This morning, I happened on a letter by an Episcopal bishop, Sean Rowe. It was phrased in language I am familiar with and which I always like on first contact. But the more I think about it, the more uncomfortable I feel with it. In this post, I’d like to think about those two reactions.

This letter was sent to bishops of the Episcopal church on November 6. So…just after. Bishop Rowe recognizes that not all Episcopalians are going to feel the same way about the election. As people of faith, he says, we can work and pray…”whether we are joyful, hurting, or afraid.” It it hard to imagine being joyful about the new empowerment of a man as destructive as Donald Trump, but “hurting” and “afraid” don’t seem like alternatives to me. They seem like internal and external faces of the same response.

Having recognized the range of responses to the election, Bishop Rowe goes on to focus on the response of the church. We can still, he says, “combat the misinformation and fear by which the Enemy [that is Bishop Rowe’s capital E and ordinarily refers to the Devil] seeks to divide us from one another.”

OK and how will we do that? Currently, he says, there are efforts to undermine our trust in institutions and in one another. He cites a report by the Department of Homeland Security as evidence.

There are indeed, efforts to undermine our trust in institutions. What people like me call “the rule of law” or “civil society,” many other people call “the Deep State” or simply, “the System.”

The word “institution” was invented to distinguish the people who have roles within an organization from the organization itself. The word is based on the Latin verb statuere, “to cause to stand.” The institution “stands there;” the individual people come and go.

Trusting people is not that hard. Some are good; some are bad. Some are strong; some are weak. Some are lovers of routine; others are creative. You find a way to live with the strengths and weaknesses. But institutions are not like that and I think Bishop Rowe is right that the “undermining of institutions” is the crucial loss we are facing.

People were shocked, as I recall, when Nixon’s subordinates described one of the lies they has been caught in as “no longer operative.” If you are searching in that expression for any hint of apology, I wish you luck. The immediate meaning was “We realize we can not continue to tell that particular lie.” The practical implication was that some new one would be created that would last for a little while. The idea that it was false and known to be false is simply lost. The idea that lying as part of your regular interaction with the citizenry is simply wrong…is also lost.

Truth telling is an institution.

Truth telling is still a part of face to face communication. People whom you know and see regularly and who lie to you suffer condemnation and even, in some cases, reprisals. But face to face communication is a smaller and smaller part of our lives. The electronic and print media are not and cannot be controlled by truth telling norms. Social media cannot be controlled by truth telling norms. We all suffer from a loss of credibility in the messages we receive and in the people from whom we receive them.

I think there is no gift more valuable that Episcopalians could give—the rest of us, too, but I am grateful to Bishop Rowe for starting us off—than to restore trust in institutions. That will be a lot harder than restoring trust in persons who are outside your own silo, but that would not be a bad place to start. Trusting the people as a step on the way to trusting the institutions will seem an odd order to some, but when I think of the value of trustworthy institutions, I think it is worth considering.

If we need anything to remind us of the value of such institutions, we need only remember the English civil war in which Protestants killed Catholics when they gained a temporary ascendancy and Catholics killed Protestants when their positions were reversed. All you had to do to wind up on the hit list was to have been one of “them.”

That was brought to an end by the establishment of the monarchy as an institution that could be counted on to be evenhanded—at least so far as alternating assassinations goes. The U. S. is on the brink of such a failure of institutions and we need to find a way to trust them again.

It will not be the old trust—the compatibility of similar people in similar classes. There will have to be a new trust, based on new reasons. If it is any part of the Episcopal charge to resist the Enemy—to quench the fiery darts of the wicked, as Paul put it—I want to find a way to join with them.