Well, this week I am off to the Motor City.
I am going in order to deliver a presentation called “The Counterculture of Community”. I will be offering this presentation three times in three parishes in the Archdiocese of Detroit and its purpose is to discuss the effects of excessive individualism in our U.S. culture.
While I was at Boston College I studied this topic I became interested in the impact that an increasingly individualistic culture is having on our Church here in the States. By individualism I mean that one’s focus tends to be on oneself, or on oneself and one’s family, but not so much on any greater community beyond that. The effect of this, when it comes to faith is a more or less privatized spirituality. The person believes in God, but their faith is not a shared faith, and it is often a kind of homespun set of beliefs that support that faith.
It seems that as a nation, we are becoming more and more individualistic, not only in our faith, but in other areas of life as well.
I don’t want to bore anyone with a bunch of statistics, but let me just offer a few to illustrate the point.
· The United States divorce rate is the highest in the world at nearly 50%.
· Participation in the PTA (as an example) is down from earlier memberships of the 1970’s by 60%.
· Political participation (voting, working for candidates, etc…) is down by 30-40% from the 1970’s.
· Attendance at weekly Mass among Catholics is down from 74% in 1957 to 31% in 2004.
People really are just becoming less and less likely to become involved in things outside the home, and the effects have been very detrimental to our society and to our Church.
So many people are now in a kind of go-it-alone faith journey, saying “I am spiritual but not religious.”, and they are missing out on the support of other believers. They are missing out too on the nourishment that is offered through regular participation in an intentional faith community. I can’t imagine how I would be able to maintain my faith without community.
The other Sisters and I thought that if people could have a lived experience of what it means to belong to an intentional faith community… a community of people who are together for the express purpose of living out their baptismal call to participate in the Gospel mission… then they could learn how important community is to the Christian life. Then they would want to bring those values and commitments with them wherever they went, whether that be into their marriages, their parenting, their ministries, their parishes, or wherever it might be.
Of course, if after a person had an experience of living in our community, that person wanted to enter religious life, we would be very happy for that. But we want to believe that living this life even for a period of time would be a valuable experience to the person and, through that person, to others.
I don’t know if anyone would want to weigh in on this issue. I would love to hear from people. Do you see our society as too individualistic? What do you think are the causes of this? What do you think we ought to do about it, if anything?
By the way…thanks to all of you who have been visiting this site. I really like doing this and I am so happy when I see that people have been here and were thoughtful enough to leave comments.
Peace to all of you.
Sr. Judy
Filed under: Reflections | Tagged: community, individualism
Sr Judy
I enjoyed reading and thinking about your last entry. You bring up an interesting dichotomy that is shaping church membership of all traditions. My friends and I often talk about feeling alienated in the new places that we have settled in because it seems that people do not want to do things in community. Sometimes church functions also have this same twinge of individualism, where you see people interacting within their own family but not reaching out to other families or singles. I recently went through a faith retreat at a local abbey and we talked a lot about the issues that you bring up. The thing that struck me the most was not so much that people are staying home with their faith, but which people were staying home. Young, single adults shy away from faith communities and I wonder why this is so prevalent? Is it simply that two generations of adults between 18 and 40 feel discontented with institutional religion? Or do they is that they do not feel that they can play a role in the Church as a lay person because they are not attached to a family unit? In your research, have you come across any information that might shed some light on this part of spiritual individualism?
Thanks again for your blog
Dear Regina,
Hi and thank you for your thoughtful post. I too find this topic to be interesting and have spent much time reading about this. If you are interested in doing some reading on this, there are two popular books that I think are very good on this topic. One is “Bowling Alone” by Robert Putnam. He really paints a thorough picture of where we are as a nation when it comes to community involvement. It was written in 1999, so some of the stats are a bit outdated, but there is so much there to consider.
Another good book is called “Habits of the Heart” by Robert Bellah. (I think it’s Robert, but it’s definitely Bellah.) It is similar to Bowling Alone, but I think Bellah goes a little deeper.
As for your question about why young single folks shy away from faith communities…I think I can offer something…even if it is only some piece of the puzzle. I am not sure that young folks are discontented with institutional religion as much as they have little experience with it. There are just a lot of people who have no connection with any church during their upbringing, and so have little reason to turn to a church for direction or community. Of course, there are always those who have been discontented, and that too may play a part, but I have run across some information that tells me that Baby Boomers are less engaged in the community than their parents, and that Generation X is still less involved, and that Generation Y is the least involved. So, at this point in our history, the younger a person is, the less likely he or she is to become involved in the wider community.
I will also say that in my own experience from when I was a single laywoman in the church, I remember feeling somewhat at loose ends in my parish because of not being connected to a family, so I think that that’s a part of it too.
I do hope though that young people will begin to see the value of getting more involved. I am hoping that the women who do eventually get involved in our temporary commitment program will be able to really imbibe the value of a commitment to an intentional faith community and be able to carry that strongly held value with them wherever they go.
Thanks for your comment.
Peace to you,
Sr. Judy
Good post. i think the individualism which one can think of as a disconnection is something that is within the self and between selves, and ultimately signifies disconnection from God in the spiritual sense. When tv, internet, people, and advertisements are filling our heads with material that at the least does not lead our to God and the worst leads one to a sort of athiesm and ‘belief in -one-self’ [the individualism working on the theological level here] – i.e. the idol of the self, then over time it is not surprising that divorce rates, attendances to places of worship and such are way down.
Solution: Where are those people who are genuinely connected to God while living in the midst of everyone else, the accomplished spirituals; as those are people to be followed. Until people are taken to them, they cannot take them by the hand to their Lord. Why do people allow this ‘religion of freedom’ -by which i mean the movement by which a group of people use the word ‘freedom’ to mean all sorts of things and create policy that prevents moral stuff on our airwaves and instead allows immoral stuff. Secularism, isn’t that just another religion with a set of ‘whatever fits my whims, and benefits my pocket at this time’ theologies?
I think we need to create communities of accomplished spirituals who are also intellectually gifted enough to make a difference where it counts and change countries from the root. Hopefully God will bring back a collective realisation of Himself as people are realising the emptiness of His absence from lives. We must secure our intentions, and sincerely direct our lives towards those things that will truly make a difference (as judged by the most foreseeing of us) as if we do other things then our sincerity and therefore our connection with Him (in this life and the next) is at great stake.
S.A., no, secularism is not another religion. Religion actually claims something about God and the universe, secularism doesn’t. There’s no evidence to backup religion, which is fine I guess, since it’s about faith – but you can’t impose something on others that doesn’t even have evidence to back it up. Secularism doesn’t make any claims about the universe, it just ignores the question altogether – secularism focuses on being human, whether God exists or doesn’t.
Morality has nothing to do with religion. Atheists, like religious people, can be good people too, you know. I was appalled when the Pope actually implied that the priest sex scandal had to do with a larger culture of secularism – that’s possibly the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Talk about shifting the blame.
And things weren’t exactly wonderful in society when divorce rates were lower. If those people weren’t meant to be together, isn’t it a good thing that the divorce rates are up? I mean, the only difference before is that people in unhappy marriages stayed that way. Now they move on.
I agree that people need to get more involved in their community, and that that’s been lacking. And I agree that my generation is rather pathetic and apathetic when it comes to voting. But I don’ t think individualism as a rule is a bad thing – I think it’s a good thing that people are freer to be themselves now. And I don’t think communities are ever going to be obselete – people have and always will need each other and flock together.