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John Wesley once preached, “Christianity is essentially a social religion; and that to turn it into a solitary religion, is indeed to destroy it.” We can’t go it alone. We need community. Got it. The trouble is, people have stripped Wesley’s perspective of its nuance. In the following paragraphs he explicitly acknowledges that no time alone is bad for the soul and says faithful Jesus followers may “subsist in a desert, in a hermits cell, in total solitude.” Yet the way American Christianity has dumbed things down in the centuries since leaves no room for introversion or solitude.
Christian culture in the American context largely disparages introversion. It’s not only that extroversion is favored. That would be fine. Every culture has its own tendencies. It’s this implicit belief that godliness entails hyperactive productivity and continuous socializing. It quickly turns into a perception of flawed character. If you don’t enjoy nonstop social interaction and intense stimuli, then you’re a cold, unloving person. Apparently loving Jesus automatically rewires the soul to draw energy from bright lights, unabating noise, frenetic activity, and constant people.1
None of that squares with our Lord as depicted in Scripture. In Matthew 14 Jesus went alone to grieve. In Mark 1 Jesus got up early, went to a solitary place, and prayed. In Luke 5 it says Jesus frequently withdrew into the wilderness to pray. There’s a clear pattern emerging, no? He wasn’t socially reclusive but His spiritual vitality depended upon recharging in solitude. To be clear, I’m not suggesting Jesus was an introvert nor am I reversing the problem by claiming introversion is somehow godlier.2 All I’m saying is extreme extrovert privilege is foreign to The Way of Jesus.
In Henri Nouwen’s book, Reaching Out, he explores the the spiritual movement from suffocating loneliness to receptive solitude. Commenting on the life of Thomas Merton, Nouwen writes, “The paradox of Merton’s life indeed is that his withdrawal from the world brought him into closer contact with it. The more he was able to convert his restless loneliness into a solitude of the heart, the more he could discover the pains of the world in his own inner center and respond to them.” Jesus understood this dynamic between Being and Doing, but American Christians seldom do.
The original beatniks had deep interior lives that were receptive to introversion and solitude. Now, it’s important not to conflate shyness or contemplative solitude with introversion.3 These ideas are not all one in the same, but they do counterculturally butt up against the extroverted social values and expectations of American culture, especially American Christian culture. That’s why it’s important for beatnik Christianity to be eagerly receptive of the ideas in books like Adam McHugh’s Introverts in the Church and Thomas Merton’s The Wisdom of the Desert.4
Sorry, autistic people, but your neurosensory sensitivities mean you don’t sufficiently love Jesus.↩
Jesus actually seems more like an ambivert or an omnivert to me. Personally, I’m a thoughtful-people-are-great-but-walking-dunning-kruger-effects-destroy-my-soul-vert.↩
For that matter, I think we need to distinguish between inversion and the trait that psychologist Elaine Aron has identified as the Highly Sensitive Person.↩
Final thought: there are an awful lot of wounded introverts and contemplatives (not necessarily the same people) throughout our churches who feel like there’s something wrong with them because the behavior of their healthiest true self offends the social sensibilities of American Christianity’s extrovert privilege. That’s a problem.↩
