Consumers or Community

Since the 1960’s, we have been caught up in a far-reaching cultural revolution. One aspect of this revolution has been retreat from participation in the institutions of community life – notably marriage and church – but also from civic engagement in general. Screens have allowed us to substitute contact-free virtual relationships for in-person community, and the Covid lockdowns accelerated self-isolating “work from home” lifestyles. It’s ironic that one of the social media giants seized on the language of “friendship” for its product: ironic, because social media cannibalizes more real and embodied forms of community to produce merely virtual forms of community – relationships that are contact-free, and fundamentally transactional, segmenting the population into self-selecting and warring tribes. Recent statistic samplings indicate the long decline in church affiliation has paused, or even reversed, but it is too soon to celebrate. For one thing, it is young men who are coming back to church, not young women: the polarizing dynamic is still at work.

Underlying this dissolution of community, and its replacement by disembodied virtual communities, is the emergence of the autonomous self, godlike in its self-determining freedom, bound by no constraint of tradition, reason, or nature, under obligation only to the imperatives of self-expression. As a result of this shift, we understand what we are no longer in terms obligations to community but in terms of consumption.

The decline of marriage and of the church mean an erosion also of the goods that we can have only by commitment to community, and not by transactional consumerism. Genuine community requires more of us – but it also provides benefits you can’t get any other way. For example, there are real and measurable benefits that children receive when they grow up with parents who are married to each other: those benefits are less commonly found in children who grow up in other circumstances. But it is not just children who benefit from community – it’s also the parents, in the great unspoken covenant of mutual care between the generations. The retreat from family and church and civic engagement has marched with a decline in procreation rates well below replacement levels. An aging society will have to depend on ever smaller numbers of working adults for its well being. It’s not just social security benefits, either, whose funds are on track to run out in 2032. The decline of the workforce will affect the economy, national security, public health, social services, and much more. It will put ever more pressure on those who are most in need of care. It is not impossible that pressure should mount for euthanasia on economic grounds.

The question is, whether we have reached a point where we are ready to rediscover ourselves as individuals in community rather than as consumers driven by self-expression. I do not have an answer to that question. What I do know is that the Christian religion has a deep and rich teaching and practice of community; for the Christian religion is about the establishment of genuine community at the very deepest levels of reality, a community that is grounded on the action of God himself, drawing us into communion and fellowship with himself in body and soul, for time and eternity, so that we share in the very life of God, the relation of the Father to the Son in the Holy Spirit. Just think of the images for community that we find in Scripture – the Creator’s chosen people, God’s household and family, the Shepherd and the sheep, the Vine and the branches, the Body of Christ, the Temple of the Spirit. Think also of the sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion, the outward means by which we are united to Christ in his Body and sustained in that union as “very members incorporate”. The inner spiritual virtues of mind and will that unite us to God in Christ through the sacraments – faith, hope, and charity – are also virtues that unite us to one another: shared faith, shared hope, shared love that is also love for one another. Through these virtues, by means of the Spirit’s working through these sacraments, we are growing into the community that Christ has established for us in his own person.

For us to live in this community requires that we not approach it as consumers, making choices based on convenience, taste, opinion, or self-interest. That’s hard, because everything else in our culture teaches us to do just that. (That’s why merely transactional approaches to boosting the birth rate by financial benefits have had little success.) As the gospel itself proclaims, there is only one way to establish and maintain community, and that is sacrifice. That’s why the Prayer Book service makes clear that in the very act of receiving the benefits of Christ’s sacrifice for us, we are offering ourselves to him, “ourselves, our souls and bodies”, “not only with our lips but in our lives”. It is in dying to self, that we live unto God, in the Body of Christ, in the Temple of the Spirit.