Church Be Damned? The Case for & Against Community
J.D. Lyonhart
12 min read ⭑
When I was 17, my high school had all the graduating seniors write a blurb to go along with their picture in the yearbook. For mine, I quoted John Lennon:
I don’t believe in Bible
I don’t believe in Beatles
I just believe in me.
In other words, I don’t need the rest of the band — I just need myself. Expressing the same sentiment, but in nonmusical form, is Jean-Paul Sartre, who writes, “Hell is other people.” What does he mean by that? Sartre was a famed philosopher who placed the individual’s existence above the attempts of society, morality, the church or other people to limit and define us. For example, we are born to parents who never cease overbearing us. Sure, you eventually graduate and move out, but your deference to your parents only transfers from them to your employer, your overbearing boyfriend/girlfriend, your country, your ideology, your church, your pastor, your favorite authors and podcasters and pundits and like-minded groupthinkers.
Everything you’ve done, you’ve done for others or copied from others or repackaged from others. Everyone is the other, and no one is themself (as if to prove the point, I stole that sentence from Martin Heidegger). Hell is other people, and we are too afraid to leave their warmth to carve our true, authentic, solitary self from the frost.
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At 17, I could already see how the community was destroying individuality. They say society is a melting pot, but what that actually means is all differences are melted down and overwhelmed into a homogenous, bland broth. As soon as we are placed alongside others, they begin to grate against our edges until we are sanded down into good little boys and girls who fit the mold. Boyfriends change for girlfriends; wives change for husbands; children become who their parents want them to be; teachers mold us into carbon copies; peers fold to pressure; congregants conform to their congregation and denomination and pastor and God. Indeed, the church is almost a punch line today, representing the last place that unique individuals with unique identities and proclivities might wish to go. Congregations stampede over any individuality or uniqueness or diversity, flattening us into cardboard cutouts of formerly full individuals.
As soon as your spiritual journey needs the approval and input of others, it ceases to be your spiritual journey. The self gets swallowed up in the other.
These sentiments define the Western world in which I was raised. We value freedom, autonomy and self-determination. Consider our formative revolutions in England in the 1640s, America in 1776 and France in 1789. We prize independence, individualism and pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. Consider any modern political debate about almost any issue, from welfare to capitalism to vaccinations. We value individual authenticity and being yourself. Consider the perfume commercial I watched yesterday that went, “Bleu de Chanel — a fragrance for an individual who is deeply themselves.”
We believe our purpose on earth is to find out who we are and stay true to it. Just watch any Disney movie ever. We listen to our own hearts and minds over the wisdom of others, family, society, authority and tradition. Just read Dr. Seuss, who writes, “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” We think the meaning of life is not at the bottom of a bottle but at the bottom of ourselves, and if we could just dive deep enough, meditate long enough and psychoanalyze inwardly enough, we would finally return to the hearth within, knowing the place for the very first time. Our modern age is the age of the individual self.
This is perhaps why so many in today’s culture define themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” It’s a way of saying we have a personal sense of the divine but don’t pursue that sense in a communal or church setting. As Deepak Chopra writes, “Religion is belief in someone else’s experience. Spirituality is having your own experience. … You should be totally independent. … you should have faith in yourself.” Spiritual guru Ram Dass reiterates this, saying, “The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can’t be organized or regulated. … Listen to your own truth.” Or, as Eckhart Tolle states, “I cannot tell you any spiritual truth that deep within you don’t know already. … The real spiritual awakening [is] when something emerges from within you.”
Growing up, these kinds of sentiments were very much my world. Less than 3% of people in my hometown, Vancouver, attend a weekly religious service. Yet more than half the population still believes some sort of divine entity exists. That means we’re still spiritual but want to get away from religious communities, churches, clergy, dogma, groupthink and so on. The problem isn’t God but his people.
The Myth of Total Independence
I read “Walden” in my high school English class, one of the defining texts of the modern Western canon. It condenses the true story of Henry David Thoreau escaping civilization to live alone in the woods for two years. How wonderful that sounded to me, to cease being a social animal and simply be an animal, alone and scrounging in the wild. I got giddy with introversion. Oh, to get away from the whining and fighting and etiquette and gossip and insults and passive-aggression and cruelty and complications of others and civilization. One-way ticket for one, please!
The only problem, which I realized later, is that Thoreau was, and I’m quoting here, a “miserable a******.” He once visited the site of a shipwreck that killed a hundred people days earlier and commented on how he felt pity not for the lost souls but for the wind and waves that had to deal with them. He was well known for being a puffed-up, sour, judgmental, cold misanthrope. The irony, then, is that Thoreau fled the evils of society, only to bring them all along within him. He escaped society but was still stuck with his miserable self. Our fallenness follows us wherever we go — it’s not just social but individual. The problem isn’t just out there; it’s in here. It’s in me.
