Meritocracy Is a Betrayal of the

Protestant Ethic, not a Fulfillment

Why the “rhetoric of rising” is incompatible with Christian views of grace and
the common good.

DANIEL RENTFRO

JUNE 28, 2021

Image: Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons / WikiArt

A nonnegotiable rule of political discourse these days is that it should operate on

the basis of “public reason.” Debates about law and public policy, we are told,
should only appeal to universally shared principles, rather than personal morality or
religious belief, which vary from person to person. Therefore, in the public square,
one must translate religious arguments into generally accepted “public reasons,”
which in practice means secular reasons.

In his latest book, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?,
Michael Sandel refreshingly turns the public-reason doctrine on its head. Sandel, a
Harvard University professor as well as a popular author and speaker, casts secular
arguments about social and political values in terms appealing to religious
believers. Though the book betrays nothing about Sandel’s personal religious
leanings (or lack thereof), it invokes concepts with deep roots in the soil of
Christian theology—terms like humility, community, dignity, grace, purpose, and
the common good.
Against the grain of modern political philosophy, Sandel argues for a decidedly
thick view of public morality and personal well-being. He makes the case that
politics ultimately requires us to ask who we want to be as a people, a question at
the heart of a Christian understanding of history.

Frustration and resentment

Some years ago, a Newsweek profile described Sandel as a “rock star moralist.”
This is a curious description, as Sandel remains modest and soft-spoken even amid
his worldwide fame as a lecturer on issues of public morality, justice, and the
common good. He converses with his audience as much as he lectures. Firm in his
own views, he nevertheless remains generous toward those who disagree with him.

The Tyranny of Merit concerns one of the few propositions enjoying bipartisan
support: America both aspires to be and substantially is a meritocracy, a place
where success depends on ability rather than ancestry. To quote Barack Obama, in
America “bright, motivated young people … have the chance to go as far as their
talents and their work ethic and their dreams can take them.” Sandel labels this “the
rhetoric of rising.” Presidents from Reagan through Obama, along with
counterparts in other Western democracies, have made this rhetoric a campaign-
speech staple.

What does Sandel think about this? “When politicians reiterate a hallowed verity
with mind-numbing frequency,” he writes, “there is reason to suspect that it is no
longer true.” And by 2016, he argues, the rhetoric of rising indeed “[rang] hollow.”
Around the world, many nations—both industrialized and emerging—were
outshining the United States in their levels of social mobility. More ominously, the
rhetoric of rising started puffing up the pride of the risers. Financial success took
on an aura of moral superiority. Sandel calls this “meritocratic hubris.” Wealth
seemed to become an entitlement rather than a blessing. Hedge fund managers—
Sandel’s poster children for meritocratic hubris—concluded that
they deserved those seven figure bonuses. It was, to quote George Harrison (a true
rock star), “I, me, mine” all the way down.

How did this happen? Politicians tell us that the key to rising is a college education.
“You earn what you learn,” Bill Clinton liked to say. Unfortunately, the vaunted
college degree wasn’t always delivering the goods. In the 1930s, Harvard president
James Bryant Conant promoted the Scholastic Aptitude Test as a way to identify
top-ranking students from all geographic regions and economic strata, with the goal
of reducing Harvard’s overpopulation by the privileged few. Unfortunately, SAT
testing turned out to correlate most strongly with family wealth, strengthening the
very inequity it was designed to combat. As a result, a shockingly small percentage
of college students actually rose from true poverty to wealth.

Worse yet, those who fail to achieve financial success now seem somehow
culpable. Either they didn’t have the goods to begin with, or they haven’t worked
hard enough. Earning capacity becomes a gauge of one’s intrinsic value. In place of
Aristotle’s vision of justice as due recognition of, and reward for, moral virtue,
argues Sandel, we now have a degraded, market-centered measure of personal
worth. The rhetoric of rising, supposedly a message of hope and optimism, turns
out to foster frustration and resentment, creating a patchwork of winners and losers
that divides rather than unites us.

Among the products of this resentment, Sandel argues, are Brexit and Trumpism. It
doesn’t stop there. It has crept into all areas of American culture. Sandel sees it, for
instance, in libertarian objections to public health care. Those with poor health, the
thinking goes, are probably smokers or drinkers or couch potatoes, responsible for
their own physical woes. Sandel includes a brief discussion of the “prosperity
gospel,” arguing that it rests ambiguously on the idea of being blessed by grace
rather than blessed with talent and ability.

