The Dis-grace-full Logic of Merit

Too often grace is limited to a theological concept—salvation—when it should be thought of as a grace-full way of life. But in our modern meritocratic world of earning and deserving, we often completely miss the repeated scriptural injunctions that nothing we own is ours and that everything we have is a gift from God. In LDS scripture, the sin isn’t being dependent on others, but rather claiming to be independent from God. Not needing help, but pretending to be self-reliant. Given this, how can we return to grace, when so much of our modern identity is tied to independence and self-reliance? Grace means to experience life as a gift, to experience what we have “earned” as something that we have been given. Taking grace seriously would mean a radical rethinking of our modern meritocratic ideals.

Take a look at this wonderful puzzle of a scripture: “I command thee that thou shalt not covet thine own property” (D&C 19:26). From our modern meritocratic perspective, this scripture makes no sense: covet my own property? How can I covet what is mine? Is this just a strange way of saying you should share what is yours with others?

I would suggest the awkwardness of this verse is due to two incompatible logics being brought together. On the one hand, we have the logic of grace, in which everything is a gift and nothing can be earned. On the other hand, we have the logic of merit, in which “every man fare[s] in this life according to the management of the creature; therefore every man prosper[s] according to his genius” (Alma 30:17).

The scriptorian will notice that this line was delivered by the anti-Christ Korihor. They might ask, “You don’t really want to claim meritocracy is anti-Christian do you?” Yes, that is exactly what I want to claim. Of course, Korihor is also a libertarian, complaining that the people “durst not look up with boldness, and that they durst not enjoy their rights and privileges. Yea, they durst not make use of that which is their own lest they should offend their priests.” (Alma 30:27–28). Here we find not only an invocation of atomistic “rights and privileges” but also, again, the claim to ownership. According to Korihor, what we own is ours and we should be able to use it however we want without pushy priests trying to get us to give it to the widow and the orphan.

I suspect all Christians are aware of the logic of grace in broad, vague terms because it is ubiquitous in scripture. God created everything. Everything is a gift. “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein” (Psalms 24:1).

But from what I have seen, American Christians often struggle to understand the logic of grace because it fundamentally differs from the logic of merit that dominates modern life, a logic that is calculative and based on scarcity. In contrast, the logic of grace is un-calculative and based on abundance:

For the earth is full, and there is enough and to spare; yea, I prepared all things, and have given unto the children of men to be agents unto themselves. Therefore, if any man shall take of the abundance which I have made, and impart not his portion, according to the law of my gospel, unto the poor and the needy, he shall, with the wicked, lift up his eyes in hell, being in torment. (D&C 104:17–18)

The logic of grace says there is more than enough to go around unless some start hoarding it all for themselves. If this happens and the logic of accumulation catches hold, the weakest tend to be left out, specifically the widow and the orphan. 

Note that in the logic of grace, all are dependent on God. He gives us whatever we have. We may have worked for it, but ultimately it is not earned but given. From this starting point of human dependency, one of the most denounced sins in the Bible is claiming or seeking independence from God. Korihor is an anti-Christ not just because he denies the existence of God, but because he declares life is “every man for himself.” He embraces the logic of merit and extolls the pride that should come from it. When you’ve worked for it, you’ve earned it, Korihor argues. It is yours and you have rights and privileges to do what you want with it. The priests are out of line for telling you otherwise.

The language of individual rights is so fundamental to modern political thought that we simply take it for granted. We tend to think of freedom as individual freedom. We think of freedom as independence. 

These are not just political terms for us, but moral ones as well. People who are dependent on the government for help are morally bad. Twenty-year-olds that still live at home and depend on their parents are lazy. The sooner you learn to be independent the better. That is freedom.

Of course, the problem goes even deeper. Freedom and independence are central to modern identity. We can take pride in our financial independence and freedom. We can look at our houses, cars, and various other possessions as signs of our hard work. 

Both the political and moral valences of these terms have become so normalized for us and central to our sense of identity that it is hard for us to see that they are directly opposed to the logic of grace and dependency. Nothing you have is yours. Everything is a gift from God. Everyone is dependent on God. Claiming independence is a dangerous delusion. 

It can also be hard for us to see how independence and dependence are often gendered in an idealized view of a “traditional family”. Men are associated with independence, women with dependence. Men are the heads of households and work out in the public sphere. Women take care of the children in the domestic sphere and are dependent on men for support. 

In light of how these ideals have been assigned to particular genders, it is not surprising that many men care a great deal about merit and meritocracy. My best friend growing up refused to accept government-funded scholarships for low-income or minority students because he wanted to “earn it himself.” He didn’t want to be seen as a moocher. This put him behind for years trying to work and take classes here and there. He died in a motorcycle accident the semester he was scheduled to graduate—ten years after he started. At his funeral, many of the speakers praised his “work ethic.” In truth, his work ethic had held him back. I couldn’t help but be bitter hearing him praised for the toxic standards that had harmed him.

The toxic ideals of independence and hard work harm many men. (Similarly, a society that denigrates dependency while associating it with women also denigrates women.) It teaches men not to work together, but to be self-reliant. It teaches men to accumulate as much as possible, to take pride in what we accumulate, and to be fearful of those (whether priests or the government) that would ask us to share it. It teaches that if we share, it is a matter of our magnanimity and goodness.

Meritocracy denies the logic of grace. The logic of merit dis-graces life. It leaves the world dis-grace-full. 