Isolate me in the woods, and I’m not going to get better but, if anything, worse. My inner demons will finally have me all to themselves. My thoughts will bounce around incestuously in the echo chamber of my own mind, with no one to bring me back down to reality. Sure, I may have less social anxiety at first, but my existential dread and cosmic isolation will slowly begin to toy with insanity and suicide. My basic need for touch, conversation and intimacy will funnel itself into increasingly deranged fantasies. Sartre may have been right that hell is other people, but hell is also yourself, raveling further in forever.
Humans are inescapably social creatures, even the weird ones. Which is why Christopher McCandless, an Emory grad who fled society in 1992 to go live alone in the Alaskan wild, later scribbled next to his dying corpse, “Happiness only real when shared.” According to the World Health Organization, loneliness is equal health-wise to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. These effects can be so detrimental that some countries have even appointed an official minister of loneliness to address it. And a Harvard medical study following the health of 168 men over 80 years found that, medically, the “only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”
Community isn’t just essential for the health of the individual but for their existence to begin with. Sorry, Rousseau, but man is not “born free.” No, he is born umbilically chained to another who is not disposable but rather essential to the whole birthing process. Then we are raised up, nursed, potty-trained, given a common language, and shown the way of the world by others. We do not exist first as individuals and only later get placed into relationships. Rather, we are in relation from the very get-go. No others means no self.
The fantasy of personal independence has only been plausible for a few centuries and only for wealthier countries. It now feels possible for an individual to stock up on groceries, work from home, never come out and live in total isolation and independence. Yet the groceries do not magically appear on the doorstep but are placed there by another human, who is a member of an intricate social system requiring dozens, if not hundreds, of others to be working together in unison.
This illusion of physical independence has been coupled with intellectual independence. The creed of the Western Enlightenment was “Think for yourself.” This is ironic because what we define as valid thinking was itself the result of thousands of years of communal reflection and tradition. While we tend to think of our individual self as the one thing that hasn’t been hand-fed to us from the outside by others, our Western individualism is arguably what is most unique to our specific community, culture, time, place and tradition. Even science is not just thinking for yourself but thinking with others. Most of what the individual scientist believes is not because they’ve done all the experiments for themselves, but because they trust the scientific community.
This is why Isaac Newton, arguably the most important scientist in history, said, “If I have seen farther than anyone else, it is only because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” You cannot think for yourself unless you first think with others.
The Illusion of a Solo-Spiritual Journey
One might point out similar issues with the “spiritual but not religious” crowd, which tends to believe it is thinking, feeling, meditating, journeying in isolation from the system and tradition and community and dogma. Yet we inherited these New Age and individualistic sentiments from our parents and grandparents in the 1960s and ’70s, and they themselves appropriated these ideas from Western individualists and Eastern religious communities going back thousands of years.
Remember those New Age thinkers I quoted a few paragraphs back, who said to set out alone on your own spiritual path? Well, Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle both have a net worth of around $70-80 million. What they should have said was, “Pay me to tell you to think for yourself.”
The “spiritual but not religious” crowd is still part of a collective system, economy and ideology. They are still putting coins in the coffer, just not at church. They still have gurus and teachers and yogis, and so still have corruption and infighting and sexual abuse, just without the accountability or appeal process of a more established religious denomination. They still have their dogmas, except no one else is allowed to question them because their spiritual journey is deeply private and all that matters is what’s true for you. And they only believe that to begin with because they’ve inherited it from a spiritual community of thought and practice, which likes to fancy it has somehow evolved beyond the communal nature of religion and humanity. But it’s not less communal; it’s just less aware of the social privileges that allow them to play at being authentically themselves, while not actually making the world a better place for anyone else.
“There is no whole individual without their community, and no community without the individuals that comprise it. Problems arise when we try to make one side of the equation bigger or more dominant than the other.”
Encountering God Through Others
If you are reading this and think my description of the “spiritual but not religious” crowd is an unfair caricature (which I’m sure, for some people, it is), then great; I am so happy to hear you actually are deeply embedded in spiritual communities of support. I’m glad we agree that’s important.
Because it really is important — more important than I could have realized at 17. Luckily, my spiritual community did not give up on me even though I had given up on it. A small group of Christians met together during the week for food, games, conversation, debate and prayer, and I’d begun to join them regularly. The way they did church constantly challenged my assumptions.
With them, church wasn’t about the building; we often met at McDonald’s, the beach, or someone’s house (just like the early church).
With them, church wasn’t a pastor telling us what to think; it was a pastor listening to me rant and process everything I was thinking.
Church wasn’t about force-feeding me dogma; it was a lively discussion and late-night debates about whether we have free will and other crazy questions.
Church wasn’t about hiding who we were as individuals but opening up the doors and letting others see us fully, sharing and confessing and processing together — I told them things about myself I’d never told anyone.
