It’s amazing how much smarter everyone else gets when I take antidepressants. 

It makes sense that the drugs work on other people, because there’s nothing in me to fix. I am a perfect and wise arbiter of not only my own behavior but everyone else’s, which is a heavy burden because some of ya’ll are terrible at life. You date the wrong people. You take several seconds longer than necessary to order at the bagel place. And you continue to have terrible opinions even after I explain the right one to you. But only when I’m depressed. When I’m not, everyone gets better at merging from two lanes to one.

This effect is not limited by the laws of causality or time. Before I restarted Wellbutrin, my partner showed me this song. 

My immediate reaction was, “This is fine, but what if it were sung in the style of Johnny Cash singing Hurt?” My partner recorded that version on GarageBand for my birthday, and I loved it, which means I was capable of enjoying things and thus not suffering from distorted cognition, just in case you were wondering. But I restarted Wellbutrin just to see what would happen, and suddenly the original recording had become the kind of song you can’t describe because you sound too sappy, so all you can say is it brings you to tears. My partner couldn’t tell the difference, so my theory is that because I was the one who took the drug to make the song better, only I remember the old, mediocre version. 

The effect extends to physical objects. As previously mentioned, I spent the first half of 2024 laid up with mold poisoning. For about half of that time, I knew the problem was under the bed* (I’d recently bought a storage bed that was completely surrounded with drawers). In that time I bought dozens of air filters, spent $4k on getting my entire house scrubbed and set up a ventilation system under my bed. I did everything except replace the mattress. This was due to the mattress being too heavy for any human being to lift and everyone was too busy to help me. 

And even if I had found mold in the mattress, what could I have done about it? The websites for mattresses and bed frames are labyrinths that require feats of strength and skill to defeat. Nor was it possible to get the mattress out of my apartment, so it would just continue leaking the spores in a slightly different place. 

Then I restarted a second antidepressant (Abilify, 2mg). The mattress was still too heavy for me, but suddenly light enough that it wasn’t an unspeakable imposition to ask my partner to flip it against the wall. And at the exact same time, the manufacturer’s website simplified itself so I could not only order a copy of my current mattress, but ask for a discount because my old one was so new (it worked! They give half off if you waive return rights). Less than a week after I started Abilify I was sleeping on a new mattress on a new frame, the old mattress and frame were at the dump, and my mold symptoms began to ease. 

Given how well they work, taking antidepressants seems downright prosocial, so why are some people reluctant to try them? Sometimes they’re concerned that antidepressants work too well and turn everyone into a happy zombie. This is based on the fallacy that antidepressants work on you rather than on your environment. The fact that everyone is suddenly better at lane merges doesn’t make me incapable of being sad about medical setbacks. If having your world-is-easy meter set two steps higher seems like a bad thing, consider that that may itself be a symptom of your world-is-easy meter being set too low. 

Pills aren’t the only way to make the outside world bend to your will, of course. Diet and exercise have a great reputation in this arena, matched only by the complete lack of effect of wishing for good diet and exercise. Luckily, one of the ways antidepressants change the environment is making weights lighter, lung capacity higher, and food take fewer steps to prepare. So if you’ve spent a few years knowing you should improve your diet and exercise routine without managing to get over the hump to actually doing it, maybe it’s time to give the everything-is-easier pill a try. Especially because the benefits extend not only to you, but to everyone on the highway with you. 

Caveats

I’ve had an unusually good experience with antidepressants and psychiatrists. The first two antidepressants I tried worked very well for me (the second one is only for when things get really bad). I didn’t have to cycle through psychiatrists much either.

The most popular antidepressants are SSRIs, which I’ve never taken. My understanding is they are less likely (and slower) to work and have a worse side-effect profile than Wellbutrin, whose dominant side effects are weight loss and increased libido (but also insomnia and a slight increase in seizure risk). I’ve heard of good reasons not to start with Wellbutrin, like a family history of seizures or being underweight, but (I AM AN INTERNET WEIRDO NOT A DOCTOR) they seem underutilized to me. 

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Patrick LaVictoire and the Roots of Progress Blog Building Fellowship for comments and suggestions. Thanks to CoFoundation and my Patreon patrons for financial support. 

