Consecrating Power

Language that shields authority from accountability by invoking divine blessing

Consecrating Power is the name I’ve given to the fourth spoke in The Wheel of Reality-Bending Phrases. To consecrate something or someone is to make or declare it sacred. Here, power, whether it is within religion, politics, the workplace, home, or other relational contexts, is made untouchable because it is placed beyond ordinary structures of authority and given divine sanction. This is a power clothed in the language of anointing, calling, and spiritual revelation.

Like the other phrases presented in this series, these expressions may have legitimate meanings within a healthy environment. I highlight them to draw attention to both the inherent amplification of power when such language is used and the capacity for that power to be misused. Ethical leadership, wherever it functions in life, must be aware of and acknowledge the scope of its power. When that power distorts language, the distortion is not so much in the words themselves but in the way those words are used to coerce others.

Bumping Against the Force Field

The other spokes in the wheel primarily focus on the person: their emotions are recast, their discernment is bypassed, their truth-telling is framed as disloyalty. Consecrating power functions in a different way by targeting the interpersonal space between the powerful and those with less power. It’s as if a force field is constructed to create a kind of buffer around authority rather than directly dismantling someone’s perceptions.

Photo by MARIOLA GROBELSKA on Unsplash

I’ve encountered this force field more than once in my life. In each instance there was a particular moment when I realized the question, opinion, or concern I thought was reasonable and appropriate was somehow being turned into a spiritual transgression, as if I had stepped onto sacred ground without realizing it and triggered strong defensive action.

The defensive action of the force field, in my experience, usually looks like some kind of shaming or condemning, accompanied by spiritual language and Scripture. Sometimes the response can be disproportionately overwhelming and akin to what I call Scripture Bombing. Scripture Bombing is when a person pulls verses and passages from Scripture and drops them on you for the sole purpose of controlling you. Often the verses are taken out of context and employed without openness to dialogue. They are part of the force field consecrating power. For example, I once questioned the reliability of a statistic someone published, and when I voiced that disagreement, I was sent a simple message: “Psalm 34:14.” I looked it up and read, “Turn away from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.” The message was clear: questioning another’s work was somehow a pursuit of evil. Suddenly I was holding a verdict of my own character instead of a conversation about a number.

When power has been consecrated, a person who has a legitimate concern faces a particular kind of isolation that is different from other forms of silencing. Their concern doesn’t just get dismissed, but gets spiritualized in a way that makes it sacrilege to voice the concern.

I think this is a an under-named loneliness. It is not the loneliness of being misunderstood, or of being in the minority, or even of being rejected. It is the loneliness of carrying something true that has been made to feel dangerous. It is the loneliness of knowing what you know while being surrounded by people who have agreed, collectively and perhaps without realizing it, not to know it with you. The truth sits in you like something radioactive. You can’t set it down and you can’t hand it to anyone else. The people who might once have helped you hold it have been formed, gradually and thoroughly, to treat the holding of it as a spiritual offense.

What makes this loneliness particularly difficult to name is that it often doesn’t look like loneliness from the outside. Perhaps you are still inside the community. You still attend, participate, and maybe even lead. The isolation is within, where you sense a growing distance between what you can see and what the community around you is willing to see, between what you know and what you are permitted to say you know. The question, concern, or truth that became evidence against you is still yours. But you have learned, at some cost, that it belongs to a territory no one else is willing to enter with you as most have learned how to tiptoe and move with tact so as to not bump up against the force field consecrating power.

How the Force Field Gets Built

One of the most disorienting features of consecrating power is that it tends to develop gradually through repeated language that amplifies and defends authority. By the time the force field is fully in place, most people inside the community cannot remember a time when it wasn’t there. Usually there’s no single moment a person declares themselves to be beyond accountability. It’s a buffer built through a hundred small communication strategies, each individually plausible, until the force field is complete and everyone has learned, without being explicitly taught, that certain beliefs, questions, and dissenting actions are not permitted. A person in power may first be described as uniquely gifted, then divinely called, and eventually put in position by God for a particular purpose. This gradual development is what makes it so hard to identify and name when you are inside it.

When authority is framed as originating primarily from God rather than from communal trust or mutual accountability, questioning actions can begin to feel like questioning God’s decision. Here are some of the phrases that tend to consecrate power:

• “God has placed this leader here.”

• “Touch not the Lord’s anointed.”

• “God is doing something through this ministry.”

When these kinds of phrases are used to bend reality in defense of power, there is often little attempt to understand its original meaning or context. For example, the phrase “touch not the Lord’s anointed” comes from a specific and dramatic moment in the Hebrew scriptures. David is hiding in a cave. Saul, the king who has been hunting him, is vulnerable, and David chooses not to harm him. It is an act of remarkable personal restraint in a life-or-death situation between two men, one of whom is actively trying to kill the other.

Notice how far that particular phrase has to travel in order to fit a context in which a leader is being challenged or called out for misconduct or abuse. In its original context, it describes one person’s costly, specific decision not to physically harm someone who wants him dead. In contemporary religious communities, it is sometimes invoked to discourage someone from raising a concern, asking a question, or requesting accountability from a leader. The distance between those two situations, between a man with a sword standing over his would-be murderer and a person with a legitimate concern sitting across from a religious leader, is enormous. But the phrase crosses that distance as if it weren’t there, and in crossing it, it bends reality: a principle that was never meant to travel across such disparate contexts becomes a near-universal law, and the ordinary act of raising a concern somehow becomes the equivalent of raising a sword. This kind of manipulation of phrases and texts happens frequently in gaslighting cultures and helps build the force field around unaccountable power.