Despite being dis-grace-full, meritocracy often functions like a religion—providing the same kinds of answers traditional religions do while crowding them out of the nest. For example, while Christianity promises that God will somehow establish justice in the next life, meritocracy claims that the world we live in now is already just. If you work hard you will succeed, we are told. From this claim it is often fallaciously concluded that those who are successful must have worked hard and those who have not succeeded must not have worked hard. Even though these conclusions are demonstrably false, people in a supposedly meritocratic society hold tightly to these claims precisely because of their explanatory power. The poor deserve to be poor. If they want to stop being poor, they can work their way out of it. The rich who have earned it deserve to be rich. They have worked hard for it. While adherents of meritocracy do recognize that some people have not worked for their wealth and to a lesser degree that some poor people might have not made it yet, the general tendency is to assume that the rich deserve to be rich and the poor don’t. Notice that in a fully functioning meritocracy everyone deserves to be where they are. Everything is in the right place, everything is just. 

Meritocracy not only functions like a religion—explaining why inequalities exist and promising salvation through hard work—it is a particularly powerful religion. It is remarkable to me that despite being demonstrably false and a bad ideal, many people in modern society cling to meritocracy with a deep fervor and faith. They want it to be true. They need it to be true.

Meritocracy is antithetical to the gospel. The logic of grace and the logic of merit are incompatible. And yet, I often hear moral issues framed in terms of merit at church. This includes both traditional “work is good for us” sentiments from speakers and teachers, but also, as I discuss in Meritocracy Mingled with Scripture, institutional programs like recent efforts to encourage self-reliance that have deeply meritocratic tones. I do think we recognize something like grace in the abstract. We are sometimes effusive in our gratitude. But at the fundamental level with things like housing, we are not very grace-full. Every congregation I have lived in was rife with housing inequalities, but this was never discussed. Inequalities were taboo. Efforts were often made to  genuinely help those on the bottom, but I don’t ever recall hearing discussions of the immorality of those who had larger houses and richer lifestyles. According to the logic of merit, they deserve this and it would be out of line to question their advantages. Inversely, there is a latent awareness that, according to the logic of merit, poverty is the result of individual failure. To approach those who are struggling financially can be fraught because they may have internalized the meritocratic idea that they are failures. Offering help can be taken as insulting: “You have failed. How can I—a successful person—help you, a failure?” Genuine goodwill must walk on tip toes lest it be taken as an insult.

What would it be like to be grace-full?

This question is more complicated than it looks at first and yet, in another way, straightforward. From a historical and scholarly perspective, it is quite complex. From the perspective of LDS theology, it is strikingly simple.

For the majority of human history, humans lived in gift cultures. In one of the most famous essays in the anthropology literature, “The Original Affluent Society,” Marshall Sahlins argues that, contrary to modern misconceptions, hunter-gatherers experienced themselves as living in abundance. They were not miserable, starving, and endlessly searching for food—they knew where to find food and would move around to do it. There was more than enough if one knew where to look. Sahlin’s student David Graeber argues in The Dawn of Everything that hunter-gatherers were very willing to share with others but also hypervigilant about preventing would-be usurpers from taking more for themselves and gaining control over others. Like the scripture cited above from D&C 104, they experienced their lives as abundant, but knew that abundance could be stolen by greedy individuals.

I think we can learn much about grace from hunter-gatherers and gift cultures. And although it may seem like such perspectives might be hard to come by now, Indigenous people around the world have been criticizing the West for treating the living cosmos as a dead, dis-grace-full, mechanical universe. From the perspective of Indigenous authors like Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass) and Daniel Wildcat (On Indigenuity), the modern Western understanding of the world produces deeply dis-grace-full and unethical ways of relating to it. We are, Wildcat argues, forgetting our own Mother Earth and her many gifts.

Mormons have a simple and straightforward example of grace: 4 Nephi. I wish Mormons would talk about 4 Nephi more. It records the 200+ year existence of the happiest people that have lived in the history of the Earth. They loved each other, they shared with each other, and God provided abundantly. When did it fall apart? When they started wearing fancy clothing and stopped sharing.

Grace lives in abundance. If we accepted grace, we would share with others. Accumulating money is the antithesis of grace. Buying large houses while others are homeless is a denial of grace. Wearing expensive clothing while others go hungry is dis-grace-full. Our modern society would have appeared deeply immoral to hunter-gatherers. The same would have been true from the perspective of those described as the happiest “people among all the people who had been created by the hand of God” (4 Nephi 1:16). 

Happiness is morally fraught. Meritocratic happiness takes joy and pride in what it has “earned”. It atomizes or individualizes us, telling us that happiness is our own responsibility and that we shouldn’t be jealous of one another. Grace-full happiness, on the other hand, is comparative. It doesn’t mind its own business. It looks to the neighbor, the stranger, the migrant, and asks if they are happy. Since “it is not given that one man should possess that which is above another, wherefore the world lieth in sin” (D&C 49:20), happiness must be communal and we must be “equal in all things.” Such a grace-full happiness seems to be as far as one can be from meritocracy and, unfortunately, as such, unimaginable and unbelievable to the meritocratic mind. We must change.

Justin Pack studies the political, social, moral and environmental implications of thoughtlessness, especially with regard to exploitation and alienation.

Art by J. Kirk Richards, @jkirkrichards