*Medicine being what it is I’m still only 95% that this was the cause, and was less certain yet before I got the mattress off the frame and examined it

I’m going to describe a Type Of Guy starting a business, and you’re going to guess the business:

1. The founder is very young, often under 25. 
2. He might work alone or with a founding team, but when he tells the story of the founding it will always have him at the center.
3. He has no credentials for this business. 
4. This business has a grand vision, which he thinks is the most important thing in the world.
5. This business lives and dies by its growth metrics. 
6. 90% of attempts in this business fail, but he would never consider that those odds apply to him 
7. He funds this business via a mix of small contributors, large networks pooling their funds, and major investors.
8. Disagreements between founders are one of the largest contributors to failure. 
9. Funders invest for a mix of truly caring about the business’s goal, and wanting to receive the glamor of the work without the risk.
10. Starts a podcast advising others even as he’s failing himself.
11. Would rather start from scratch than reform an existing institution.
12. Oversight is minimal and exerted mostly through funding.
13. Generally unconcerned with negative externalities
14. Always uses the latest technology to get ahead
15. Both funding and the job itself heavily reward charisma and narcissism.

Hint for those outside the Bay Area and Twitter: at this point you’re supposed to guess “tech start-up”

16. Marries before he starts his business, and often has young children. 
17. Growth metrics are the end in and of themselves, not a proxy for money.

Hint for those outside the Bay Area and twitter: this is obviously not a tech start-up.

This guy is founding an evangelical church, and I find his ecosystem fascinating. First for its stunning similarities to venture-capital-funded tech start-ups, and then for its simplicity and open-heartedness. None of the dynamics in church planting are unique or even particularly rare, but they are unobfuscated, and that makes church planting the equivalent of a large print book for the social dynamics that favor charismatic narcissists. 

My qualifications to speak on church planting are having spent six weeks listening to podcasts by and for church planters, plus a smattering of reading. I expect this is about as informative as listening to venture podcasts is to actual venture capital, which is to say it’s a great way to get a sense of how small players want to be perceived, but so-so at communicating all of what is actually happening. Religion-wise, I also raised in a mainline Protestant denomination, although I left as a teenager. My qualifications to speak on tech start-ups are living in the Bay Area and being on Twitter.*

[*I’ve also been an employee at two start-ups, have angel investor friends, and some of my favorite clients are founders looking for their next thing. But I assure you, going to parties in the bay is sufficient.]

What is Church Planting?

Evangelical Christians are in a bind: they believe that introducing heathens to Jesus is the most important thing they can possibly do, but are fundamentally opposed to the kind of structure that Catholics and mainline Protestant denominations use to support missionaries. Missionaries have a hierarchy they answer to, and one of the things I’ve come to respect about evangelicals is how little use they have for hierarchies and credentials. 

How do you spread the Word when you can’t order someone to do it? You decentralize. Church planting is a do-acracy, where young men decide that God has called them to lead a church, and a decentralized network of financiers fund whoever they choose. This man, and perhaps an assisting team, builds a church from the ground up, answering to no one but his funders. 

The Planters

We’ve already covered many traits of a planter, but let me give a few more:

• If under 30, he spontaneously came to the belief that God called him to plant a church.
  • A much smaller number of 30- and 40-somethings are pushed into church planting by their pastor. 
• He does not have a seminary degree but if he was Saved by high school he probably went to a bible college (which may or may not be accredited by a secular assessor). Evangelicals do not have much use for credentials. 
• He has probably trained as a youth pastor at an existing church, but it’s also possible he was an assistant pastor or is starting cold. 
• He does not consider himself affiliated with any denomination, although in practice there are common theological strains among the “non-denominationals.” If you ask a church planter for his beliefs he will say “I teach the bible.” 
• He may hold a traditional job as well as pastoring, especially early in the process.

Why do I say that church planters tend towards charismatic narcissism? 

First, charisma is a bona fide requirement for being a pastor, especially an evangelical pastor who needs to recruit a new flock. This is doubly true for “parachute plants,” in which a planter moves to a new-to-them area and starts a church, knowing no one beyond their support team. Funders would be stupid not to select for the ability to make people like you and support your goals, and if they somehow were that stupid, the uncharismatic ones would lose in the marketplace (another way in which planting culture embodies American virtues: their embrace of creative destruction). Similarly, VCs like founders who are the subject of positive pieces in trade journals, not because they think those articles have any factual content, but because the skills to get those articles written about oneself have other uses. 

Second, planters are selected for a lack of self-doubt. It takes a special kind of 24-year-old to think, “Hundreds of people should pay me for my advice on the most important topic in existence every week,” and those who do will trend towards narcissism. 

Third, the job is more rewarding and less taxing for narcissists (and extroverts). Lead pastor is an incredibly social job, requiring numerous 1:1 interactions and performing in front of a hopefully large group. 

When I first started this investigation, I expected this push towards charisma and narcissism to be countered by the demand that church planters have strong moral character. Surely planters were selected by wise elders, who’d known them for years and seen them be noble under difficult circumstances. And many places do at least pay lip service to that ideal. But the very first checklist I found for assessing church planters had a noticeable absence of demand for even self-assessed character, much less an appraiser with deep knowledge of the potential founder. 80% of the questions focused on ability to conceive a grand vision and get people to go along with it.

