When defining expressive individualism, it might be best to start with the slogans behind the movement:
- You be you.
- Be true to yourself.
- Follow your heart.
- Find yourself.
History points us back to where it comes from. Robert Bellah and his team who wrote Habits of the Hearttraces the origins of expressive individualism back into the 1800s. However, very much rooted in the USA, this was published in 1985 and things have moved on since then – if the balance of emphasis, then was on ‘individualism’, the scales appear to have tipped now to be on ‘expressive’!
A Secular Age is a book written by philosopher Charles Taylor, published in 2007 and considered to be one of those ‘defining books of our time’ by a number of people with bigger brains than mine. I soon discovered Charles Taylor is one of those authors everyone quotes, but few have read! Once I started, I quickly discovered why, so I was very grateful for a (relatively) quick orientation from Philip McCormack, Principal at Spurgeon’s College. In this book, Taylor looks at the change in Western Society from a condition in which it was almost impossible not to believe in God, to one in which believing in God is simply one option of many. It’s sobering to reflect on how, in a such a short space of time, his insightful commentary has become commonplace. Taylor highlighted today’s secular world is characterised not by an absence of religion—although in some societies religious belief and practice have markedly declined—but rather by the continuing multiplication of new options, religious, spiritual, and anti-religious, which individuals and groups seize on to make sense of their lives and give shape to their spiritual aspirations.
Mark Sayers is someone who’s wavelength I can get on with much more easily. Whilst certainly no intellectual lightweight, he communicates as the wise and strategic church leader he is. In Disappearing Church: from Cultural Relevance to Gospel Resilience talking about our current post-Christianity, he picks up how ‘we have failed to notice a new power had seized control of both our imaginations and the halls of power’.
This new power swirls around a small yet widely held set of beliefs:
- The highest good is individual freedom, happiness, self-definition, and self-expression.
- Traditions, religions, received wisdom, regulations, and social ties that restrict individual freedom, happiness, self-definition, and self-expression must be reshaped, deconstructed, or destroyed.
- The world will inevitably improve as the scope of individual freedom grows. Technology—in particular the Internet—will motor this progression toward utopia.
- 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.
- Humans are inherently good.
- Large-scale structures and institutions are suspicious at best and evil at worst.
- Forms of external authority are rejected, and personal authenticity is lauded.
This is the clearest, briefest outline I’ve come across and reading down the list it’s certainly makes it easier to both recognise the contours of popular contemporary culture and why it threatens to be so corrosive for the people of God, the church of Jesus Christ. The biggest problem I face in addressing expressive individualism is staring me back from the mirror: myself. I’m implicated, we’re all implicated. Because expressive individualism pervades modern cultural life, across the western world, it pervades the church.
This is our problem. Expressive Individualism is the idea that meaning, and identity aren’t given to me by outside influences (parents, church, or God), but rather are found within me. This ideology presses us to look at our deepest desires, longings, and urges and use these to discover the “true me.” Furthermore, it encourages us to “be true to yourself” and to “follow our hearts” to not be shackled in or constrained by traditional ideologies or external influences. It encourages us to chart our own path and to determine who we are, without being told by anyone else. Ultimately, it places the epicenter of authority in the hearts of every individual.
In so many ways we are repeating our personal involvement in the interwoven nature of sin and the human heart, as Paul cites towards the end of his discussion around such themes, in Romans:
“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do – this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.” Romans 7:15-20 NIVUK
So-called ‘progressive’ theology has at its’ heart the motivation to justify myself before God, which Paul has demonstrated has no foundation, or if it has, as Jesus pointed out, one of sand.
