Sensus Divinitatis

A version of this article first appeared in the Christian Courier in September 2023.

I was carpooling a long distance with a public university administrator, and as the hours passed, she shared with me her recent difficult divorce. 

“I gave myself to that marriage,” she said, her face getting dark. “I trusted the notion that you give yourself to the relationship. But I got badly burned.”

She paused, and became much brighter. “Then I realized Shakespeare was right: ‘To thine own self be true.’ From now on, I trust no one but my own inner voice.”

“Then I realized Shakespeare was right: ‘To thine own self be true.’ From now on, I trust no one but my own inner voice.”

– the contemporary testimony of our dominant culture

This fear of being lost in something that turns out to be sorrowful or fraudulent is hard to shake after a bad experience. On impulse, we can become self-protective and hardened towards others. The positive side of this is that we may become more assertive and stop trying to please everyone. We stand up for our convictions and willingly risk not affirming others’ opinions. A healthy element of self-care may result.

The liability of “to thine own self be true” is that it makes teamwork, not to mention a partnership like any future marriage, rather difficult. Vulnerability, intimacy, and love are always a terrifying risk. Being true to yourself alone exacerbates what is already a deeply lonely culture (an epidemic or even pandemic some say). This cult of authenticity today has its momentary romance, but like real romance, it too, has its lengthening shadow. Truth is always greater than one’s own notion of it.

The Turn Inward

Just out this year is Canadian sociologist Sam Riemer’s book Caught in the Current: British and Canadian Evangelicals in an Age of Self-Spirituality (McGill-Queens 2023). His argument is that concerns over church decline, sexual ethics, and the exit of youth from church are just the surface of our cultural sea. The underlying current that drives all the visible issues is self-spirituality, and more specifically, a shift from a locus of external authority to internal authority. 

Other sociologists have called this cultural sea change “expressive individualism” (Robert Bellah), “individualization” (Ulrich Beck), “subjectivisation” (Peter Berger), “a massive subjective turn” (Charles Taylor) or “the spiritual revolution” (Heelas and Woodhead). While some measure of individuality is healthy in a highly conformist society, that doesn’t describe most of North America. New York Times columnist David Brooks just calls it “The Big Me.”

This book suggests many of our debates have misdiagnosed our deepest cultural challenge. We have argued about bible verses, disputed theology, pressed for the unity of the church, and enlisted the natural scientists but there has been less talk around this shift in which the individual becomes the final authority for law, church, media, education, and politics. “The two main concerns of evangelicals–decreasing orthodoxy/orthopraxy and unpopularity,” warns Reimer, ” are symptoms of a much more foundational and formational change that many fail to see” (16).

CC’s own Roland DeVries’ column on identity entitled “Who Are You?” touched on the issue. He remarks on the trend now that each person is the foremost authority on their identity. “I am the only one who can speak the truth of who I am.” This radical sea change in Western culture no doubt has hundreds of years of history, and even arguably a connection to Christianity’s emphasis on individual dignity. It is also a reaction (as DeVries says) to instances in which people were told who they were by external authorities, and the consequences were atrocious. Think slavery. 

“I am the only one who can speak the truth of who I am.”

The Burden of the Modern Self

Reimer helpfully explains that this self-spirituality is not only the result of individual rebelliousness or cultural narcissism. He points directly to structural change: namely the proliferation of multiple cultural sources for the self. Church, home and school used to reinforce one another through a common worldview. Today, the multiplicity of diverse messages assailing individuals through media, school, home, church, and state requires that individuals make choices. When individuals pick and mix their loyalties, the locus of authority shifts to the self.

This reminds me of Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith’s notion of “sacred umbrellas.” Earlier sociologist Peter Berger famously posited that subcultures create “sacred canopies” of religion to shelter themselves with meaning and purpose in an otherwise chaotic world. Smith argues, however, that in the advanced modern world “the old, overarching sacred canopies split apart and their ripped pieces of fabric fell toward the ground, many innovative religious actors caught those falling pieces of cloth in the air and, with more than a little ingenuity, remanufactured them into umbrellas.” These he says, are “small, handheld, and portable” and do not require others to prop them up. (American Evangelicalism, 106).

Such portable sacred universes can be adaptable and mobile in our pluralistic, high-speed world. Such independence from others, while empowering, comes with liabilities that we rarely talk about today, including mental health. Reimer says this modern deference to the self erodes the fabric of faith community and the self becomes sovereign, and even sacred. The inner voice of a person is understood to be wholly good, if not divine, and all that obstructs, or even questions this sacred self is suspect, if not oppressive.

