Who Are "We"?

Evangelicals need a sociology of collectives

This is a guest post by Dr. Benjamin Mabry.

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There’s an old joke that goes: the Lone Ranger turns to his sidekick, Tonto, and states “We’re surrounded by hostile Indians.”  Tonto replies, “What do you mean ‘we,’ Kemosabe?” 

It’s a humorous illustration of the way that our use of collective language doesn’t always do justice to individuality and perspective.  In my recent serialized article at American Reformer, I got a number of objections in both the comments section and on X.com that I denied the existence of a universal community of humanity based upon our shared need for forgiveness.  Of course, I do deny it.  I deny it on the basis that my critics, much like the Lone Ranger, have no idea what the word “we” means.

In this short essay, I’d like to quickly sketch out why it’s important to have a “sociology of collectives” if Christians want to understand the social world in which we live and learn to function as a “we” ourselves.

What is a sociology of collectives?  Basically, this is the answer to the question, “What transforms an aggregate of individuals into a collective body?”  As many 8-year-olds learn, if you take 100 random ants and place them in an ant farm, you will not get an ant colony.  We understand intuitively that a pile of building materials is not a building.  We read the account of the Tower of Babel, however, and we still fail to understand that a random collection of strangers is not a community.  Something more is required to turn an undifferentiated mass of people into a functioning collective body.  “We” are more than just a random selection of people dropped into a random geographic location.

Unfortunately, most Christian public intellectuals, especially those without social science backgrounds, proceed under the assumption that a sociology of collectives is not necessary to opine on public matters.  Part of the blame for this derives from the post-war cultural consensus and its rigid controls on social science research during and after the Cold War.  There was a flourishing science of collectives prior to the Second World War, especially in Germany, but much of that research was lost first to Nazi purges and then rejected by scientific authorities on both sides of the Iron Curtain.  For example, in his Kyoto 2003 lecture, philosopher Jürgen Habermas argues that his work begins with a rejection of the key concepts of community (gemeinschaft) and society (gesellschaft) because of the Nazi use of those terms and his fear that continuing to think of human sociality in terms of communities and societies would risk further outbreaks of racial hatred and nationalism. 

Abandonment of an attempt to scientifically understand human collectives resulted in an ideological assumption that all humans must necessarily belong to a cosmopolitan, universal social organism.  This is the current condition of a significant amount of Christian public discourse; they don’t even know that their baseline assumptions about the nature of human collectives are the result of a political decision made by Western academic organizations in the late 40’s and 50’s.

This is one of the reasons that I’m so heavily reliant on books from the 19^th and early 20^th Centuries.  Part of a renewal of Christian intellectualism must involve bypassing the work of the last seventy years and returning to see what valuable things were lost to the ignorance and fear of the Cold War establishment. 

One of the key knowledges we must restore is an understanding of what makes up a human collective.  How can we talk about a Christian community if we can’t even define community in a valid and objective way?  To give an example, I will use a set of definitions common to a number of thinkers including philosopher Max Scheler and sociologist Albert Schutz.  Both of these thinkers use definitions that include observable phenomena as the basis for their definitions and avoid empty moralistic grandstanding.  Let me add the caveat that these are only two types of social relations and not the only types.

Community consists of a type of interaction between individuals in which the governing principles of acts are implicitly given and in which the other person is taken as a full personality.  The first part means that there are no “rules” to your social actions other than what everyone already knows is proper and improper behavior.  There are no signs in a community environment telling people what to do or how to do it.  In a community, everyone is already socialized into the right and wrong forms of action.  Only children are still being taught how to act and what to do.  When wrong actions occur, there is no authority tasked with punishment.  Everyone knows it was wrong and the response to those wrong actions is spontaneous on the part of the whole community. 

The second part of the definition means that the relationship between two people is not defined by the action in which they are both participating but the wider social network.  If two people in a community are working together on a community project, their primary relation is not coworkers but neighbors, friends, or relatives.  The action is incidental to their relationship.

Society consists of a type of interaction between individuals in which the governing principles of acts are explicitly given in the form of laws, rules, signs, and objective markers.  The other person is given, not as a full personality, but as a “type” or “role.”  The first part means that all societal actions are governed by explicit rules given in an objective form to everyone.  For example, the rules of the pool are posted on the wall.  The rules of the grocery store checkout are given in the way that the registers are set out in lines, which signify the expectation for customers to form lines and check out in order.  These rules are enforced by a person whose role is to enforce them.  In many cases this is a police officer, but it may include a store manager, a security guard, or a loss prevention manager. 

The second part of this definition means that societal relationships of one person to another are entirely dependent on the role or position they hold in the explicit societal system.  The customer’s role is to purchase goods, the clerk’s role is to check out those goods, and each party follows a script as established by the “rules.”  In most cases, once that societal action ends the relationship ends.  The action constitutes the whole of their relationship.  Commercial interactions are not the whole of societal relationships, but they are the most common.  Interactions with the police, government offices, politics, and similar impersonal interactions are frequently societal.

