So those virtues will necessarily be alien to popular culture, even if the people wanted them there. Themes of restless desire, the lust for power, the insistence of moral autonomy, and resistance to restraint are common in popular culture precisely because its elites must sustain these sensibilities to stay in business. The assumption that undergirds the charge of elitism is an anti-hierarchical egalitarianism, the notion that justice and goodness cannot be possible as long as hierarchies of authority remain. The Bible clearly assumes hierarchies of authority in social life in all forms. The preferred biblical metaphor for leadership in the Church, for example, is that of shepherd, which sounds pretty elitist to me.
Pastors are to be a sacrificial elite to be sure, but an elite nonetheless.
The presupposition of biblical teaching is that any right-minded sheep should turn to a shepherd for help whenever encountering the sort of trouble sheep are likely to get into. But they are clearly an elite, like it or not. As Nathan Hatch has shown in The Democratization of American Christianity, Americans generally haven t liked it. So they have preferred those churches and polities that minimize or deny the authority of pastors. In fact, among Protestants, it seems assumed that the church government that governs least governs best.