This self-spirituality, says Reimer, is the underlying doctrine of the Zeitgeist that drives our culture, and it powerfully influences Christians, including evangelicals, and diminishes the authority of church, clergy, and the Bible in everyday life. It leaves many Bowling Alone as Putnam’s book convincingly argued.

The Self is a Fickle God

Global Scholar David Koyzis has written a book on the notion of authority, We Answer To Another (2014) and he laments how people pit individual authority against institutional authority, as if they are incompatible. Building on the neo-Kuyperian tradition, he argues that all have their proper authority in their appropriate sphere. Overall, society is a diverse place with a pluriformity of authority, and life flourishes best when each keep to their designated sphere of authority.

So if one entity claims authority over all spheres, whether it’s the state, the individual, the military, or the church, they have overturned a God-given order in favour of an idolatrous one. Only God is authoritative over all. This delegation of authority to different cultural realms is one of God’s good gifts. 

The Self is a fickle god to surrender to. Reimer quotes a prescient pastor at the end of the book who warns:

I think the biggest thing that’s being hit by the culture is the … confusion over what truth actually is and the desire to accept people, and accept them as they are, is causing people to almost say everybody’s truth is true, which obviously can’t be true. But that is what’s happening. (168)

British Anglican Rector now serving on the Canadian Prairies

He ends by saying that people are scared to stand up for any moral claims out of fear of being labelled and bullied. So they stay quiet.

“To thine own self be true.” This line in Hamlet comes from a rather hypocritical and pompous character named Polonius and may in fact be either satirical, or intended to mean “to thine own self be beneficial.” Seek your own interests first. It has become cliché, but it was not originally intended as a virtue!

Loneliness as Weapon and Burden

I saw four boys in the same school uniform waiting for the bus the other day beside the road. They were all on their cell phones, ignoring each other. They were each doing their own thing. I turned to my daughter and said, “When we were young, we used to talk with each other at the bus stop. Sometimes in winter we would even have snowball fights.” She sighed the way kids sigh at their out-of-touch parents.

This, however, is not just nostalgia for the old days. I’m talking about continuing to risk real-time embodied human interaction in real life. Electronic media exacerbates our self-spirituality. It is a modern temptation to retreat into our private universes and there are forces that take advantage of our loneliness and weaponize it against us, says a recent Atlantic article by Hilary Clinton. The stakes are higher than we can imagine.

For some this individualist ethic may sound liberating—and it often is at first for those who have been burned by institutional life—yet it can in time become a lonely burden to generate your own spiritual life. We belong body and soul in life and in death to Someone Else, and He wants a relationship with us that includes our confession, surrender, and a thorough transformation toward sacrificial service. In community. We take a role in a drama larger than ourselves, and that means following some script rather than our own impulses. In a healthy community, there is always room for improvisation and individual difference. But some conformity, some surrender, is the doorway to belonging.

If “being true” is indeed a value worth pursuing, the quest entails not only conformity to some collective vision and practise. Being true also means coming to terms with what is real. In our postmodern culture, reality has fallen on hard times and its not just about the virtual universe of our on-line life. We have been alienated from nature, and in multiple ways, from our own bodies. Transgenderism is only one example of how embodiment has become sadly problematic. I’m increasingly convinced that some recovery of a critical realism is key to a return to spiritual, mental, and physical health. Like a second naïveté, a second realism, after the anti-realist phase. There is a real world beyond us, and getting with the grain of its design will lead to life for all.

We can’t return to the heyday of church life and facile universals about the human condition. Still, we must resist the current of cultural atomization and pixelation. Small groups, neighbourhood events, reading clubs, exercise classes and shared meals can be a lifeline. Sunday worship can shape us for such a counter-cultural lifestyle. We need to be true—true to our calling from God, and that is best done side by side, sharing life together. But the crisis requires an even deeper reconnection: we need to submit ourselves to the patterns of creation, to God’s design for life, with a wariness for the very real effects of corruption and evil.

God lives within us as well as without us, but we have given up on the God beyond us. We in the West are locked in the immanent frame. Being true might begin with an inner sense of God’s presence, but it is the nature of faith, hope, and love to reach out, to serve, and in some ways surrender to something beyond our inner world.