The tribe is hungry. You can see it in the endless line-drawing, the degrees of separation, the guilt by association that passes for discernment in too many evangelical circles. A reader named Jacob recently asked me a question that helped me understand why.
Jacob noticed a connection between two columns I’d written that appeared the same week. The first was about the mob mentality and crowd culture rising in the wake of expressive individualism. Now that the “find yourself and express yourself” philosophy has largely exhausted itself, we’re being drawn toward group identity to fill the void of significance and meaning that a self-generated identity cannot sustain.
The second was “Stop Being Shocked When Christians Disagree with You”—in which I used the famous feud between the Puritans John Owen and Richard Baxter to argue for tempering our expectations that Christians will be uniform on how best to address the pressing issues of our day. My encouragement was to expect disagreement among faithful believers, assume a posture of curiosity, and not abandon charitable persuasion as a means of engaging debatable matters. Sometimes our surprise at disagreement is precisely what heightens the tension and makes friendly relations with brothers and sisters nearly impossible.
Jacob wondered whether these two columns are related. Perhaps one reason Christians are so shocked when other Christians disagree is connected to the resurgence of crowd culture—the way we increasingly find our sense of meaning and purpose in the tribe we most closely associate with.
When the Tribe Becomes Everything
There’s surely something to that diagnosis. It touches on one of the perennially appealing aspects of fundamentalism—a term I use not as a pejorative but as a descriptor of a mindset marked not only by what we believe as Christians (often ranking nearly all doctrinal positions and practices at the same level of importance), but also by what separates us from other Christians and why fellowship should be broken with those who don’t adequately separate from believers deemed to be in error.
At its best, fundamentalism commends strong convictions and fosters warm fellowship within communities bound together by their opposition to the outside world or to compromised churches. At its worst, it becomes brittle and insecure. When people raised in such environments come into closer contact with sincere believers outside their tribe, they can wind up questioning everything—including, ironically, the fundamentals of the faith that all Christians everywhere confess. When everything is treated as a first-order issue, any doubt at any point can cause the whole edifice to crumble.
The reality is that we’re witnessing the rise of new forms of revisionist Christianity and a resurgence of fundamentalist identity simultaneously—and in both cases, the lines are as often drawn around political views as they are around theological affirmations.
Whether it’s the fundamentalist enclave devolving into an online world of ever more radical right-wing beliefs, or the progressivist mindset devolving into little more than left-wing talking points baptized in Christian rhetoric, the appeal in both cases is the sense of community. It’s the feeling of being beleaguered and outnumbered, pressing up against your compatriots in battle against the bad guys, that generates a sense of significance and purpose.
Exhausted by looking inward to discover and express who we are, we now look around desperately for the affirmation of others—the sense of identity that comes from drawing close to those who share our affinities and outlook.
Purity Spiral
This explains why so much energy in evangelical circles is devoted to line-drawing, often with degrees of separation straight out of the old fundamentalist playbook.
If you quote that author, well, don’t you know she’s a friend of so-and-so, and so-and-so once said this and she never disavowed him, so . . . Or if you appreciate that pastor’s take on one issue, you should know he once promoted someone with a bad take on a different issue—how could you be so undiscerning? Or if you found this article helpful, don’t you know it comes from a website that also published a bad take on Trump (pro or con, depending on which tribe you’re in), and so everything from that source should be suspect . . . And on and on it goes.
Because people increasingly find their identities in the purity of their enclaves, no outside influence can be permitted to infiltrate. And lest you think I’m speaking primarily about the MAGA right, this tendency is every bit as strong in anti-Trump circles where progressive pieties go unchallenged. Reading widely and generously becomes nearly impossible in this environment, and so do broad associations and friendships.
With individual identity so fragile, embattled, and embittered, it’s no wonder people retreat to their cocoons and long for a world where everyone is closely aligned. The problem, of course, is that disputes don’t disappear—they morph into new lines drawn over smaller and smaller matters.
This is why, across the left and right, in political and ecclesial circles alike, we see Christians excluding one another from fellowship, allowing suspicion to reign, and castigating believers for openness to “problematic” persons—often over disputable matters that once fit comfortably under the same tent of fellowship.
Community, Not Crowd
So my answer to Jacob is yes: The devolution of expressive individualism into crowd culture heightens the shock Christians feel when they encounter fellow believers who disagree with them. The impulse to find solace and identity in others is ever-present.
Yet at its best, the church isn’t a crowd but a true community. The church is where we’re reminded that we’re loved by God and chosen by grace. The church is where we’re fortified in our faith and strengthened to stand against a culture often hostile to the demands of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. There’s an indispensable element of looking around in the Christian life—loving our brothers and sisters, covenanting to walk with them, and enduring the storms of debate and discouragement when our siblings inevitably let us down.
But communities can devolve into mere crowds. When our identity is defined primarily by tribal alliances, we’re less likely to endure the ordinary disagreements and troubles of church life. We’re more likely to disengage—to retreat into the online world of complainers and commiserators, and then fall back into an individualized spirituality where only those most closely aligned with us qualify for fellowship.
The solution is to look up first, to God and his Word, and then around to his people as we submit to Scripture together. How we do this, in our communal lives and individual devotion, is a matter for further reflection. But surely the gospel that stands above and outside of ourselves is the only antidote to both the lonely world of expressive individualism and the unthinking world of the crowd—giving us the firmness of conviction to stand on truth no matter the cost, and the generosity of spirit to encounter and endure those it can sometimes be hard to love.
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