The Birth and Death of the Individual

There was once a time in Antiquity when a man’s fondest ambition was to live and to die for his State. A glorious death was thought to be one in defense of ones kingdom or empire. And a child born into these times was expected to give their full allegiance to the State, even above their own family. Man’s covenant was between himself and his State.

    To see yourself as an individual with your own wants and desires was unheard of in these times. Certainly the regents did not take into consideration the idea of ‘individuals’ with rights and ambitions of their own. Citizens were seen as an entity that served the government or ‘living tools’ as Aristotle declared. And the government was all powerful. To retreat from ones civic duties was to be seen as an ‘idiot’, a word originally meant to describe anyone who retreated from the life of the city-state.

    Illustrative of this point is the suicide of the great Roman philosopher, Seneca who was instructed by his once-student and then Emperor, Nero, to kill himself and, like a good citizen, the famed philosopher complied. Moderns can’t imagine a political leader today requesting a citizen to kill themselves much less that citizen actually following through with such a request! But when you are seen as simply a spoke in the wheels of governance, you are dispensable. And Seneca, like Socrates before him, was seen as quite patriotic.

      But a new and powerful shift in perspective was coming into the world. 

     At a certain point in history there came a new Word who’s mission it was to free mankind from tyranny. The Word spoke of individual responsibility, individual sovereignty, and individual reward. We were to no longer see ourselves as a faceless, nameless member of a collective, but to see ourselves as created by God for the purpose of furthering His Kingdom. Now our fidelity was to the Living God and not the false gods of human imagination.  Even the king was responsible to God not only for his own personal conduct, but for his treatment of his citizens as well. This new idea of individual sovereignty would change the world. 

     To  seek ones own redemption, follow their own ambitions, and seek the beautiful, the good, and the true in their own life was a radical idea. The words, “ I have come that they may have life, and that ABUNDANTLY.” (John 10:10), was a seismic shift from the idea of citizen as tool of the State. Christ came to speak to individual hearts and to free those in slavery not only to personal sins, but to a zeitgeist of natural inequality. Christ brought a message irrespective of class, gender, citizen, or slave. Man stood as an individual before God.

      And how did this idea of the sovereignty of the individual impact the world? After the Emperor Constantine welcomed Christianity out of the darkness of the Roman catacombs, Christians were free to preach, teach, and communicate the idea of individual sovereignty and man’s rights.  The lives of all people including women, children, and slaves were redefined through their intrinsic worth and purpose before God not man. And so the idea that we are not part of any earthly collective, but are individuals made in the image of God with personal rights and ambitions allowed for personal freedom on a scale the world had never known.

    Sadly we are experiencing a regression in our world. As Newbiggin observed, “Western European civilization has witnessed a sort of atomizing process, in which the individual is more and more set free from his natural setting in family and neighbourhood, and becomes a sort of replaceable unit in the social machine. His nearest neighbours may not even know his name. He is free to move from place to place, from job to job, from acquaintance to acquaintance, and—if he has attained a high degree of emancipation—from wife to wife. He is in every context a more and more anonymous and replaceable part, the perfect incarnation of the rationalist [atheistic] conception of man.” (1)

     We are returning to the days of the collective rather than the sovereign individual. We are becoming ironically a collection of abstract individuals untethered to any moral standard or fidelity to theistic Truth. 

     And the collective now acts as its own tyrant. The sovereignty of the individual is negated by the tyranny of the interest group. Individuality has been overthrown in favor of tribalism. We now claim our allegiance to a cause, a gender, a skin color or any number of group identities. We preface our views on any subject with phrases like, “As a Latina,...”, “As a Conservative,...”, or “As a black man,....” but never as an individual. We are relinquishing our individuality for the perceived power of the tribe. 

    If you doubt this assessment, listen to the plethora of pandering politicians vying for the favor of the American voter. Every appeal to a particular interest group is another box checked on their  Divide and Conquer Checklist. As Rev. Steve Schlissel recently noted, “Every mention of “family” as an institution to which politicos have pledged their allegiance and service must be interpreted in accordance with the more fundamental and determinative reality that no definition of family—no real, objective, recognizable definition—is permitted to function meaningfully in our midst.”(2)

      While the Founders envisioned a country of sovereign individuals free to pursue happiness in their own lives, current fashion popularizes group identities seeking justice for any number of perceived offenses. Like a Roman citizen pledging their allegiance to their Emperor, moderns pledge fidelity to their cause. And their cause informs their worldview, and their worldview can not be questioned. Thus they cry, “Hail, abortion!”, “Hail, Socialism!”, “Long live moral relativism!” as they stand safely burrowed in the comfort and acceptance of their collective. 

     So as much as we like to think we are ever evolving as humans, we are seeing a devolution. We are regressing back to a time of enslavement to an all powerful all defining overlord- group identity. 

   Sadly we have exchanged the freedom Christ offers to the world for the tyranny of the group. If we are truly to ‘evolve’, we must break free from earthly factions based upon race, gender,or any political leanings. We must embrace the freedom we have as INDIVIDUALS in Christ. “Each individual has the freedom to follow their own conscience and to be obedient to the leading of the Spirit in their own life” (3) 

        Let us embrace our greater identity as sovereign individuals, free to think, to aspire, and to speak as freed men unshackled from the tyranny of a group.

“Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.” (John 8:36)

1. Leslie Newbiggin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture 
2. Irving Tremellius 
3. ActiveChristianity,”The Truly Free Christian”, online blog