Recently there has been an attack against individualism both outside and particularly inside the Church. What is often brought up at least in Christian arguments is that the Church is a community not an individuality. We are intended to gather and share Christ together. ‘No man is an island unto himself,’ etc. To an extent, absolutely the Church is a community and yes, the Church also gathered in homes in the early Church. Whole families would come to Christ and live for Christ together. There was no concept of an individual sinner’s prayer.

Yet, when Christians today throw out the term individualism, they don’t just mean a lack of community in the Church. What they are really attacking is the modern use of individualism in America today that has grown, in part out of Christian ideals and out of Western ideology to become what it is now. While some may want to destroy individualism completely in order to return to an early Church community mindset, that is not practical in our current culture where the idea of communal living is foreign in an increasingly isolationist world. We are not moving toward community, but away. This is not to say that we should not try to increase community, we should, but we may have to go much slower than those currently ready for community would like.

Still, there are three ways in which I would agree that individualism is wrong.

When the individual has no one to keep him accountable, even God

Individualism is absolutely wrong when the individual has become so used to being alone that there is no one who will stand up to him that he will listen to. This happens often when a person has been in higher positions and is no longer accountable or has rejected the accountability given to him by others. Such a person holds his thoughts, decisions, and reasonings as the highest standard. He will listen to no one, not even God. He is utterly individualistic.

When individualism leads to self-centered living

Individualism is wrong because it can lead to preferring self over others to the point of not seeing the needs of those around them. When a person is so individually focused that she can’t see the needs of a person next to her, that is when she has entered into the dangerous area of individualism. Living for the self and primarily for the self is very much an idea of individualism that the Christian should not entertain. We are all called to live for God, to love others, not to live for ourselves.  

When individualism promotes relative truth

Individualism is also wrong when it suggests that truth is subjective to the individual, that truth itself is relative submitted to the whims of whatever each person wants. This push for subjective truth is entirely individualistic since only that specific person can claim what is true for them. It is no longer about what is real, scientific, factual, or God-centered, but it is about what a person feels is true. There are no objective truths that might be true for me but false for you, there are only subjective opinions that can be true for me but false for you.

All of these areas are part of the real danger of individualism. But this is not the whole story. There are some aspects of individualism that are in fact good and biblical. Check out my next post for that!