This deeply violates my sense of what organized religion should be, and my lack of participation in organized religion in no way lessens my feelings of entitlement to see it done the way I want. But the fact that anyone can be a pastor is another facet of evangelicalism that accords with the virtues of America. No one can tell you you can’t found a Bible-teaching church. They can decline to fund you or attend, or if they really hate you perhaps write some mean things in a newsletter. But if one funder declines, you can always try another, and another. You just have to believe in your grand vision hard enough (which will select for narcissists).

The Goals

The goal of a church planter (and their funders) is to introduce more people to Jesus. I use the word “introduce” quite literally here; it’s much more like trying to introduce two friends at a party and get them to shake hands than trying to get a friend to read a life-changing book, or introducing them to the ineffable presence of my childhood church. This is one of the biggest differences between evangelical and mainline Protestants- they both talk about both Jesus and God, but for evangelicals the emphasis is on the former, and for mainlines the latter.

Church planters take their goal of Jesus handshakes very, very seriously, considering it the most important biblical commandment. This makes a ton of sense if you accept their belief that the handshake is the difference between eternity in hell and eternity in heaven. Given the importance of saving souls, merely founding and growing a church isn’t enough; You need to grow large and plant churches that themselves grow large and plant more churches. You need to be disciplemaxxing at all times. Leaderboards track the churches that are the largest and fastest-growing (baptisms is another area of competition, although I didn’t find a leaderboard for it).

This philosophy bugged me a lot because why is a handshake (or as they would put it, knowing Jesus Christ and accepting him as your savior) sufficient? How do you know someone really accepted Christ and isn’t just saying it? What if they do it wrong? Protestants don’t believe in salvation through works, so you can’t even use their behavior as a check. And what if a bad Christian nonetheless recruits more people to the Jesus party? Their recruits will never even have a chance at doing it right.

An ex-evangelical friend explained the reasoning as follows: as long as someone is coming to the party and shaking hands with Jesus, there’s a chance for them to get a handshake firm enough to accept him into their heart. But if they’re not even attempting to live as a Christian, Jesus can’t make inroads. The role of a pastor is to enable Jesus to take as many shots on goal as possible. Which again, makes sense once you accept their premises.

The Funders

Lots of charismatic narcissists and young idiots have grand visions for themselves, but only certain ecosystems systematically support those dreams. If we want to understand church planting and environments like it, we need to look at the people who are actually making it happen, i.e., the funders. 

 We’re talking about nondenominational churches, which leaves four sources of funding:

1. Existing megachurches that devote a portion of their budget to funding church planting. These are the Saudis of the church planting world. They often require the planted church to tithe back to them. 
2. Sending networks, which pool money from many churches to support planters. These are equivalent to VC firms or investment syndicates. They also often require planted churches to tithe back (same source)
   1. E.g. Acts29, Send Network, Grace Global Network, Grace Church Network, Grace Network (Canada).
3. A friends-and-family round, where people you know donate significantly.
4. The Patreon model, where hundreds of people or churches give small amounts. 

Like venture capital, funding from 1+2 is often pledged and released in stages based on meeting milestones. Milestones might be acquiring a new space, attendance, or finding additional funders. They will often have some ideological requirements, like complementarianism (men and women are spiritually equal but called to different roles) or cessationism (the belief that the Holy Spirit no longer enables humans to do miracles).

Churches and sending networks will often provide other support along with their funding, more like incubators than traditional VC. This can include classes, apprenticeships, support groups, and the same for the wife you definitely already have (being a planter’s wife sounds like all of the downside with none of the upside, more on this later).

Funding can be anything from six months of partial expenses to fully covering four years of expenses- but very rarely go beyond four years. At four years you are expected to be self-sufficient and ideally have started nurturing your daughter church plants (which every planter lists as their goal), because if you don’t do it by year five you never will. 

Much like venture capital, church planting is a hits-based business. Funders expect most of their plants to fail, and of those that succeed, they expect most successes to be modest. You make your investment back on the 1 in 100 founding that becomes a unicorn (or mega church). However success rates vary by funder; one church claimed 14/14 successes for their high-touch spawning process, and people on the patreon model are most likely to fail. 

The Human Cost

The worst case scenario for a church plant is something like Mars Hill Church, where a pastor built a successful megachurch with a tightknit community, only to abuse his authority and destroy the church*. At best, this cost members their spiritual home and a community they had come to count on. At worst, they were so badly traumatized they could no longer have a relationship with God. This doesn’t seem that surprising when you’re led by a 25 year old who (untruthfully) brags that he went from heathen to intended pastor with no stops inbetween. 

