I was intrigued by the news that Continuum International (publishers of such fine books as Circles of Thorns, and If You Meet George Herbert on the Road, Kill Him) have just been bought by Bloomsbury. Especially as the news was released three days after I had signed a contract with Continuum for them to publish my next book— how, I wondered, did Bloomsbury act so quickly, and why, I wondered, were they so desperate to get the rights for my work?

The answer is on the cover, he says, modestly. Next summer, Continuum / Bloomsbury will publish “You are the Messiah, and I should know: why leadership is a myth, and possibly a heresy”. Based on my PhD research at the University of Kent¹, YatM looks at the way “leadership” is used as method of social control and is described as the universal virtue in our society. It is the panacea, the solution to every social problem, and there is no organization, business, group or nation which does not need more of it.

The problem is, no one can agree on what “leadership” is. In the academic and business literature there are X² definitions of what constitutes “leadership”. There is even no agreement about how the various different definitions of leadership relate to one another. In any other field, such a mass of contradiction and confusion would lead to suspicions about the intellectual credibility of the subject: however, “leadership studies” is different, because there is always the opportunity to package the latest insight into “vital”, “necessary”, “cutting-edge” leadership, and sell it to the desperate business men (and they are usually men) who seek an advantage over their rivals: “Follow the ABC method”, “Use the K1P approach to dynamic, integrative leadership!” and share prices will soar and women will swoon.

But, if “leadership” is not a coherent and credible discipline, why is it so powerful in our culture? The answer comes from two insights: a) understand leadership as a “Myth” (a  story we tell ourselves to make sense of our world); and b) the most powerful mythic medium in our culture is Cinema, and, especially, popular Hollywood film. This means, in effect, it doesn’t matter how many text books on “transformative leadership” or “transactional followership” you buy, how many seminars on the “leadership lessons of Jesus Christ” you pay for, the dominating medium of leadership is film. You say “Mark Zuckerberg”; he says “Jesus Christ”; we all mean “John Wayne”.

I explore my idea in, roughly, the following structure³:

Section 1 The “Problem” of Leadership

 Is Leadership a Problem? :  How leadership is presented as a universal good, and yet how the secular advocates of leadership are unable to agree on a definition or even a family of definitions of leadership. How much is leadership a means of selling reassurance to worried businesses?

Jesus, MBA : How the Church in the late twentieth century began to incorporate the strictures of secular business consultants into church governance and ministerial formation. (I include a case study on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s “sharia law” speech).

Leading and Leaving the Dead :  I examine the usual Bible passages usually described as the Scriptural justification for leadership studies and show that they are anything but.

 Section 2 The “Problem” of Myth          

The Morphology of Myth : I demonstrate that leadership is best thought of as a “myth”, and what this term might mean.

The Myths of the Mighty : Myths are always the expression of a particular society, and I explore what the myths of the dominant culture of our day, the United States of America, show us about the origins of leadership studies. R. W. Emerson’s role is explored.

 Section 3 Leadership Myths in Movies

 The Leadership Principle: Affirmation: I look at the films which advocate an uncritical acceptance of the “great man” model of leadership, and show how that is reflected in most popular thinking about leadership. Films include Patton, Triumph of the Will, and Star Wars.

Splitters! : Repudiation:  a group of films, mostly made in the 1970s and 80s, attempted to repudiate the older model of leadership, but in doing so, they merely perpetuated Emerson’s idea of the sovereignty of the individual which is the root of the “great man” model. ‘Don’t follow leaders, don’t be a follower’, was their message. Films include Spartacus, Full Metal Jacket, Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Apocalypse Now.

Citizen Soldiers : Resurgence : in the 1990s attempts were made to reintegrate a healthier model of leadership/followership in films. Given that we have to have leaders, how should they behave? Unconsciously, these films (Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, The West Wing) merely reinforced the older mythic idea of the separation of the leader from his community. John Wayne’s persona is the root of all these.

Section 4 Conclusion

Mythos and Anti-Mythos :  if leadership spills over into totalitarianism, then what is the Church to do? The life and ministry of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is the place to turn to, in his repudiation of “great man” leadership, and his modelling of the true Christian pattern of social organization, discipleship.

I hope that I will, as the autumn comes upon us, to give some taster of what this might look like in detail (I realise that this will incur further corrective expressions of disappointment from Archdruid Eileen). In the meantime:

1. incidentally, the PhD is 11/12 completed, but won’t be submitted until the autumn. I am that rare creature, someone who gets a contract to publish his PhD before his PhD is even finished [↩]
2. number deliberately kept vague, as by the time this blog is posted, it will be out of date, by some order of magnitude [↩]
3. YMMV when it actually comes to the finished article [↩]

I know exactly who reads the papers: the Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country;
The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country;
The Times is read by people who actually do run the country;
the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country;
the Financial Times is read by people who own the country;
The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country;
The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.

The News of the World and The Sun are read by the people who don’t care who runs the country, just so long as they can hear what’s in their voicemail, and read about their sons’ medical reports.

I’ve had a comment piece  published on the Guardian’s Comment is Free blog, examining what the Parochial Fees Order means for the future of the Church of England. A taster:

On Saturday the General Synod of the Church of England will turn its attention to a little piece of housekeeping, the parochial fees order, through which the fees charged by churches for weddings and funerals are regulated. This might seem unremarkable, but, in reality, if the order is passed, it will mark the triumph of managerialism and the end of the Church of England as we have known it. The order is flawed, pastorally, practically and ecclesiologically.

Read it all here.