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?
Now that I'm more settled, and having re-read your post, it doesn't seem off base, and indeed seems to be a well-recognized issue, for over a century, at least. I think what triggered my little outburst is recognizing this, while also recognizing I need to find more ways to engage, meeting people where they are. It's extremely frustrating to bring up, "Jesus said the Kingdom isn't here or there, but within," only to have them shirk responsibility to each other to "go to meeting," or fly to Africa to impose this wildness on others while deposing the Orishas, no less. And my problem with religion or philosophy isn't the story telling. It's that the intent of the stories are dismissed on some merit-making ideology. They may have begun as literalism, but the older I get, the more I doubt it, although the purpose has seemingly evolved and devolved by degrees, as human societies evolve and devolve again. The immediate issue seems to me to be first liberating the stories from the money and power hungry, then liberating the stories from morality (primitive religions seem to do it somewhat effectively), then liberating the people from literalism, while also asking how we may evolve our philosophies (stories) to serve the masses. In short, I'm not sure the most direct and efficient route has been the historically most effective and lasting route. And like the destruction of the giant Buddha statues, the temple in Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock, or the Hanging Gardens, it erases history and any residual knowledge we glean while also sowing deep-seated and centuries-long resentments that flare again and again. This religion or that or none, this clan or that tribe blah blah. And that's incidentally why I don't see multiculturalism as a bad idea.
That part is definitely hard. With the religious people in my own life, I will admit I often don't even discuss religion unless it's to point toward a thing like "I was hungry and you gave me to eat" side of Christianity. Or like, Jesus making a whip and driving the money changers out of the temple. Religion can be such a deeply felt, emotional thing for people and such a huge part of their life, so it can feel like walking on eggshells sometimes to engage religious people on their beliefs. I'm also just not convinced religion is inherently bad and am inclined to think human societies tend to invent something similar to a religion, even when they don't have a centrally recognized one. For example, the way AES can talk about being a servant to the public, it strikes me that there's an almost religious fervency to it. Importantly, they operate on "scientific socialism" rather than dogma, which makes a huge difference for them, but nevertheless, the spirit of being a party member who serves the people can have a sacrificial fervency to it that is reminiscent of people taking up religious orders.
So I think there's a kernel of something consistent there, in that religion and things like it can serve as a robust, centralized means of keeping a society on roughly the same page. But they can also have destructive fanatical elements to a sometimes disturbing degree. Religion molded to imperialism or colonialism, for example, gets disturbing fast. But then you have stuff like indigenous tribes who, whether they have a whole religion or not, have certain consistent spiritual beliefs. You have Iran, who somehow combined Islam with anti-imperialism and national sovereignty through the IRGC; who no doubt has some practices many of us here would not exactly love, but who nevertheless is using religion as an overall force for good in the world.
I feel like I'm kinda rambling off on my own track here, but anyways, I guess the thing to remember is that it's not something we should have to be doing alone, one person at a time. China did not become what it is by individually talking people into moving from one set of beliefs to another. For the time being, we're very limited in the west and have to kinda build as we can and expect some more systemized forms of change will have to come down the pike when real power is there to enforce it; that until then, there's going to be a lot of halfway theres and kinda sorta changed people who will need more of a push than a talking to.
https://news.abolish.capital/post/64615
It does, and the connection felt is to our real siblings, right here, right now!
That's true of political and economic movements, as well, isn't it? Pol Pot immediately comes to mind, and under the guise of "communism."
That may be a happy latent effect, but I would prefer to hear the thoughts of a Muslim comrade, especially familiar with Shia thought, and maybe specifically to Persian Shia thought.
We work with what is, while working for "what is not yet," don't we?
I'm glad you rambled, here. It feels we're on the same page, but sometimes our communication styles trip us up. Thank you for your time and thoughts, comrade. I really, really appreciate them, and you for taking the time.
The idea of serving the people first and foremost is also literally something Jesus tells the apostles to do.
Faith is at it's core just surrendering to something greater than you, metaphysically or at least in the social spirit. Of course, the substance can be very different, but I think the psychological movement people who really believe in something do is equivalent.
Yep.
Eta: and they have historically added some social cohesion, in forms of law, but we're grown now. Governance needs to serve everyone or no one. So I find myself wondering if perhaps I might give anarchocommunism a more serious look.