[*Mars Hill was funded via a friends and family round but received substantial advice and encouragement from the Acts29 network, so I think it’s fair to use it to assess the judgement of the decentralized leadership]

Similarly, I hate how little Silicon Valley pays attention to externalities. I don’t mean the creative destruction via things like Waymo replacing drivers, I mean advice like “advertise two features and implement the one that more people click on,” or “build your fintech business on sex workers and then kick them out once you’re big enough.” Users’ time and energy are treated as free goods. The benefits to users might sometimes outweigh the costs, but I never get the sense anyone is doing that math.

The Life Cycle

Once a man has decided to plant a church, a common starting point is hosting a bible study in his home, but some plants skip this step and go straight to Sunday services. The first step to holding Sunday Services is to find a location. My sense is that if you get a bunch of early-stage pastors together, this is what they complain about. You want somewhere that’s available at prime church time, has seating and A/C, feels like a church, and costs little. The dream is finding a 7th Day Adventist church (who hold their services on Saturday). Movie theaters are not common but pastors who use them seem happier than those in school gyms and hotel conference centers, because it spares them two hours setting up speakers and folding chairs.

The standard advice is to start with “preview services” to draw some interest locally and work out the bugs. Then you do an official launch service that will draw lots of people, mostly existing Christians and your supportive friends. You’re considered successful if your regular attendance reaches half of your launch attendance.

As your church grows you need additional rooms for nursery and Sunday School. If your existing space doesn’t have convenient small rooms, you’ll need to move. In fact you’ll often have to do this anyway as you gain followers. Churches go through several moves as they grow, hermit-crab style. 

Unless you started with a too-big space, you will probably hermit crab your way through larger and larger gymnasiums until a nearby church fails, at which point you merge with them or buy their building. Buying the building is preferable; mergers saddle you with a bunch of people who aren’t bought into your cult of personality. The most successful churches will go on to build their own giant buildings. 

Two hundred regular attendees is a big milestone for planted churches. I first heard it mentioned merely as a size few churches get past, but it’s also a financial threshold. At 200 people, the variation evens out so you can have a longer planning horizon, and probably afford a backup pastor.

Every church planter at least pays lip service to the goal of planting more churches. That requires rapid buildup. I’ve varyingly heard that if you don’t support a new church plant in the first 5, 3, or 1.5 years, you never will. 

Past 200 attendees I know less, because there aren’t that many megachurch planters going on these podcasts. However, you do eventually achieve the biggest crab shell possible, or just put down enough roots that you can’t transition again. If you attract any more people after that you start streaming your sermons to other rooms on the same property. Eventually (2,000 people?), you begin streaming to off-site locations, which is known as being a multi-site church (more recently, you’ll also start streaming online).

Multisite churches are something of a micro-denomination, where an existing church will create a new physical location that is still considered part of the original church, with the same lead pastor. Generally most of its sermons are piped in from the original church (Evangelicals are on the forefront of using new tech in service of God). It will have at least one site-lead pastor. Initially, I assumed this pastor did the work of local ministering- couples counseling, running food banks, etc. But these things aren’t emphasized much at evangelical churches, so I’m not quite sure what fills their days.

A minority of pastors are too entrepreneurial and will leave their settled church to plant a new one, but it seems far more common for the founders to stay on indefinitely.

The Theology

You’ll notice I didn’t mention theology beyond recruitment, or what people do after shaking Jesus’s hand. That’s because independent pastors and even many denominations rarely discuss this. The dominant attitude (going back to at least the 1850s) is that they don’t want to let petty disagreements about the nature of God and the Church disrupt the vital business of throwing parties where people can meet Jesus. 

The passphrase for this is “I teach the Bible.” That sounds neutral but since everyone has a frame and everyone injects that frame into their teaching, what it actually means is “My interpretation of the Bible is so obvious it hasn’t occurred to me people could draw other conclusions” This annoys everyone (exact episode lost) who both teaches from the Bible and recognizes that neutrality is not a human possibility. But it successfully functions as a passphrase for people who have agreed they’re on the same team.

The Failures

This section is weaker because failed planters rarely go on podcasts. That said…

The goal of church planters is to bring people to Jesus. As a whole, evangelicalism is not growing faster than the population, so seems like the system is failing by their lights. 

Individual planters have a failure rate of somewhere between 30% and 90%, depending on their support levels and how you define “attempt”- right in the range of tech start-ups.

