Squaring Individualism With The Church
By: Jacob Brunton
Tags: Christianity, Individualism

I am a Christian advocate of Individualism.

I’m often asked how I square such individualism with the fact that there seem to be legitimate collectives in all of life, and especially in the Bible — the ultimate of which is the Church.

This is my answer:

To begin, it’s helpful to understand the nature of a collective. Start by asking: A collective — of what? Answer: Of individuals.

The next question is: What “collects,” or unites, them? There are only two types of answers to this question: Something arbitrary, or something chosen.

Two Types of Collectives

You can “collect,” or group, people together by some arbitrary attribute, like race, height, gender, hair color, etc… Or, you can group them together based on shared ideas and values which they hold.

The difference becomes more explicit when you consider what it means for each type of a supposed collective to actually function like a collective.

The collective which is based in shared ideas and values organically functions like a collective. Each individual member agrees with all the others about some fundamental ideas and values, and as a consequence, he is eager to cooperate with all the others in the pursuit or celebration of those shared ideas and values. This is the sort of collective exhibited by the Church (to the extent that the Church is healthy).

Not so with the collective based in arbitrary attributes. The extent to which the individual members of this type of collective don’t agree on fundamental ideas and values is the extent to which they can only function as a collective by force. This is the sort of collective exhibited by communism.

What makes the first (voluntary) type of collective good, and the second (arbitrary) type of collective evil? I would suggest that the first has not forgotten the nature of that which is “collected” — i.e., the nature of the individual. Only individuals have minds and affections. And therefore, only individuals can agree to ideas and values. This is why individualism is necessary for any healthy collective — because the individual is logically prior to the collective.

That’s all individualism means: understanding that the individual is logically prior to any collective; that the health of a given group is contingent upon the health of its individual members, and on their shared individual agreement concerning the fundamental ideas and values which unite them.

Applying It To The Church

Imagine a small church in which no one person believed the same thing about the fundamentals of the gospel. Maybe one person believes that Jesus was only a man, and another believes that Jesus was fully God, but not actually a man. Another believes in works-righteousness, and someone else believes in universalism. Keep going with the list of possible heresies, until everyone at the church is covered. Now ask yourself: Could this possibly be a healthy church?

The answer, obviously, is: No. Why? Because the health of the church is contingent upon the health of its members. More importantly, the unity of the church is contingent upon the shared convictions of its members. If the individual members do not share any fundamental Christian convictions in common, then on what basis can it even be considered a “church”?

Now, imagine a church in which every person was passionately convinced of the fundamentals of the gospel; where each individual member took it upon himself to carefully guard his mind and heart from false teaching, and thus was able to help others do likewise; where each individual member carefully cultivated his own passion for the things of God, and thus was able to help encourage others to do likewise. This, obviously, would be a very healthy church. And this is precisely what Christian individualism would prescribe.