy I typically use and have used in these spaces before – a small child has an overwhelming desire to place his hands in the flame of a gas range.  Is it loving to let him express that desire and end up with third degree burns, or is it more loving to tell him “No”…and when that fails to knock his hand away…and when that fails to pop his bottom?  I think most of us would say that the second option, despite its potential to escalate punitively, is the more loving option.

Our institutions fail because the people in them are not well formed – they were allowed to stick their hand in the flame and the pain they suffered makes them even meaner than their parent.  No one has taught them decent morality and they think the world serves them instead of understanding the most basic Christian moral standard.  They fail to understand that none of us is worth a tinker’s d#$% without God’s infinite, and expensive, grace.

The irony is that when we do not trust our institutions, we fail to see that such means we do not trust ourselves.  After all, our institutions are comprised of people.  To criticize and condemn our institutions misses the point entirely because they are not the root of the problem – particularly when we are talking about institutions that have served us well for long periods of time. We are the root of the problem.

If we want improved institutions we have to start by improving ourselves.  Unfortunately, I cannot “fix” you.  I can try to convince you to fix yourself, but the job is ultimately yours.  What I do know is that my efforts to so convince you will be far more convincing if I am simultaneously working to fix myself.  So that is my first priority.  I pray that with God’s grace I have had a modicum of success.