For systemic data on why churches fail I rely heavily on this survey by Dan Steel of struggling (not necessarily failed) church plants. The top issues he found:

1. “No-one is fully rounded when it comes to gifting” aka “skill issue” (75%)
2. “Not getting what we want”, which seems to be either skill issues in disguise (insufficient attendance) or external shocks like pastoral illness or suddenly losing a location (65%).
3. “Disunity when you’re fragile is costly”, which is any conflict between the pastor and other people. This got a boost from covid-19, where fights about meetings and masks were common and costly (63%).
4. Pastor character issues, which they define as getting the job done at the expense of other people (45%).
5. “Naiveté and over-optimism regarding the speed of growth”, which is a mix of skill issues and bad expectation setting (23%).

A guest on New Churches Podcast gives the following reasons, in unquantified order of importance:

1. Pastor isolation, which I think is code for discouragement or running out of money. I don’t get the sense planters are leaving thriving churches because they feel isolated; when successful planters feel bad it’s called burnout.
2. Conflict between the founding team. This surprised me because it very rarely comes up in interviews. From what I’d heard, founding teams aren’t important enough for conflict with them to matter. So either I’m listening to a subset of people without this problem, or they’re hiding it.
3. Skill issues and a lack of self-awareness around skill issues.

I didn’t bother looking up numbers for why start-ups fail but from party chatter the list is pretty similar. 

The Alternatives

Starting a church is a lot of work; why not just take over an existing one? The official reason is that God called them to, and that new churches are the best way to introduce more people to Jesus, which is the most important act of worship. But I can’t help but notice that for a certain personality type, planting your own church seems way more fun than stepping into an existing one, for the same reason he’d have more fun founding a start-up than being a middle manager at IBM.

When you found a church (or a company), you’re baked into it. Everyone who attends (works for) your church is there because they like you. That’s a great feeling (especially if you’re a narcissist). It also saves you a whole lot of problems with parishioners who remember how their last pastor organized Sunday School and will fight any change tooth and nail. If you join an existing church and it closes, you broke something that worked. If your church plant closes, well, planting is risky, and at least you were willing to try (a pastor’s second planting attempt is much scarier, because now if you fail it’s a pattern). 

Starting a new church is more work, of course, but lots of people would rather put the work in if they can be their own boss. 

The Attendees

Thus far, I’ve found church planting admirably consistent in its efforts to reach its stated goal (recruit people who are not in contact with Jesus and get them to shake his hand, thus saving them from eternal damnation). We’ve already looked at how the system as a whole is not growing, but there’s a subtler issue in who they aim at. 

The closer someone is to death, the closer they are to eternal damnation. So you’d think that if saving souls was your goal, you’d focus on saving the elderly. As a bonus, the old-but-not-decrepit have more money and more hours to volunteer. However, planters seem almost sneering at the elderly, calling them “white hairs” and “bald heads” who are more trouble than they’re worth. In practice, attendees tend to be within 10 years of the age of the pastor, so if a 25-year-old found your plant, it won’t attract 65-year-olds for 30 years. The sense I get is that churches and funders go after young families because they are sexy, the same way that the start-up ecosystem didn’t discover parents as a market until 10 years ago. 

Speaking of sexy: the sexiest recruits are those new to Jesus, or at least prodigal sons. If you listen to church planters talk, these people make up the majority of attendees. But given the population numbers, we know that attendance is not growing faster than the population and have a higher-than-average fertility rate, they are net losing people. They could be shedding lots of people and then recruiting some back, but based on some survey data, it seems like they’re mostly not.*

I ultimately guess that 10-40% of attendees could in some sense be considered new recruits. My sources:

• This unsourced slideshow says that the previously unchurched make up only 10-15% of attendees at newly planted churches in Canada. 
• A survey of white American Evangelicals say that 18% were previously unaffiliated, and 4% came from non-Christian-Evangelical backgrounds. 
• Pew estimates that 40% of evangelicals were not raised Christian. This group includes members of non-Christian churches, but I think does not include people who were raised Christian, walked away, and returned (who church plants would recognize as a win).

It’s good for pastors that most of their flock is already on board with Jesus, because it means they’re also on board with tithing. Conventional wisdom is that it takes 4 years for the previously unchurched to contribute financially. Given that only the most generous funders supply 4 years of expenses, and some only a few months, it is absolutely imperative for pastors to attract people with an existing tithing habit. 

If a new member was already Christian, your hope is that they’re new to the city as well. “Stolen sheep,” aka people who moved to your church because they were dissatisfied with their last one, are considered a mixed blessing. They will tithe and probably volunteer, but it’s unlikely they will be long term satisfied with your church. If they were the type of person to be satisfied, they’d have been so at their last church. If you let them, they’ll suck up a bunch of your time and emotional energy on their way out, which is why one pastor suggests ignoring them. 

