To Go Forward: Not Just a Personal Relationship
More reflections on Christian Smith's Why Religion Went Obsolete, specifically why the idea of emphasizing a "personal relationship" is out-of-date (Part 2!)
Blog note: I did write a Part 1 about general takeaways from Smith’s book! It’s here, in case you’re wondering what this book is about more generally. This series has also ended up more ministry-focused than societal
One of the turning points in my own religious biography (or life testimony or spiritual journey) was the summer after my junior year of high school. Two plus decades later, the story isn’t really worth telling, so I’ll just summarize by saying that junior year itself was probably when I was most held captive by stereotypical evangelical training, and that was the source of some dissonance with my school friendships, which in turn caused some of the scales to fall from my eyes when some drama occurred. A bit burned from that, I resolved to question more the tacit dogmas animating church traditions, while holding on to what is true and good in faith practice.
And, through God’s divine provision and/or good luck, my own evangelical faith communities largely supported my questioning. My home church’s pastoral intern shared that he didn’t see much value in Rapture theology, and the pastor organized a week-long urban dip the summer after my senior year with a central focus on food insecurity and injustice. At a summer retreat (BAAYF, actually) that year, I had a religious experience when reading Isaiah 58 leaving me convicted about the importance of social justice. When I shared this the next morning with a youth pastor at another church, he affirmed my experience as good and passed along James 1:27 to tell me that seeking God’s favor means being concerned for those on the margins of society. These church leaders encouraged me to continue to seek God amidst my questioning, and in so doing opened me to explore said questions in a larger faith community and inoculated me from outright opprobrium.
Still, moving from zealous convert to questioning insider meant reevaluating how I felt about many stock-standard phrases common to evangelical Christianity. One specific argument that I reevaluated was the idea that “it’s not a religion, it’s a relationship,” which I ran into a lot when I started diving into objections to church and Christian traditions. Historically, the phrase’s popular usage dates back to evangelist Billy Graham’s revival messages emphasizing a “personal relationship” with Jesus, rather than time spent in the church pews or general service. To be clear, theologically that statement is fine: I value personal devotional time, I’ve already mentioned religious experiences in this very post, and the period of history I study also has numerous civil rights activists testifying to God’s presence as they faced countless trials and tribulations. My own spiritual journey definitely celebrates the knowing Jesus personally way more than the religious trappings of faith.
As an apologetic, though, I found it problematic because it didn’t address the very real concerns I encountered as a professing teenager in an already-secularist Silicon Valley. People who asked me about my faith rarely turned their ire onto the relational aspects like God loving humanity or finding peace in prayer; but instead on reasonable questions like why churches were so fixated on opposing same-sex relationships or whether my tithing propped up questionable organizations like Focus on the Family. While it’s not a personal relationship with Jesus that causes one to be militantly pro-Republican “family values,” telling someone else “it’s a relationship actually” really just boils down to a version of “you don’t understand,” and that’s a pretty poor argument. Additionally, this was a common rejoinder when I raised questions about reconciliation or social justice, suggesting that diversity isn’t something we humans can fix in the here and now but rather something Jesus will take care of in the Second Coming — echoing some versions of “racial colorblindness” that similarly make it a distant goal with no actionable takeaways (to go history nerd for a second, Billy Graham, as a “personal friend” to King, encouraged him to “hit the brakes” on Birmingham protests, so this application is not surprising). To me, claiming that “it’s not a religion” often meant pretending that church practices have no real-life consequences, instead of recognizing our Biblical call to be “salt and light” to a broken world, and making God’s love apparent in practical ways to all our neighbors.
And to summarize my objections, I think declaring Christianity as a “personal relationship” is often just irrelevant: it doesn’t address my concerns, nor does it often speak to the world around us. As a result, I found myself nodding when Christian Smith’s Why Religion Went Obsolete stated that the idea of a “personal relationship” has, ironically, helped make traditional religion “obsolete.” According to Smith, us post-Boomers have taken the “personal relationship” idea to its natural conclusion and don’t really see the point of institutionalized religion or traditional doctrines. After all, if it’s just about how God relates to me, why should I give any weight to what a pastor thinks or spend my Tuesday nights at a Bible study with people I don’t really know or bother to mentor others in their faith walks? And similarly, if I can get a spiritual experience while out in nature or discover a God that affirms my values, then why would I bother with the Triune God of the Bible that demands He be supreme even above my own dreams and desires?
As Smith writes: “This ironic migration of ‘personal relationship with God’ from evangelicalism to individualistic spirituality is emblematic of a larger unintended evangelical influence on American culture … the valorization of individual subjectivity as the seat of authenticity and authority.” Smith notes that this was not intentional, and mainstream evangelicalism doesn’t endorse darkness retreats or ayahuasca or 99% of what comes out of Aaron Rodgers’ mouth. Regardless, Smith argues that the idea of a “personal relationship,” shorn of its religious underpinnings, escaped into broader culture, and people now use it “to relieve themselves of an obligation to follow any particular teachings about who or what God is or to participate in any religious congregation.”
Hyper-individualistic perspectives, in turn, affect how people relate even to essential doctrines of faith. For example, one of the most common ways in the Bible to address God is Lord. Yet it only hit me in my youth director days what lordship actually means: someone who I grant enough authority that if they tell me to do something I don’t want to do, I have to do it anyway. The only culturally relevant touchstone I’ve come up with to accurately illustrate lordship with is Lord Vader from Star Wars. Now imagine Vader telling his retinue of Stormtroopers to get ready to deploy on a mission: even if said troopers had vacation plans or leave scheduled they can, at best, appeal to Vader to change his mind, but they can’t tell him to screw off with his directive because Admiral Motti tried that and that ended poorly for him.