Ultimately, Sandel has little use for the prosperity gospel, which he finds
“gratifying when things go well but demoralizing, even punitive, when things go
badly.” This comes as part of his “brief moral history of merit,” which attempts to
find parallels between 21st-century secular ideas of meritocracy and Puritan
attitudes about predestination, salvation, and worldly success.

Unfortunately, this section is marred by Sandel’s choice to draw as much on

German sociologist Max Weber and his “Protestant ethic” hypothesis as on real
Protestant theologians.

According to Weber, capitalism flourished because of Protestant industry and

wealth accumulation, first as a sign of God’s election but then as a way to secure
salvation. Sandel carefully avoids the conclusion that Protestantism bears the
responsibility for the current outbreak of meritocratic hubris, which “is not
necessarily tied to religious assumptions.” He acknowledges that Scripture rejects
the connection between merit and blessing—God’s speech to Job (38–41) being a
case in point. The Augustinian view of salvation as pure grace won out over the
Pelagian emphasis on works. Sandel notes, as well, how Luther and Calvin
themselves were anti-meritocratic in their views of salvation: “Merit drives out
grace,” he writes, “or else recasts it in its own image, as something we deserve.”

Nevertheless, Weber’s cameo appearance is both the one false note in the book and
a missed opportunity to illustrate the kind of impoverished moral reflection that
Sandel deplores. It would not be a stretch to call Weber’s Protestant ethic (not to
mention the prosperity gospel) a “thin” version of Protestantism, bearing the same
relation to Calvinism as marketplace morals do to Aristotelean virtue. Early
Protestant capitalism was only a part of a larger social vision that emphasized the
communal over the individual. Equity, common good, and special concern for the
poor all figure prominently in Calvinism. Financial success carried with it an
obligation to others.
Calvin would have deplored the whole meritocratic package: the theology behind
it, the resulting assortment of people into winners and losers, and the abrogation of
those duties the fortunate owe to the less fortunate. We can imagine Calvin riffing
on the question raised by the book’s subtitle: What, indeed, becomes of the
common good in a culture of winners and losers?

The true Protestant ethic

Not surprisingly (for those familiar with his previous work), Sandel concludes that
theories of justice that prioritize individual freedom above “thicker” notions of
human flourishing impair civic (and civil) engagement over moral issues. Sadly, if
we can’t debate what constitutes the good life, we end up where we are today:
stuck in endless shouting matches from one side or the other of a false binary. For
example, Sandel says this about the current argument over the meaning of equality:

It is generally assumed that the only alternative to equality of opportunity is a

sterile oppressive equality of results. But there is another alternative: a broad
equality of condition that enables those who do not achieve great wealth or
prestigious positions to live lives of decency and dignity—developing and
exercising their abilities in work that wins social esteem, sharing in a widely-
diffused culture of learning, and deliberating with their fellow citizens about public
affairs.

This, Sandel says, describes a community truly dedicated to the common good—
inclusive in its vision of who belongs and generous in the benefits it bestows.
Wendell Berry, the farmer and agrarian writer, articulates a similar ideal: the
“mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the
people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives.”
To get there, we must reject the rhetoric of rising and accept the inherently
theological premise that all humans are of equal worth.

Here’s how Sandel closes The Tyranny of Merit:

The meritocratic conviction that people deserve whatever riches the market
bestows on their talents makes solidarity an almost impossible project. For why do
the successful owe anything to the less-advantaged members of society? The
answer to this question depends on recognizing that, for all our striving, we are not
self-made and self-sufficient; finding ourselves in a society that prizes our talents is
a good fortune, not our due. A lively sense of the contingency of our lot can inspire
a certain humility: “There, but for the grace of God, or the accident of birth, or the
mystery of fate, go I.” Such humility is the beginning of the way back from the
harsh ethic of success that drives us apart. It points beyond the tyranny of merit
toward a less rancorous, more generous public life.
“There, but for the grace of God, go I.” This sentiment, frequently attributed to the
Protestant martyr John Bradford, better expresses the true Protestant ethic than
anything written by Max Weber. It is a fitting end to Sandel’s splendid book.

Daniel Rentfro is the managing editor of the Bible and the Contemporary World journal at the
University of St Andrews, and a practicing attorney. He is the author of The Law of Freedom:
Justice and Mercy in the Practice of Law.