The Supporters

Wives

I’ve yet to hear about a church planter who wasn’t married when he founded his church. They always describe their wives as also experiencing a call from God to be a pastor’s wife, which is extremely convenient. 

By default, wives end up with whatever church work their husband doesn’t want or is bad at. This is especially likely to be work that requires high conscientiousness, involves children, or involves other women. They also need to do all the work at home that their partner isn’t doing because pastoring is sucking up all their time, or perhaps provide income because the church can’t fully support the family. And they’re doing most of the parenting. 

Pastors’ wives are expected to make friends with the women of the church but also keep their problems private, because it would undermine their husband’s job if people knew he was unreliable about taking out the trash. 

Overall church wife-ing seems like at least as much work as pastoring, with fewer rewards. 

Support Teams

Many pastors mention launching with other families from their sending church. They frequently discuss how important support teams are, but almost never what their supporters did that was so valuable. Maybe music? Surely set up and tear down. And it’s useful to have people in the pews right from the beginning so nonbelievers don’t walk into an empty church. But overall this feels like a blank spot in my knowledge because the support team never goes on podcasts and for all that pastors sing their praises, they rarely give specifics. 

I posit that pastors are performing the equivalent of thanking the little people at their Oscar speech because they know they’re supposed to, but don’t believe it in their heart of hearts that other people are very important. In contrast, you do tend to incidentally hear about the work their wives do.  

Mission Teams

You know how churches sometimes send teenagers to Mexico for a week to build houses? Well sometimes they instead send those teens to a recently planted domestic church, to ring doorbells, volunteer at vacation bible school, or do manual labor. These have only come up in one episode, which was spent complaining about how they were worse than useless (under the guise of acknowledging that the pastors didn’t know how to use them productively). The most useful function mentioned was mowing the pastor’s own lawn, to free up his time. 

Conclusion

Biology has a concept called convergent evolution– that if you put two distantly related animals in the same ecological niche, they will evolve to be more similar to each other than their respective recent ancestors. Think dolphins evolving the same fins and tail as sharks, despite having bones and needing to breathe air.  Silicon valley and church planting sure seem to me like they’ve gone through convergent evolution, but what is the ecological niche?

1. Some people really like attention
2. If you don’t have the energy to do the difficulty, sexy thing, you can get some reflected glory by funding it
3. Absence of traditional gatekeeping. 
4. In the absence of a countervailing force, charismatic people will be more successful on the margin. That’s what charisma means.
5. If you don’t track the eggs broken in your omelette making, there’s no drive to minimize them. 
6. Youth-worship

And when you combine those, what you get are hits-based economies and a lot of negative externalities. 

Sources

Podcasts

Inside a CATHOLIC Megachurch (Protestant Perspective) 

The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill Church (all episodes)

Everything I Did Wrong as a Church Planter: A Million Part Series (all episodes, as of 2025-06-22)

The Lutheran Church Planter (all episodes, as of 2025-06-22)

New Churches Podcast (26/236 episodes)

Canadian Church Planting (10/41 episodes)

Terminal: The Dying Church Planter (all episodes, as of 2025-06-22)

CMN Church Planting Podcast (all episodes, as of 2025-06-22

Revitalize and Replace (4/236 episodes)

Ministry Wives (1/201  episodes)

Pastors Wives Tell All (1/332 episodes)

Articles

The Priority & Practice of Evangelism: Canadian Church Leader Perspectives in 2021

Religious Change in America

Do We Really Need Another Church Plant?

Evangelism and “Nones and Dones” in Canada

Books

The Evangelicals, by Frances Fitzgerald.

Thanks

Thanks to Patrick LaVictoire and the Progress Studies Blog Building Initiative for feedback on this post. Thanks to my Patreon supporters and the CoFoundation Fellowship for their financial support of my work. 

Introduction

Taxes are typically meant to be proportional to money (or negative externalities, but that’s not what I’m focusing on). But one thing money buys you is flexibility, which can be used to avoid taxes. Because of this, taxes aimed at the wealthy tend to end up hitting the well-off-or-rich-but-not-truly-wealthy harder, and tax cuts aimed at the poor end up helping the middle class. Examples (feel free to stop reading these when you get the idea, this is just the analogy section of the essay):

