The Problem

Christian individualist culture is something that impacts the west and in ways that go beyond whether a person is even Christian, or believes in a god or gods at all. It is possible, in other words, to think and act like a Christian without ascribing to Christian scriptures or going to church. Individualism is intertwined with the modern, western Christian view, to the extent that it can be genuinely difficult to see Christianity as separate from individualism.

In practice, Christian individualist thought looks something like the following: The purpose of mortal life is be tested by various challenges and trials, and come out the other side having shown that you are a morally upstanding individual, at which point you are "saved" and get to spend an eternity in bliss, in an afterlife. If you fail at this, you become "damned" and have to spend an eternity in torture, in an afterlife.

In the abstract, one might be tempted to think this point of view is a net good for the world. People believing that they need to be moral, in order to get the good outcome, or else they will be severely punished. Observation of human behavior and dialectical materialism alone could tell us how this is bunk, that material conditions are sometimes going to make it very hard for people to willpower their way into being a "good person" and that people are more moral when their needs are met, rather than when they fear punishment.

But even with that aside, it still has problems. The Christian individualist view of being saved or damned steers people toward a kind of self-obsessed view of their own existence. Instead of being taught to look at problems holistically and look at responsibility as a collective duty, people are taught to look at problems in relation to how they impact their personal standing as good or evil and look at responsibility as a matter of gauging accurately whether they needed to cleanse themself of impure association with, or participation in, something damning.

It might sound harsh, but it's almost a kind of narcissism of the soul. The fate of the individual soul is positioned as the all-important preoccupation. In the context of capitalism, this can be expressed in tricky ways, such as a rich person giving to charity. This process of large scale charity can also be a form of tax breaks and soft power in institutions that receive the charitable donations, but nevertheless, it's a great fit for the Christian individualist mold. The capitalist can feel like they are tipping the scales toward "saved", without fundamentally changing anything about the power dynamic at scale, nor changing their priorities away from personal enrichment.

And the media apparatus promoting Christian individualism can use this to validate the capitalist as a generous and overall "good" figure, for reasons like this. In other words, they take advantage of the binary framework of good and evil, using it to bludgeon people with simplistic narratives in which an otherwise exploiting person/entity flips states into being a force for good, through sheer weight of "good person deeds."

Charity and other such "harm reduction" measures are not inherently bad--they can sometimes be life-saving in the short-term--but they also aren't a solution to systemic problems and it is systemic problems that individualism is wholly incapable of addressing. The Christian individualist framework allows people to feel like they are being "good" without ever challenging an exploitative system and targeting systemic problems.

The Solution?

It is difficult to say precisely what the solution looks like, but it surely needs to be collective in nature, not individualist. However, achieving this is not as simple as saying "Christian thought is more communal now." It is dealing with an embedded culture revolving around whether a given individual is good or bad; whether a given individual is saved or damned. If we were to naively say that, in the true believer Christian context, the priority becomes to "save as many as possible", this could lead to all kinds of distortions about forcing people to live certain ways "because X way of living will save them and Y way of living will damn them". And at that point, we're more just talking about a theocracy instead of collectivism.

So, reaching collectivism instead means grounding it in something more earthly. Trying to get closer to "heaven on earth" and dismantling hellish things on earth, which is a collective goal of "saving" as many people as possible, but now in a more literal sense of saving them on Earth rather than saving them hopefully for the afterlife. If there is a collective goal to literally save, then it starts looking more like governance that ends exploitation, that prioritizes human needs, that tries to liberate peoples from hellish conditions on Earth. It starts to look more like communism.

If "good" behavior is not about ticking personal boxes in the hope you "make it" to heaven, but is instead about a collective responsibility to hold each other accountable and also uplift one another, the narcissism and neuroticism is reversed. If my failure is partly your failure and vice-versa, then being "saved" is no longer a personal, individualist trial. It is instead more like a trial of a whole society, a people, even the whole species. And overcoming those trials, no matter how many generations it takes, means creating something a lot closer to heaven on Earth. If we can build a heaven here, then what need do we have to spend a lifetime self-obsessing, for a chance at some possible heaven after?