High-Low-Middle and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod

 

Bertrand de Jouvenel

Bertrand de Jouvenel is an 'eccentric amateur' French thinker who developed the "high-low-middle mechanism" model, as described ably and concisely by Neema Parvini:

"The idea at its most basic is that the high - the central power - makes an appeal of liberation and a guarantee of security to the low who are being 'oppressed' by the middle. By patronizing the low, the high thus starts to drain away the power of the middle, thus accruing more power to itself." - Neema Parvini, The Populist Delusion, pg 77.

We see this model play out in the Honest Conversations "bible study" (scarequotes, because it invokes very little Bible). Bill and Ben are presenting on behalf of the Synod, the "high" central power. They are making a patronizing appeal to the "low" LGBTQ+ by means of revisiting how the "middle" thinks of and interacts with the LGBTQ+ community. These oppressors in the middle are generally straight, white Christians - the same straight, white Christians whose statistical overpopulation is lamented in the WELS 2020 statistical summary:

By generating a "bible study" that stretches the Biblical witness on a Procrustean bed of the spirit of our age to produce a winsome witness to the LGBTQ+ while denying hard Biblical truth, unknowingly they implement a form of the high-low-middle mechanism. The "power" they steal is the middle's ability to think and speak in line with the full counsel of Scripture.