• Computer programmers typically have the option to work remotely in a low-tax state; teachers need to be where the classroom is. 
• Estate taxes tend to hit families with single large assets (like a business) harder than those with diverse investments (who can simply sell assets to pay for taxes), who are hit harder than those with enough wealth to create trust funds.
• Executives can choose to receive stock (which is taxed more favorably) instead of cash to the exact percentage they desire. Well paid employees are offered stock, but the amount will not be tailored to their needs. Lower level employees either are not offered this, or are not in a position to take advantage of it.
• The legal distinction between a business (whose expenses are tax deductible) and a hobby (deductions not allowed) is based on whether the activity nets you income (there are complications and you can sometimes prove a money loser is a business, but this is a good rule of thumb). Small business owners (e.g. lawyers) can fold their occasionally-revenue-generating hobby (e.g. photography) into their real business, enabling tax deductions for their hobby.
• IRAs, 401ks, HSAs, and FSAs all lock your money up for a time or purpose, in exchange for lower or delayed taxes. You can only take advantage of them if you’re sure you won’t need the money for another purpose sooner.
• More examples here.

Note that most of these are perfectly legal and the rest are borderline. But we’re still not getting the result we want, of taxes being proportional to income.

When we assess moral blame for a situation, we typically want it to be roughly in proportion to much power a person has to change said situation. But just like money can be used to evade taxes, power can be used to avoid blame. This results in a distorted blame-distribution apparatus which assigns the least blame to the person most able to change the situation. Allow me a few examples to demonstrate this.

 

Examples 1 + 2: Corporate Malfeasance

Amazon.com provides a valuable service by letting any idiot sell a book, with minimal overhead. One of the costs of this complete lack of verification is that people will sell things that wouldn’t pass verification, such as counterfeits, at great cost to publishers and authors. Amazon could never sell counterfeits directly: they’re a large company that’s easy to sue. But by setting themselves up as a platform on which other people sell, they enable themselves to profit from counterfeits.

Or take slavery. No company goes “I’m going to go out and enslave people today” (especially not publicly), but not paying people is sometimes cheaper than paying them, so financial pressure will push towards slavery. Public pressure pushes in the opposite direction, so companies try not to visibly use slave labor. But they can’t control what their subcontractors do, and especially not what their subcontractors’ subcontractors’ subcontractors do, and sometimes this results in workers being unpaid and physically blocked from leaving.

Who’s at fault for the subcontractor(^3)’s slave labor? One obvious answer is “the person locking them in during the fire” or “the parent who gives their kid piecework”, and certainly it couldn’t happen without them. But if we say “Nike’s lack of knowledge makes them not responsible”, we give them an incentive to subcontract without asking follow up questions. The executive is probably benefiting more from the system of slave labor than the factory owner is from his little domain, and has more power to change what is happening. If the small factory owner pays fair wages, he gets outcompeted by a factory that does use slave labor. If the Nike CEO decides to insource their manufacturing to ensure fair working conditions, something actually changes.

…Unless consumers switch to a cheaper, slavery-driven shoe brand.

Which is actually really hard to not do. You could choose more expensive shoes, but the profit margin is still bigger if you shrink expenses, so that doesn’t help (which is why Fairtrade was a failure from the workers’ perspective). You can’t investigate the manufacturing conditions of everything you buy– it’s just too time consuming. But if you punish obvious enslavement and conduct no follow up studies, what you get is obscured enslavement, not decent working conditions.

 

Moral Mazes describes the general phenomenon on page 21:

Moreover, pushing down details relieves superiors of the burden of too much knowledge, particularly guilty knowledge. A superior will say to a subordinate, for instance: “Give me your best thinking on the problem with [X].” When the subordinate makes his report, he is often told: “I think you can do better than that,” until the subordinate has worked out all the details of the boss’s predetermined solution, without the boss being specifically aware of “all the eggs that have to be broken.” It is also not at all uncommon for very bald and extremely general edicts to emerge from on high. For example, “Sell the plant in [St. Louis]; let me know when you’ve struck a deal,” or “We need to get higher prices for [fabric X]; see what you can work out,” or “Tom, I want you to go down there and meet with those guys and make a deal and I don’t want you to come back until you’ve got one.” This pushing down of details has important consequences.

First, because they are unfamiliar with—indeed deliberately distance themselves from—entangling details, corporate higher echelons tend to expect successful results without messy complications. This is central to top executives’ well-known aversion to bad news and to the resulting tendency to kill the messenger who bears the news.

Second, the pushing down of details creates great pressure on middle managers not only to transmit good news but, precisely because they know the details, to act to protect their corporations, their bosses, and themselves in the process. They become the “point men” of a given strategy and the potential “fall guys” when things go wrong. From an organizational standpoint, overly conscientious managers are particularly useful at the middle levels of the structure. Upwardly mobile men and women, especially those from working-class origins who find themselves in higher status milieux, seem to have the requisite level of anxiety, and perhaps tightly controlled anger and hostility, that fuels an obsession with detail. Of course, such conscientiousness is not necessarily, and is certainly not systematically, rewarded; the real organizational premiums are placed on other, more flexible, behavior.

