Beliefs of the post-Christian West

Early on in Mark Sayers’ 2016 book Disappearing Church he outlines, in the form of propositions, the social imaginary or set of presuppositions that suffuse and animate the contemporary post-Christian context in the West. Sayers is sophisticated; he doesn’t suppose that millions of people wake up in the morning, sign a form with these beliefs outlined in black and white, then go through their day consciously attempting to put them into practice. Rather, they form the tacit backdrop of our common life, the largely (though far from entirely) unquestioned and presumed fabric of society. It’s the water we swim in, the are we breathe. We are certainly able to recognize, articulate, revise, and/or reject them. But they’re there, in us, whether we like it or not.

Here they are:

1. The highest good is individual freedom, happiness, self-definition, and self-expression.

2. Traditions, religions, received wisdom, regulations, and social ties that restrict individual freedom, happiness, self-definition, and self-expression must be reshaped, deconstructed, or destroyed.

3. The world will inevitably improve as the scope of individual freedom grows. Technology—in particular the Internet—will motor this progression toward utopia.

4. The primary social ethic is tolerance of everyone’s self-defined quest for individual freedom and self-expression. Any deviation from this ethic of tolerance is dangerous and must not be tolerated. Therefore social justice is less about economic or class inequality, and more about issues of equality relating to individual identity, self-expression, and personal autonomy.

5. Humans are inherently good.

6. Large-scale structures and institutions are suspicious at best and evil at worst.

7. Forms of external authority are rejected and personal authenticity is lauded.

This seems basically right to me, with three amendments: (a) I would make the comment about technology its own separate thesis; (b) I would nix the faith in the internet and leave it more broadly as a comment about technology as such; (c) I would rewrite #6. The pervading spirit of the age is suspicion about structures and institutions, yet a sizable percentage of the population hopes not to abolish their sheer existence, but to seize, conquer, colonize, and control them from within. That’s violent language, to be sure, but the vision underlying the aim is sincere and, for its adherents, benign: if the institutions that guide and govern society are doing so poorly, then we ought to reform them (whether modestly or radically) so as to administer justice rather than injustice, righteousness rather than corruption, flourishing rather than oppression.

With those minor changes, I’d readily sign off on this list as a reliable description of the Zeitgeist. Nor are spheres of life defined by the contrary of this list immune to the beliefs it comprises. Churches imbibe and embody these views as much as and sometimes more than other institutions. This list’s name is Legion, and the exorcisms it calls forth are never a completed task but a daily necessity.

Having said all that, I do wonder to what extent the smoothness with which this list goes down as a diagnosis of our social context is a sign of living in an echo chamber—or at least, reading and writing among like-minded folks, especially Christians of a certain sort. Yet it seems to me that even secular (classical) liberals, non-religious folks, and members of the Left could and, in many cases, would and do agree with this list, granting that they might use different words or strike a different tone than Sayers (or, as the case may be, offer different solutions to the problems it presents). That’s the appeal, I think, of the work of scholars like Bellah, Berger, Lasch, MacIntyre, Taylor, Milbank, Stout, Casanova, Asad, Mahmood, Žižek, and so many others. Sayers is attempting to summarize, synthesize, and render in plain English, for a lay Christian audience, an account of what the church is facing in the West that is not merely, and preferably not at all, a defensive reaction from a newly embattled minority. (He’s writing from Australia, it’s worth noting.) Yet how would others respond to this list? What would they add? The book has me curious to know.

UPDATE: A friend writes to add a fourth amendment: Strike through “tolerance” in #4 and substitute “recognition.” Checks out.