Now, it is true that society and community can overlap.  The checkout clerk can be your cousin.  The police officer who pulled you over can go to church with you.  A great deal of interpersonal conflict arises when the expectations for communal or societal relationships get crossed.  The folks in line behind you at the grocery store will get annoyed if you chat all day with your cousin.  The officer might find it unethical if you offer to babysit his kids in exchange for letting you off without a ticket.  There is no end of issues that arise when someone whose relation to a community is merely societal enters a communal environment and breaks the unspoken rules.  Just consider the complex inter-community politics surrounding zoning laws and noise ordinances.  A not-insignificant number of inter-racial incidents actually consist of conflicting implicit assumptions about correct behavior across two or more communities.

One frequent criticism I received from many sources is that this approach assumes that it is possible for two people to have absolutely no potential social relationships.  I didn’t think this would be particularly controversial.  How else would you describe your relationship to someone on the other side of the globe who doesn’t share your language or faith? 

However, we don’t need such an extreme example to prove the point; think about this in practical life.  If society is governed by a set of shared, explicit rules, what is your relationship to someone who can’t abide by those shared rules with you, or can’t agree on a common meaning of those explicit rules?  If you’re at the pool and you cannot come to an agreement with the lifeguard on what “don’t run” means, then you’re going to be removed from the pool.  There’s a reason that many shopping malls and amusement parks have rules against unaccompanied teenagers. 

If two groups of people exist who can’t or won’t both abide by a common set of explicit, objective laws or rules, then these two groups cannot socially coexist.  They exist solely within a relation based on power and the ability to coerce the other into abiding by one interpretation of the rules.  It is absurd to claim that such situations never exist.  Lack of a common language is the simplest example of such a situation; if you can’t communicate, then you can’t abide by a shared set of laws.  Another example would be communities whose implicit norms and culture are so incompatible that no common set of laws would be found acceptable by both groups. 

How can Christians apply these scientific insights to the problems and issues facing our communities?  The first thing is to get a solid grasp on what the Christian community (or communities) really are.  The Body of Christ is a purely spiritual concept.  It does not correspond to any existing institution, corporation, or social grouping on Earth.  The Body of Christ cannot be used to infer the existence of social relationships between individuals who have never met one another.  Despite the gimmick of inviting a foreign language speaker to preach or sing in church services, the reality of the matter is that even Christians cannot truly worship together without a common tongue.

Christians need to begin identifying those with whom they share a common, implicit set of communal norms and beliefs.  These are the people with whom you can coordinate and cooperate without needing an explicit organizing principle, whose lifeways and worship-ways are fundamentally compatible. 

Christians are commanded to congregate, but the fashion of modern megachurch congregations is a falsification of the intention of the gospel.  There are no real bonds within a megachurch, no implicit sense of unity, nor a shared community of we-identification.  The members rarely know one another as personalities, but instead through their roles as fellow-congregants; they’re merely Sunday Morning Faces to one another.  The megachurch is the manifestation of mass-society in the Christian milieu, bringing people together on the basis of a shared explicit commitment to a set of symbols and rules rather than an inner, implicit agreement on the meaning of the church community among people who live out their shared life in Christ.  This is why the megachurch and institutional bureaucratic model of Christianity appeals most to the Upper-Middle Class, whose natural environment is a society and its business-like milieu.

We should understand the limits of societal, inter-community cooperation with Christians who do not share our implicit principles and norms.  It can be deeply uncomfortable for Mainline Protestants and low-church Evangelicals to worship in one another’s services. 

When I was an employee of Episcopal Relief and Development, there were numerous conflicts that arose as a result of disparate implicit expectations for what a Christian charity should do and offer in post-Katrina New Orleans.  One major source of conflict, for example, was the disagreements between Episcopal leadership, AME Church partners, and non-Episcopal employees over the extent to which they would cooperatively participate in political protests against Mayor Nagin.  The fact that someone is our spiritual brother in Christ or is institutionally connected through explicit inter-denominational (or even intra-denominational) cooperation agreements doesn’t replace those thick, felt, implicit bonds of actual communal relationships and shared belief systems.

Likewise, we must recognize when conflicts with nominally Christian people actually represent an attempt to impose their own communal norms and implicit principles on the larger inter-communal body of believers.  Our folkways and worship-ways don’t invalidate those of others.  I’m happy that there are diverse types of congregations who all worship in their own ways and who can share a spiritual unity without having to share a liturgical, institutional, or cultural unity. 

When Christian figures ignore the levels of social relationships and try to demand that the spiritual unity of the Body of Christ necessitates a community conform to an extra-Biblical principle of politics or culture, this is a categorical error.  The only principle that is universal to the Church is the Word of God. 

Particular communities, especially Upper-Middle Class and institutionally privileged communities like the seminaries, might claim that their culture is the true interpretation of the Word but we should be wary when they attempt to impose their views from on high using denominational bureaucracy and institutional power. 

Our problem today is that too many establishment Evangelicals fail to see that their problem with grassroots Christians is essentially cultural, not Biblical, because they fail to see themselves as merely one Christian community among many.  These are inter-community conflicts, no different than the car with a thumping subwoofer driving through a quiet subdivision. 

Benjamin L. Mabry holds a Ph.D. in political science from Louisiana State University.

Cover image credit: Vincent Martinez Fasoro, CC BY-SA 2.0