Abandon the expectation of fairness, all ye who enter
How to steer General Assembly
Commentary by James D. Berkley, The Layman, June 1, 2010
Let’s say that for some nefarious reason, you decide to control the proceedings of General Assembly. You prize your personal viewpoint, and it just ought to prevail. Thus, you set out to bend every aspect of General Assembly (GA) to ensure that your ideas will triumph. Related Article
If somehow you had the power to do so and the devious streak to want to, what might you do to dominate the Assembly? Well, you could:
- Control commissioner information channels to ensure that only your viewpoint gets out. Print only your side of any matter. Show winsome videos with your best arguments. Use leaders’ major addresses and invited guests’ appearances to tout your desired ends.
- Discourage if not totally restrict other voices. Drastically limit testimony at committee hearings to allow no major opponent opportunity for substantive rebuttal or clarification. Ignore true experts from outside your hand-picked set. And make nearly impossible the effective distribution of opposing written material.
- Dominate commissioner attention. For instance, schedule indoctrination sessions immediately prior to the opening of General Assembly. Commissioners would receive only your carefully filtered messages and would be strategically deprived of contact with other information sources.
- Staff the GA committees with leaders and resource “experts” who are prepared to advance your viewpoint freely. Give those who agree with you extraordinary access to the commissioners. Allow them to make their arguments often and at length. Call upon them in plenary if pesky opposing commissioners appear to be gaining the advantage in debate. GA Information
- Allow as little time as possible to actually debate matters, first by making commissioners mere spectators much of the time, and second by making “debate” no more than a series of minor, unconnected speeches. Make all ideas supposedly equal in value; give no opportunity to test or weigh assertions or to engage in timely rebuttal.
- Flood the assembly with your business items. Provide for numerous, excessive reports and proposals from your well-placed ideological allies, while concurrently discouraging and strictly regulating business that bubbles up from commissioners or presbyteries.
- Cloak elections in ignorance, favoring the election of even more officials cut from your mold. Provide no substantive information about nominees. For elections to major office, bar vigorous information dissemination, so that your approved candidates (especially incumbents) retain a major advantage.
- Make any undesirable minority committee report onerous to file. Severely restrict what a minority report can contain that could potentially damage your cause. Convince the minority that you are even empowered to rewrite their report to your satisfaction.
- Stage a press conference immediately after any contrary vote to spin the results in your favor. Say it didn’t happen. Say it doesn’t mean what it says, regardless of what the GA actually approved. And if all else fails, simply ignore the decision. There is no mechanism to force you to actually carry out a GA mandate. And besides, in two years a whole new group of commissioners will come along to be manipulated into letting you off the hook. Just don’t worry. General Assembly is yours to run.
The sad truth
While this set of manipulations shows great contempt for an open democratic process, it would certainly help the powerful get their way. However, who would ever put up with such flagrant manipulation of process and results?
Presbyterians do.
The system above is how General Assemblies operate – shamefully so! Should particular commissioners come to the Assembly expecting to vote as denominational leaders desire, their path is easy. All roads lead to that conclusion. What they see, what they hear, how events are set up – all will lead them smoothly to the “correct” conclusion.
However, should other fine commissioners venture to General Assembly prayerfully expecting to counter a potentially harmful special report or proposal, then they will find their way frustrated at every turn. And should concerned GA observers not in accord with the latest plan from Louisville seek to speak their convictions to possibly inform the Assembly’s decision, they will find scant opportunity to convey anything substantive. Their access is blocked; their opinion discouraged.
General Assembly is not a level playing field. From start to finish, General Assembly is presently tilted to greatly privilege some viewpoints, while greatly disadvantaging opposing viewpoints. Whether by clever design or by careless default, this is the reality. General Assembly gets steered by the powers that be.
It is time to call upon the Office of the General Assembly to make simple fairness again a reasonable expectation. A skewed schedule, a truncated set of materials, rules stacked against the grassroots, undue influence by staff members, the unwillingness to allow genuine debate by well-informed parties – these kinds of structural biases cry out for correction. Statesmanlike leadership from the top to the bottom could make the General Assembly a place where God’s Word and God’s will hold greater power than those individuals who now set the course.