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I grew up in fundamentalist churches that inculcated us in an individualistic understanding of the Christian faith. Uncritically reflecting the cultural assumptions of American society, it was about the individual at every possible turn: individual salvation, personal Lord and Savior, personal relationship with God, personal devotions, personal accountability partner, sin is always about personal actions and never collective injustice or corrupt institutional structures, etc. Their framework for every facet of faith was individualistic and bottom-up.
Naturally, this same outlook extended into their understanding of government. There was lots of talk about “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” in the Declaration of Independence, but not a word was ever spoken about one of the purposes of government being to “promote the general Welfare” according to the preamble to the Constitution. In the 19 years I lived within the Pentecostal world, I’d don’t recall anyone ever uttering the words “common good” or talking about any similar notion. Any kind of collective consciousness was completely off their radar.
In putting fundamentalism behind me, I’ve emphatically rejected every last bit of this nonsense. As far as I’m concerned, unfettered individualism is wholly contrary to the teachings of Jesus and is a blight upon the Church. To be clear, this is not a reactionary swing from one extreme to another. However one wants to describe it, I equally reject both polarities: freedom and control, individualism and collectivism, independence and codependence, autonomy and enmeshment. Instead I affirm that the Christian faith is, at every possible turn, about a third way of healthy interdependence while being self-differentiated within the community.
For those who may not have heard of self-differentiation before, my favorite definition comes from Karen R. Koenig. She writes, “Self-differentiation involves being able to possess and identify your own thoughts and feelings and distinguish them from others. It’s a process of not losing connection to self while holding a deep connection to others, including those you love whose views may differ from yours.” It’s about maintaining healthy and appropriate boundaries while living with a deep connection to others in community.
Returning to the topic at hand, in the New Testament text we see community-oriented themes:
- The Trinitarian concept of one God in three Persons who are in eternal, perfect fellowship.
- Jesus inviting people to be reconciled with God by finding their ultimate identity and citizenship in the Kingdom of God.
- Jesus sending out the disciples two by two to minister in His name.
- Where two or three are gathered together in Jesus’ name there He is in the midst of them.
- Individuals spiritually being grafted into the community of faith via baptism.
- Spiritual unity with God and one another through the sacrament of Communion.
- The earliest Christians following the ancient Jewish practice of reading the ancient Scriptures aloud to the whole gathering and discussing them together.
One of the insights of missiologists is that the Kingdom is not transcendent. It must always be incarnated by a community of faith within a particular time and place. In every new generation, and in every new place, the life-giving Story must be re-contextualized, re-imagined, and re-told. The challenge, of course, lies in discerning what parts are essential to maintaining the integrity of the Gospel and what parts can be modified. What changes and what remains the same as the Gospel moves from Jerusalem, to Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth?
I say all that in an effort to recognize that I know some American Christians have been sincerely trying to incarnate the Gospel in their own cultural-historical context. This process resulted in what historian Nathan Hatch referred to as the democratization of American Christianity. I get why it happened and, if I’m being charitable, I get what they were trying to do. Yet after all my studies of history, theology, and cultural anthropology over the past two decades, I’ve become convinced that the individualism train has gone off the Gospel tracks.
Maybe they’re OK in small doses, but I sincerely believe that a lifestyle premised upon the two-fold philosophy of “You Do You!” and “You Only Live Once!” is completely incompatible with The Way of Jesus. It results in a cult of self-centered, egotistical, narcissistic, me-first jackasses who all believe that “Jesus died for me.” No, hun, it’s time to grow up and get over yourself. The redundant sentiment in the Greek of 1 John 2:2 is that Jesus died for the whole of the world. He died for everyone collectively that we all might be saved. That’s the biblical Gospel.
American Christianity has sold its soul to the idol of individualism. “But muh freedom!” Here’s a tip: You’re putting the emPHASis on the wrong sylLABle. Once again, it’s not about you, your rights, and your comfort. Get. Over. Yourself. Following Jesus means a lifestyle of loving your neighbor as yourself and esteeming others more important than yourself. This whole thing is another example of the rampant noun-adjective confusion where supposed followers of Jesus are believing, feeling, thinking, and acting more as Christian Americans than as American Christians.
