This is an excerpt from a satire
I wrote about the kinds of people
who are attracted to
certain types of churches.

All of us struggle with pride, especially the less secure we are, but it has been my experience that two groups seem particularly full of folk who are proud of their intellectual or social position: the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians.

My father’s mother was once visiting with another woman, sitting on a park bench the way people used to do, thinking nothing of talking to strangers. In the course of the conversation, the subject of religion came up, and my grandmother discovered that the other woman was a Baptist. “A Baptist?” she responded, “You seem too good to be a Baptist.” That was in the early days of the twentieth century, when it was sometimes said of small towns, particularly in the South: the Presbyterians/Episcopalians owned it, the Methodists managed it and the Baptists worked it. That was back when Baptists didn’t have much money, and almost nobody knew anybody who was a Pentecostal. A far cry from today, but I think the elitist spirit is still there in the churches of the Presbyterian/Reformed tradition.

An acquaintance of mine, a Presbyterian minister, once said to me, “Presbyterianism is the thinking man’s religion.” It really is. For one thing, take the educational requirements: to be ordained, a person has to have completed college and seminary. That is a minimum of seven years, four for college and three for seminary, originally with three languages being required: Latin, Greek and Hebrew.

The educational requirement is probably one reason we lost the frontier to the Methodists and Baptists. In other churches a newly converted man who showed an aptitude for teaching could be apprenticed to a pastor and soon be ordained himself without ever having to quit his job and go off to school. Not so in the Reformed churches—think about it: at the time of the War for Independence, two-thirds of the colonists were, in some sense, Calvinistic. By the twenty-first century, Reformed people are a distinct minority, and the mainline Presbyterian Church is dying.  But it is still a powerful and well-educated minority. And this only reinforces the intellectual pride; the epithet, the frozen chosen, is fitting in many ways.