What seals the force field in place is not only the language of the leader but the silence of the community. The sociologist Erving Goffman used the term tactful inattention to describe the way people work together to maintain order despite the existence of behavior everyone can see but no one names because naming it would cause a disruption no one wants to be responsible for. In communities where power has been gradually consecrated, tactful inattention becomes a kind of collective practice. People learn, through small and repeated experiences, what can be said and what cannot, which concerns are safe and which will cost something. Each unanswered question, each swallowed objection, each moment of practiced looking-away teaches the community what is permitted and teaches the powerful what can be done without consequence. Past silence becomes present precedent as boundaries are renegotiated. The force field expands not only because the powerful pushes outward but because the community, through its trained inattention, keeps agreeing to hold the boundary where toxic leadership has moved it. By the time someone finally decides to speak, they are not only stepping toward destructive leadership but against the weight of everything the community has collectively learned not to say.

So the consecration of power happens through the formation of a symbiotic relationship between toxic leaders who shun accountability and an enabling community that tolerates it.

An example of this dynamic at work in faith communities is when the language of humility is used to construct this force field rather than the language of power and how easy it is for the community to become part of this construction.

Sometimes those who deploy consecrating power language are often the same who speak most fluently about servant leadership, brokenness, and being nothing without God. I have encountered this pattern repeatedly in my research and in the communities I have studied, where a religious leader whose public persona is built around self-deprecation, whose signature move is to deflect praise with a nod toward God, whose most consistent line is some version of “don’t follow me, follow Jesus” or “I’m just a vessel.”

On its surface, this language can be genuine. Authentic humility exists, and we should expect to see expressions of humility. But there is a version of this performance that functions less as a spiritual posture and more as what Chuck DeGroat has called fauxnerability: an emotionally intelligent display of general messiness and unworthiness that maintains the appearance of vulnerability while remaining insulated from actual accountability. The false self, as DeGroat puts it, dressed up in the garment of brokenness, complete with the vocabulary of weakness, need, and dependence.

What I’ve noticed is that this kind of self-deprecation often functions as a fishing trip. The leader casts with self-loathing and waits for the audience to supply the catch. “I don’t deserve this platform.” “I’m the least qualified person in this room.” “God must have a sense of humor to use someone like me.” The community, which has been formed to value humility above almost everything else, feels the pull of the expected response and supplies it. “Of course God is using you.” “Of course you are anointed.” The self-deprecation generates the consecration it appears to be refusing. And over time, the community’s reflexive affirmation becomes part of the force field itself, a loop in which the leader performs unworthiness and the followers perform reverence, each reinforcing the other until the dynamic is so habitual that no one thinks to examine it.

But there’s a paradox at the very center of this language. If the leader is just a vessel, then critiquing the leader means critiquing what God is pouring through them. The humility language, which appears to lower the leader, actually raises the stakes of any challenge to a divine level. Raise a concern about conduct and you are no longer raising a concern about a person, you are raising a concern about a sacred instrument. The force field holds because the self-deprecation has done its work.

This is also how the vessel language escapes accountability when exposure becomes unavoidable. In cases I have studied, some leaders who face serious scrutiny respond not by addressing the specific concern but by escalating the claims of brokenness, becoming, in the moment of exposure, more visibly contrite, more emphatically unworthy, more vocally dependent on grace. The confession remains general and vague, carefully chosen from the distant past or selectively shaped to appear as full disclosure while protecting what most needs protecting. The community, formed to respond to displays of humility with affirmation and mercy, finds itself in an impossible position: to press the concern further is to appear merciless, self-righteous, unable to extend the grace the community claims to value. So the concern fades and the leader’s brand of brokenness remains intact. And the person who came with a question about human conduct leaves holding, once again, a judgment on their own character.

When Power Becomes Answerable

There is a phrase that functions as one of the most effective force field phrases in the consecrating power vocabulary: God will deal with them. For many people, the conviction that God sees and will one day act justly is a source of genuine comfort and sustaining hope. But in the contexts I am describing, this language can deflect from the accountability that is actually available, the kind that operates through real people, real relationships, and real communities. To say that God will deal with a person can move accountability out of any sphere where it can be examined, named, or acted upon by the people who have been harmed because the mechanism that might actually address the harm has been relocated to a divine realm no one can access or verify.

I am not suggesting that God does not or cannot hold people accountable. I am suggesting that the community is one of the primary means through which accountability actually operates. Healthy leadership understands this. Leaders who are genuinely grounded in humility and service do not experience accountability as a threat to their relationship with God but experience it as part of it. They welcome examination not because they are above scrutiny but because they know that authority exercised among people carries the risk of harm, and that the community’s capacity to name what is true is not an obstacle to divine purposes but an expression of them.

When power becomes answerable in this way, when it returns to the community it is meant to serve rather than positioning itself above it, it opens opportunities for questions that once felt dangerous to become welcome again. Concerns can be addressed without retaliation from the force field protecting power. And the phrases that once functioned as barriers can be returned to their proper meaning: not as walls around power, but as reminders that power is always held on behalf of others, always answerable to something beyond itself, and always capable of being examined by the community it claims to serve.

Several questions can help reopen space when power appears to have been consecrated and insulated by a force field:

• Is this language inviting honest engagement with leadership, or discouraging any examination of it?

• Are concerns being addressed directly, or redirected into questions about the motives of the person raising them?

• Does this community make room for accountability, or does it primarily emphasize loyalty and submission?

• Are leaders positioned as servants within the community, or as uniquely protected figures above it?

• What happens when someone respectfully disagrees?

These questions can help invite clarity and the kind of community where power can be both honored and examined, where leadership can be both trusted and held accountable, and where no one has to carry something alone.

Consecrating Power is the fourth spoke in The Wheel of Reality-Bending Phrases. The next two articles will describe the last two spokes: Framing Truth as Disloyalty and Recasting Alarm as Sin.