I’ve spent the past couple of days thinking about identity. When I think about the great division our country finds itself in I can’t help but think of the way our society sub-divides itself into millions of identities.
A Few of My Identities
- I identify in the youth ministry people.
- I identify with people with toddlers.
- I identify with married people in their 30s and 40s.
- I identify with people who like Notre Dame football.
- I identify with children of divorce.
- I identify with evangelicals.
- I identify with urbanites.
- I identify with WordPress developers.
- I identify with entrepreneurs and small business owners.
All of those identities talk to one another in a certain way. And, in one way or another, they build language and norms which communicate that you get it while others can’t possibly get it.
As a communicator I’ve learned that each of these groupings identifies around the same core things. In each of these audiences I can tell the exact same joke, changing the metaphor slightly, and get the same accepting nod… “Oh man, Adam gets me.”
The same joke I tell a youth worker gathering about parents or senior pastors will work in a WordPress gathering about clients or marketing companies. That same joke will work with small business owners, parents of toddlers, and married people. And the joke works… not because it is universally funny but because these identities are built on the same false construction.
The Psychology of Me
Ultimately these microgroupings lead to isolation and it’s big brother, loneliness. (It’s popular to falsely label this as leading to narcissism. I disagree with that populist idea while affirming that our society has largely normalized some narcissistic behaviors, just not a psychosis.) This happens on the societal level now, effortlessly, because technology has made it intuitive to create microgroupings. That’s one of the reasons you can walk through Target or a Famers Market or go to a football game and not have a single communal experience or 1-on-1 communication.
Instead of finding community where we actually are we create community around where we virtually aren’t. (At a gathering of people just like me.) We each take our communities with us in our pocket or keep our communities in our hand with our phone. Our phone is our social network. It’s our access point to people just like me.
The Weakness of Me
When you begin to group with people who do stuff you do or think like you do or experience things the same way you do… Groupthink sets in. Yes, these groupings make your group stupider. In the WordPress community groupthink is leading developers to create things for developers and not users. In youth ministry groupthink is leading to iteration after iteration of the same idea while simultaneously agreeing with research proving that the idea doesn’t actually work. Groupthink leads evangelicals to focus on the desire to be technically right theologically while forgetting the mandate to reach the lost. On and on we see that microgrouping communities drive out diversity… which drives us deeper and deeper into microgrouping’s rabbit hole.
The Strength of We
So what’s the answer? The answer is all around us. We live in community, not microcommunity, for a reason. While cars zoom us where we “want” to go. While our phones connect us to people just like us. All of that. We can pick the mess of community. In community we will find people who aren’t like us, who disagree with us, who maybe infuriate us. And as we wade into the mess of that we find a richness and beauty we can’t find in our microgroupings precisely because microgroupings exclude diversity by default.
As a Christian, I recognize this not as a new problem created by technology, but as an old problem created by Satan himself. Divide and conquer is one Satan’s oldest tricks. And Jesus convinced his followers that a life embedded in community was better than a life separated into a microgrouping. Jesus didn’t lead his followers into the desert like the Essenes. He didn’t build a compound. Instead, he lead his people into the public spaces and the mess.
Over and over again he showed us that Me is weak compared to We. That the way things were, and the way things are, don’t dictate the ways things can one day be.
Jesus’ great call to community is that others really can get it. They might not get you at first, but as we love one another and walk through life together, we will get one another over time. You might even lose some of the baggage of me to become a part of we.
You don’t have to find your identity in what you do or where you come from… you can find a new identity in something bigger, something that is whole and welcomes diverse ecosystems.
I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.
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