The Quiet ReTribal

You Do You Becomes We Do We

Trevin Wax has written an enlightening article over at The Gospel Coalition on the shift away from the solitary version of expressive individualism. In other words, the move to the collective noun of You Do You, namely, We Do We.

Wax argues that the isolated self has been unsustainable in the bitter winds of this torrid century. We are seeing a return to mass gathering and group identity based on tribe. And this tribalism is often identified by who it is again.

For anyone who has had to run the gauntlet of a protest movement on our Western streets of late, you’ll get the idea. (I hear you Jewish students on leafy Australian university campuses.)

Once again, the late Tim Keller was, as Wax notes, ahead of the curve:

Several years ago, Tim Keller told me that in New York City he was seeing the loneliness and loss of meaning produced by this way of life pushing people in a new direction. Many, he said, were beginning to look for identity, belonging, and purpose inside a group or tribe. He wondered whether the next phase of our culture would be a strange hybrid: expressive individualism blended with group-based identity politics.

Why was Tim ahead of the curve? Because he lived and ministered in the city that is ahead of the curve, New York. He was a great cultural exegete. What was New York yesterday is the rest of the West today.

Performative Collectivism

So what comes after expressive individualism? At its worst, performative collectivism. And boy have we seen a lot of that in the past two and a half years since October 7.

At its best, the quiet revivalism that churches across the West are experiencing is another desire for something secure that, if not managed within a gospel framework, risk ending up being tribal as well.

As the Age of Enlightenment dulls, fades and sours into a secular cesspool of bad ideas, flawed economics, national unrest, unrestrained migration and a growing gap between rich and poor, we are seeing a trickle of mostly younger types tentatively dip their toes into church water. Not exactly baptism yet, but the beginning of a search for some form of identity that can hold.

Wax explores the worst of it:

In that vacuum, ideological tribes step in to offer belonging, purpose, and solidarity. The result often looks less like ordinary political disagreement and more like religious fervor, complete with confessions, heresy-hunting, sacred texts, and forms of indoctrination.

Led by the new preachers of righteousness of course, such as former Australian of the Year, Grace Tame, who after having exhorted the crowd outside Town Hall in Sydney last week to “Globalise the Intifada from Gadigal to Gaza”, duly oversees the drop to their knees in prayer.  All very performative. But in the light of what Wax states, all very predictable as well.

Warnings for Conservatives

Of course let’s not just pick on the crazy progressives. The rise and rise of that Right wing soufflé, Nick Fuentes, being a case in point. His “Groyper” congregations don’t necessarily gather IRL, but they are a constant online community, and they are heresy-hunters extraordinaire. I have had several conversations online with such types, if the word “conversation” can be attached to the sneering, ugly comments that come in my direction.

What is surprising, however, is the sheer blind faith his followers express. For a man whose only goal seems to be to tear things down, they have an inordinate level of confidence that when the whole thing is razed to the group, Fuentes will be there leading the rebuild. Ain’t gonna happen.

Wax points to warnings for the church, including the need to sift the wheat, and weed out the tares, whether people or ideas, that will be empowered by the movement. Of course the usual suspects of reactionary hyper-conservatism are there (though not named as such), but it goes for any church expression.  Or at least any church expression in which the only conclusion to be reached is that  problem of the world is “other people”, or “other tribes” and never, as Chesterton would have put it, “I am.”

The common feature is that to belong to the tribe puts you “in” and enables you, like a soccer tribe in the UK, to performatively chant obscenities at those on the other side. And this has become true of almost all secular tribal movements and, sadly, all too many churches.

Once again that is what we have seen with the antisemitic marches the past two years. There must be something thrilling for liberal, bored middled aged people for whom the promotion at work, Mary-Jane’s ATAR score, and the beach house in the summer, were the point of existence. Suddenly there’s a cause bigger than oneself. And the great thing about it, is that I am not required to change.

Belong Believe Behave

Perhaps for some, the Quiet Revival is more of a Quiet Retribal, or occasionally a Noisy Retribal. People looking for a meaning and purpose train upon which to hitch their wagon. A train with other wagons attached, that at least looks to be going somewhere.

Yet let’s not be too quick to eschew this movement. In the Dark Ages – also known as the 1990s – the slogan among so many churches trying to reach everyone – or anyone – with the gospel message, was Belong, Believe, Behave. Remember that? Remember the 1990s? Oh you don’t? Well think about life before the ubiquity of online life.

The guts of Belong, Believe, Behave was pretty simple. Pagans were looking for somewhere to belong, and if they rocked up to your church you should not run the gloryometer of behaviour over them too quickly. They’re far from Jesus so why would we expect much Christian behaviour. Let them belong for a while as they figure out this Jesus thing, and then they can believe in him and the behaviour will follow.

While there are some things to commend this, particularly among neo-pagans in the West, the New Testament was a little more cut and dried in this sense: To believe meant that you belonged. The believers were the belongers. And if their behaviour did not align with what they claimed to believe, then belonging was not guaranteed (See 1 John).

Whether you bought the theological premise behind Belong, Believe, Behave or not, it was in the water. People were looking for community and we could give that to them, because no one else could.

“Nek minnit” all sorts of toxic, weird and wacky communities have sprung up and suddenly we are all tribal again. What keeps the church from being as hostile towards others as the likes of the groups I have mentioned? What stops us stampeding the streets demanding justice?

Justice or Mercy?

The fact- hopefully – that the Bible is concerned about righteousness, with justice being a kind of subset of that. And when it comes to righteousness, I lack that! I need mercy if I am to stand before the righteous God. The mercy requirement tempers the hostility towards others, indeed it ought to kill it.

Yet no such barriers exist for the zealous who do not know the gospel. It’s justice all the way down. Mercy will not get a look in. Which means that the future of collectivism is going to get uglier than it already is.

Perhaps. But it doesn’t have to be. The Quiet Revival, or the Quiet Retribal if you wish, has the safety valve of the gospel of Jesus Christ contained within. If he is our locus and our North Star, then mercy will be at the centre of the group. And justice will require my transformation, rather than leaving me – as the secular tribes do – unchanged in my expressive individualism.

You Do You has not served individuals well. I am not convinced that We Do We will be all that helpful either if it is simply mass participation in communities that constantly affirm our darker desires.

But I will end on a bright note, and will springboard into this conversation in my next post, the quiet revival is hitting that most secular, and most individualist, of countries, Sweden. Yes, cool, detached, cynical Sweden is experiencing an uptick – from a very low base, of faith.

And once again, it’s not the post-Christian – and oft-times angry –  Baby Boomers, but once again the Zoomers. Have a read of this article, and I’ll leave you with a quote to whet your appetite:

There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about what lies ahead; not only the enlightened secularists but Christians, too, are struggling to sustain hope. But the thing about the future is that it is unwritten. Sweden once set the global benchmark for secular rationality, and everybody expected the world to follow our path. Now the quiet stirrings of faith here in the north—more confirmations, new memberships, conversations once unthinkable—show that history has a way of humbling even the most confident narratives.

Ironclad sociological theories often insist that the current moment is our inevitable future. But history seldom follows straight lines. Humanity is often a surprise even to itself.