These examples differ in an important way from tax structuring: structuring requires seeking out advice and acting on it to achieve the goal. It’s highly agentic. The Wells Fargo and apparel-outsourcing cases required no such agency on the part of executives. They vaguely wished for something (more revenue, fewer expenses), and somehow it happened. An employee who tried to direct the executives’ attention to the fact that they were indirectly employing slaves would probably be fired before they ever reached the executives. Executives are not only outsourcing their dirty work, they’re outsourcing knowledge of their dirty work. 

[Details of personal anecdotes changed both intentionally and by the vagaries of human memory]

Example/Exception 2.5: Corporate Malfeasance Gone Wrong

The Wells Fargo account fraud scandal: in order to meet quotas, entry level Wells Fargo employees created millions of unauthorized accounts (typically extra services for existing customers). I originally included this as an example of “executives incentivizing entry level employees to commit fraud on their behalf”, but it turns out Wells Fargo made almost no money off the fraud- $2m over five years, which hardly seems worth the employees’ time, much less the $185m fine. I’ve left this in as an example of how the incentives-not-orders system doesn’t always work in powerful people’s favor.

Thanks to Larks for pointing this out.

Example 3: Foreign Medical Care

My cousin Angela broke her leg while traveling in Thailand, and was delighted by the level of care she received at the Thai hospital– not just medically, but socially. Nurses brought her flowers and were just generally nicer than their American counterparts. Her interpretation was that Thailand was a place motivated by love and kindness, not money, and Americans should aspire to this level of regard for their fellow human being. My interpretation was that she had enough money to buy the goodwill of everyone in the room without noticing, so what she should have learned is that being rich is awesome, and that being an American who travels internationally is enough to qualify you as rich.

This is mostly a success story for the free market: Angela got good medical care and the nurses got money (I’m assuming). Any crime in this story were committed off-screen. But Angela was certainly benefiting from the nurses’ restrained choices in life. And had she had actual power to affect healthcare in US, trying to fix it based on what she learned in Thailand would have done a lot of damage.

 

Example 4: My Dating an Artist Experience

My starving-artist ex-boyfriend, Connor, stayed with me for two months after a little bad luck and a lot of bad decisions cost him his job and then apartment (this was back when I had a two bedroom apartment to myself– I miss Seattle). During this time we had one big fight. My view on the fight now is that I was locally in the right but globally the disagreement was indicative of irreconcilable differences that should have led us to break up. That was delayed by months when he capitulated.

One possibility is that he genuinely thought he could change and that I was worth the attempt. Another is that he saw the incompatibility, or knew things that should have led him to see it, but lied or blocked out the knowledge so that he could keep living with me. This would be a shitty, manipulative thing for him to do. On the other hand, what did I expect? If the punishment for breaking up with me was, best case scenario, moving into a homeless shelter, of course he felt pressure to appease me. 

It wasn’t my fault he felt that pressure, any more than it was Angela’s fault her nurses were born with fewer options than her. Time in my spare bedroom was a gift to him I had no obligation to keep giving. But if I’d really valued a coercion free decision, I would have committed to housing him independent of our relationship. Although if that becomes common knowledge, it just means people can’t make an uncoerced decision to date me at all. And if helping Connor at all meant a commitment to do so forever, he would get a lot less help.

This case is more like the Wells Fargo case than Amazon or Nike. I was getting only the appearance of what I wanted (a genuine relationship with a compatible person), not the real thing. Nonetheless, the universe was contorting itself to give me the appearance of what I wanted.

Summary

What all of these stories have in common is that (relatively) powerful people’s desires were met by people less powerful than them, without them having to take responsibility for the action or sometimes even the desire. Society conspired to give them what they wanted (or in the case of Connor and Wells Fargo, a facsimile of what they wanted) without them having to articulate the want, even to themselves. That’s what power means: ability to make the game come out like you want. Disempowered people are forced to consciously notice things (e.g., this budget is unreachable) and make plans (e.g., slavery) where a powerful person wouldn’t. And it’s unfair to judge them for doing so while ignoring the morality of the powerful who never consider the system that brings them such nice things. 

Take home message:

1. The most agentic person in a situation is not necessarily most morally culpable. One of the things power buys you is distance from the crime.
2. Power obscures information flow. If you are not proactively looking to see how your wants and needs are being met, you are probably benefiting from something immoral or being tricked.

 

This piece was inspired by a conversation with and benefited from comments by Ben Hoffman. I’d also like to thank several commenters on Facebook for comments on an earlier draft and Justis Mills for copyediting.