If you’re trying to lead a church focused on making disciples of Jesus who share life together and embody an alternative witness in America or other Western societies today, you’re swimming upstream against much deeper cultural currents than you may realize. Signs of institutional decline and generational abandonment of the church are all around us, and if we’re honest, we’ll admit that participation, engagement, and faithful discipleship among those who are still connected to congregations are often pretty thin. Meanwhile, contemporary American culture is coming apart at the seams, with a loneliness epidemic, political polarization, the disintegration of democratic institutions, and a loss of solidarity. I don’t think we can understand and address it unless we step back and look past the symptoms.
The roots of this crisis of community lie much deeper than this generation or the last, the advent of social media or AI, or the rise of whatever political figures concern you. They lie within the basic re-founding of Western culture that took place in the 17th-19th centuries in the Enlightenment. What we are seeing today is the outworking of cultural trajectories set in place hundreds of years ago that have become normative for Western society and profoundly shape our churches and their people. In other words, the contemporary collapse of community is a feature, not a bug, of modern Western culture.
Amidst a variety of crises that took place in the 1600s into the 1800s, an inversion of beliefs and basic assumptions began to take hold in the West. Rather than understanding humans as created by a good and transcendent God for interdependent relationships of shared life who were nonetheless marred by a deep tendency to seek their own way and break that communion, humanity was re-conceived as a collection of self-ruled individuals with rights to pursue their own desires and interests. Rather than recognizing God as the very essence of being underlying all of life, God became a being among others, increasingly eclipsed from view. A good life went from cultivating virtue and holiness through practices of self-discipline in service of love for others in the way of Jesus, to self-expression of individual desires, increasingly without limits.
Along the way, humans came to reimagine life as something they could define and determine on their own, without accountability to God, the past, tradition, or community, as long as they didn’t harm anyone else. Listening to and obeying their own feelings was the primary way to live authentically, and empathy was the primary guide to how to treat others. Settled ways of living in community in places over generations were disrupted in favor of the mobility of people, ideas, and capital–at least for those who could compete. Biological, social, and cultural limits were to be transcended through technology, no matter the impact on the environment or human lives.
This is the world of the modern West, which has brought dramatic improvements in material circumstances (alleviating much poverty, disease, and hunger), fostered various forms of social equality, and offered new kinds of opportunity. It has also brought a growing estrangement from each other, unraveling of institutions that connect us, and alienation, loneliness, and despair.
We are all deeply formed by the basic myths of the modern West, whether we like it or not. We are conditioned to see our individual selves as the ultimate arbiters of truth and goodness, to resist anything that would interfere with the expression of our feelings and desires, and to hold all relationships provisionally. The very idea that we would submit sacrificially to life together in community under the authority of a crucified and risen Lord contradicts the basic premises of our culture.
No wonder people show up at church only when they feel like it, resist calls to deeper commitment or service, and pick and choose cafeteria-style from the teachings of the Bible or tradition. At the end of the day, what matters is how it makes them feel. Churches across the theological spectrum have made sometimes fatal accommodations to this culture, whether the individualistic emotionalism of much evangelical worship or the therapeutic relativism of mainline teaching.
There is no sacred order left in Western society that provides a common horizon of meaning, understanding, or connection. The myths we share in the modern West render all structures of community fluid and fragile. It should be no surprise that we’re facing a crisis of community.
Addressing this requires confronting how we’ve accommodated ourselves and our churches to cultural stories that contradict core Christian teaching. It means going back into Scripture and the ancient wisdom of the church to rediscover who we are as God’s people. It involves embracing ancient practices that disrupt our culture’s idolatries and decenter our selves as we encounter the living God in community.
Interested in hearing more on this topic from Dwight and a number of other thinkers/writers/practitioners from a number of different fields? Be on the lookout for Season Six of the Pivot Podcast starting March 19!