Church wasn’t about money; I was a teen with no job or money to give, and I later learned the youth pastor made only $500 a month.
Yes, that church was bound within a system, tradition and community, yet it wasn’t bogged down by it. Rather, it was buoyed up and given breath and life and songs and potlucks by it. I could feel the divine Spirit through the community, for, as Jean Valjean sings: to love another person is to see the face of God. I was no longer alone in the wilderness trying to track down God; other lights were gathering around me in the night, and the brighter we were, the easier it was for God to find us. I was a self who had encountered an other.
So I got special, last-minute permission to change my yearbook blurb after the deadline. I didn’t take anything away. I kept the quote from John Lennon. I just added something after it:
“I don’t believe in Beatles.
I just believe in me.”
—John Lennon.
I love you, John, but in the past year, many things have changed. I don’t think I am ready to turn my back on it all, on hope for the world. There’s cud yet to be chewed here.
Don’t Give Up on Church Quite Yet
I had a good experience with church. I was lucky enough to see what a good and healthy spiritual community could look like. Yet I am not naive enough to think that everyone is so lucky. Some of the most egregious desecrations have occurred in church basements and Sunday schools. Some of the worst oppressors and most terrifying ideologies have found shelter in the church.
For some of you, just reading an article about church has likely been a triggering experience, and justifiably so. I wouldn’t want to argue with any of that. It’s all true; in fact, the truth is probably even worse than what we know about. I swear this article is not about trying to get you to go back to a specific church, such as perhaps your childhood church. I’ll take your word for it that it’s terrifying, backward, repressive and xenophobic. I’ve been to churches like that myself over the years.
Instead, I am simply suggesting you don’t give up on the general idea of church as church — as spirituality pursued socially with others. Now, it makes sense if you don’t go to church because you think Christianity as practiced in churches is untrue or harmful, because you’ve been burned and abused or because you simply need some time away to reset. But these aren’t problems with the idea of communal spirituality itself. To give up on church as church — not for the reasons I just listed but because you are tired of dealing with other people as other people, as complicated, messy, fallen mortals — is to give up on humanity itself.
To paraphrase Bob Marley: other humans are always going to hurt you, you just have to decide which ones you’re willing to suffer for.
Finding Truth in the Balance
Now, despite everything I just said about community, I still go on personal retreats. I still take off on my own for a few nights every other month just to read, write, pray, sleep and walk alone.
I would still say that if you’re in an unhealthy community, you as an individual should push back against that and possibly consider leaving. For example, I still disagree with my church community about a lot of things; in fact, I’m often the one pushing the envelope.
While it would have been easy to go from the one extreme to another — from holding the individual self above the community to holding the community above the self — I believe the truth lies in the tension. We are not just individual persons or just our relationships. Rather, we are persons-in-relation.
When community overwhelms the individual, we get conformity, homogeneity, assimilation, abuse, cover-ups, groupthink, mob mentality, 1984 and totalitarianism. People repress and hide whatever parts of themselves don’t fit into the social box. People stay in harmful marriages, submit to unhealthy churches and suppress their personal qualms for the sake of the whole. Yet on the opposite end, when the individual trumps the community, we get selfishness, narcissism, broken communities, broken families, isolation, loneliness, anarchy and so on.
Individuals without community doesn’t work. Community that overwhelms, stifles and homogenizes individuals doesn’t work either. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. Hell is other people, and hell is also yourself.
But heaven is yourself-with-others. My 17-year-old, individualistic self wasn’t lost but balanced out by a church community that loved and supported and challenged and refined me. Rising up as fully myself, I came face to face with others who saw me, challenged me, pushed me, supported me, enjoyed me — who made me more than I was and all that I could be. In turn, I challenged and supported them.
There is no whole individual without their community, and no community without the individuals that comprise it. Problems arise when we try to make one side of the equation bigger or more dominant than the other. Humans are not just individual persons or just our relationships. Rather, we are persons-in-relation. Which should make intuitive sense to Christians, given we already believe we are made in the image of a Trinitarian God — in the image of the one who is also three, who eternally dwells in the tension between individuality and community.
J.D. Lyonhart (Ph.D., Cambridge) is a British-Canadian theologian, philosopher, author and ordained minister. He is an associate professor of religion and philosophy at the University of Jamestown, a fellow at the Cambridge Center for the Study of Platonism at Cambridge University and a co-host of the Spiritually Incorrect Podcast. In addition to The Journey of God: Christianity in Six Movements, he also authored Space God: Rejudging a Debate Between More, Newton, and Einstein, as well as MonoThreeism: An Absurdly Arrogant Attempt to Answer All the Problems of the Last 2000 Years in One Night at a Pub.
Taken from The Journey of God by J.D. Lyonhart. Copyright © 2025. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press.