It’s not a great example because Vader’s at best an antihero and the Christian God is literally the definition of Good; and Vader’s authority stems from fear and God’s ultimate authority stems from love (though fear/awe of God is not necessarily bad). Still, I really struggle to come up with any other relevant analogy to illustrate lordship because our hyper-individualistic society views feudalism, rightly, as archaic and problematic.
And while Imperial officers have to listen to Vader, God in Smith’s book can be so distant that many people today would actually appreciate a little more reactivity from Him, to see the verse “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap” play out in real time. While prayer can feel like vainly attempting to connect to a silent God (I am guilty of feeling like this not a few times), personal meditation instead focuses on a controllable evoking manifesting a calm amidst chaos. In a world where so much information is at our fingertips, it feels strange to just leave something up to faith, even as future generations will likely laugh at our limitations and shake their heads at our follies much as we view those who believed that Earth was the physical center of the universe or that chain-smoking did not have harmful side effects.
Enshrining individualism is so embedded as a cultural value that, even in church, many times where the Bible would use “Lord” we’ve substituted “Father” to emphasize God’s benevolent love instead of His omnipotent power and authority. And God as Father is also very much Biblical: something that Jesus Himself taught.
To be fair, the pastors at all the churches I’ve been at have often criticized individualism’s excesses, emphasized the benefits of community, and defended God’s authority and ideal lordship over our lives. It’s also not like every aspect of individualism is detrimental to faith: core doctrine also states that God created each of us uniquely and knows us individually, not just as a collective. I don’t think it’s helpful to tilt at windmills, to pine for the “good old days,” and to scold people for choosing to focus on themselves.
Instead, it is important to defend the importance of meeting together, to enshrine it even as it runs against cultural beliefs, but also to adapt and realize that what worked in the past may need to be adapted. I was still a volunteer youth director during shelter-in-place, and keeping my youth group afloat then felt like it was stretching me past limits. I had kept up Friday night youth group, and that was far from ideal. It meant staring at a bunch of black Zoom boxes, and not a few times I noticed that youth I had friended on Steam were definitely in-game while I was speaking: and I didn’t blame them because I would very much have done the same thing if I was in their shoes.
The greatest encouragement for me to keep that up, though, came from an older tradition far removed from the Internet era. I came across Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, where Bonhoeffer contended that community isn’t an ideal we fashion through our talents, but rather we should view our current imperfect communities as a God-given gift to enjoy in the here and now. Already a powerful idea, Bonhoeffer’s life story makes that come to life: the encounters that inspired that book was the short period, following the general capitulation of the German churches to Nazism, that he and other dissenters formed unofficial seminaries to continue their studies free from state control, before the government restricted even those activities. Basically, if it already seemed less than ideal, it was going to get much much worse for Bonhoeffer: as he would eventually get imprisoned, separated from fellow clergy, and of course, eventually executed as an enemy of the Third Reich.
But Bonhoeffer’s formulation is fascinating because it challenges cultural conceptions of community. Community, as we understand it, is usually more transactional, that we accept when it’s good and we’re free to turn away from once it gets hard or stops seeming like it has value. As a volunteer, it’s not like I was forced to be there: my decision to remain wasn’t based on any contractual obligations. And, with the buy-in especially of some of the older youth, it somehow kept going: I could innovate things like Thursday prayer sessions, meetups with other church groups and late night Among Us sessions, an weekend online youth retreat done via Gather (verdict: surprisingly okay but not something that needs to ever be done again).
What actually ended up being more challenging was the mandate ending and trying to navigate the transition back to in-person sessions. I had assumed that the best course of action was just resuming what had worked previously, and pushing through small crowds as just growing pains; so I had called for the return of large group fellowship, canceled online gatherings, and tried to get back to business as usual as if 2021 was just an anomaly. But like every other local youth group, I lost a good percentage of my high schoolers in the transition, and I found myself trying to balance between connecting with specific youth, answering growing parental concerns about lack of numbers, and new mandates on “fun” events when I’m not good at fun.
In hindsight, I wish I tried something else: as intensive emotionally as the online element was, I think it was uniquely valuable for specific youth and I should have tried harder to remake that into something that could work on its own (though this probably wasn’t realistically feasible given general church direction, the generally stretched volunteers available, and my own volunteer part-time status). Rather than try to get back to a distant past which envisioned senior youth stepping up to take leadership and mentor the younger youth — an increasingly unlikely expectation what with added school responsibilities — I should have focused instead on just ensuring that senior youth found value in remaining connected to the church at large, be it through meaningful connections, and expending more of my own energy toward tying the younger youth to the program, as the most productive time I did spend that last year was leading the equivalent of a middle school small group and they could also have used more direct attention.
And that’s the interesting challenge: I remain convinced that while a personal relationship with Jesus is theoretically all that one needs for spiritual growth, realistically organized religion, community, and all of that remains vital to sustaining it. This is despite the heavy baggage, despite the additional effort, despite the increasing challenges to find other people on the same page and to generate enough momentum to make such a reality possible. After all, Smith takes pains to note that obsolescence doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t function: electric typewriters remain capable of producing manuscripts, after all. And sometimes we need to go back to things that are thought to be obsolete: to take an environmental example, sustainable farming techniques hearken back to older methods as opposed to big agriculture’s added environmental impact.
Because for all the data Smith uncovers about how much hyper-individualism has taken root in young generations today, he also notes there is some longing to be seen, to take part in larger communal activities, to be part of something greater — and my own experience confirms that people aren’t objecting to the idea of getting together. It’s just more difficult and more unusual to do so. So rather than become discouraged when meeting together doesn’t seem to be working and feel like we lack agency, we should instead think more about recalibrating expectations and figuring out how best to serve the specific needs of the present age.