John 12:23-25  Jesus replied, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.  I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed.  But if it dies, it produces many seeds.  The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.

I want to talk to you about the importance of learning to recapture your individuality in the midst of a rising tide of Identity politics.  I am not denying the reality of group identities.  Our Compassion New England organization plows about $350,000.00 a year back into the community in programs that minister to the marginalized.  One could say that those who use our services are a group with sub-groups, but we don’t just see them as a group, we minister to them as individuals and as created image bearers of God.  We don’t try to lead them into a class struggle but we encourage them, bless them, and when possible teach them about individual personal responsibility.   Sure, we support public policies that help those who need better access to opportunity but one of the first things Shana Sullivan and the other staff members say to someone coming for help is, “tell us your story.”  That is such a great question.

The importance and power of the individual is the focus of the Christians’ faith and the foundation of Western Civilization.  The church doesn’t live in a vacuum and can’t help but be impacted by the current ethos, which is to assume that one’s group identity matters more than their personal identity.  The cultural change in the West in particular has gone from extreme individuality to extreme group identity so fast it’s got our heads spinning and while it has healthy dimensions it also has really dangerous dimensions.  The healthy dimensions of identity politics are greater sensitivity to those who are marginalized or are for whatever reason being neglected.  The dangerous side of Identity politics is that conversations and really important debates about what to do about oppression or the tricky nuances of alleged oppression are being shut down.  I challenge us to stop and reconsider that God presents himself as both a God of the group, but also obsessively a God of the individual person.

I begin this blog with Matthew 10:39 and John 12:23-25 to try and convince you that individuality is both sacred and serious.  Yes, you need to take yourself seriously because you bear the image of God.  Verses like in Matthew 10 and John 12 which teach us to experience our metaphorical death to self don’t end up with a lost self but a found self, a multiplied self, a glorified self and an immortal self.  Psychological systems theory uses a phrase that I just love and it’s “self differentiation.”  Roberta Gilbert calls it, “The Cornerstone Concept,” in her book by the same title; in it she goes to great length to explain the individuality of Jesus.  One poignant moment of self differentiation was when Jesus had just gotten together his team of disciples and was preparing to launch his public ministry and his family came to get him in Mark 3:21  When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.”  Well, you know the rest of the story, Jesus loved his family but he stayed on mission and didn’t go back home.

This is not to say that living in community and in submission toward the members of ones tribe is not also a Biblical concept because it is.  John F. Kennedy’s “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” is not in contradiction to the sacredness of the individual.  What makes unity powerful is that it is voluntary.  Jesus said, “I lay down my life, no one takes it from me.”  Being shamed, bullied, or threatened with the loss of your career if you don’t parrot the opinion of the group is hardly a powerful voluntary giving of oneself, but more akin to the mafia or the old Soviet Union where one in every three persons was a government informant.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who has often been a voice of moderation in public debate said the other day, “Americans have always held opposing views. But on both the left & right, politics is no longer just our opinions, it has become our personal identity. None of us are moving away. So we better figure out how to cooperate when we can & coexist respectfully when we can’t.”  

New Testament Christianity and the church itself is built on what we call, “the priesthood of the believer,” or every persons ability to hear from God.  That doesn’t mean it’s smart to be independent, because it’s not; but for the church to be powerful, we have to start there. This is why every Sunday morning, I stand before my congregation and remind them of what God thinks, because they have to decide and act.  I know there’s the other side to this doctrine of individuality and in a different time I would have felt compelled to challenge the narcissistic tendencies we all have to only consider our point of view and no one else’s.  The Bible talks however about “The men of Issachar, who understood the times and knew what to do.”  Our times are threatened by the dark side of tribalism and group think.

The reason I am concerned about this is in part personal.  I am a communicator and a public speaker and I find myself more nervous than I should be about speaking truth or at least what I perceive to be truth.  I also find myself afraid to just put out there what I think, which is a really important way for humans to sort out their beliefs.  The way civil people figure things out is to state what they think, then someone challenges that and you restate what was just said a little differently.  You keep going back and forth like this until you figure out what you really think.  If we’re all afraid to think out loud because serious consequences are imposed for the act of thinking… how can this be good?  Now granted, I know I am sometimes the nervous sort and have always struggled with self consciousness and that’s not something I am proud of.  However, people are paying a real price for saying what they think these days and that should not be.  When people can no longer civilly debate things they disagree on, that can only take us to a dark place.

So what are we to do?  I think we must rise up and be compassionate and courageous.  Generally speaking every public protest is about a group of people whose needs are being ignored and who’s human rights are not being properly considered.  Targeting specific groups for special compassion has been the modus operandi of the church for centuries, all the way back in the beginning the Apostles made a stink because the widows were being neglected in the daily serving of food and the Great Apostle Paul announced he was going to preach to the Gentiles.  Focusing on groups for compassion is not the same as trying to create a class struggle and a cultural revolution.  Study the American Revolution; while it wasn’t perfect it was as near a perfect revolution as you could have.  The Colonialist didn’t try to bring England down but simply made it clear they had to stay on their side of the pond.  You can create justice without class warfare; in fact you must, there’s no other way.  After reading Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals,” a couple of years ago, I can tell you it’s a formula for a never ending revolution.  You don’t want to live in that world.

So the courage part of our response to viral group think is to start lovingly and reasonably saying what we think and questioning what’s going unquestioned no matter what it cost us.  There’s no area of your life more important to do this than in your home with your children.  Science has proven that the frontal lobes are not properly connected to the rest of the brain until we are in our mid twenties at least.  Also, youth just haven’t had the experience needed to develop a fully informed value system.  So if we who are keepers of the gates don’t speak up, our young citizens, who are most vulnerable to the will of the mob will be carried along by a crowd that neither knows what they are saying and or where their ideology is taking them.  Do you think the mob that yelled, “crucify him,” had any idea who they were crucifying?

By the way, while I am worried, I am not pessimistic.  God always raises up prophets when his people are about to lose their way and those prophets always speak truth, restore sanity, and bring about justice; at least as much justice as flawed humans can manage to create.  Elijah even had “the school of prophets.”  Isn’t that a cool idea?  Prophets roamed the land looking for people who would listen, they weren’t part of a power structure, just individual speakers of truth.  That’s what you can be if you have the compassion and courage.  

PS:  “Being taught not to talk about politics and religion has led to a lack of understanding of politics and religion.  What we should have been taught was how to have civil conversations about a difficult topic.” Unknown