Temptation of Tribalism

America is abandoning the last remnants of our historic Christian foundations. This is most obvious in law, where specifically Christian claims are ruled unConstitutional precisely because they are Christian claims. It’s evident in the universities and among intellectual elites, who cannot make sense of a theological argument that claims to be a public argument. Theology is by definition private opinion, dangerous and tyrannical when it demands public assent.

What replaces our historic Christian consensus is a patchwork of disconnected communities. The thin public “theology” of liberalism doesn’t meet human needs. No one tribe can command universal assent, and so we retreat to our tribal affinities, to our small communities where consensus is still possible. Secularization is in a symbiotic relationship with by postmodern fragmentation.

Under these conditions, Christians are sorely tempted to adopt a tribal mentality. We retreat into our small, homogenous communities to weather the storm of secularization, or to hold out until the second coming. We shore up our traditional confessional identities; we emphasizes our liturgical and practical distinctives; we survive by becoming different not only from the world but from other Christian tribes.

There is something right about this tribal instinct. In a world of renewed tribalism, the church can offer herself as the true tribe. But she can do that faithfully only when she recognizes that the Christian tribe is and has always been a parody of tribalism. The church offers some of the benefits of tribal life – intimate personal relations; vigorous ritual life; an oppositional stance toward the wider world. But the church has never been an ethnicity, and she abandons her vocation as soon as she begins to resemble one. Even ancient Israel was never a tribe like the nations. 

And, more important, the Christian tribe is never properly seen as “Presbyterian” or “Anglican” or “Catholic” or “Orthodox,” but simply a Christian. If Christians respond to the challenges of the present day by becoming more narrow, they are leaving behind genuine Christian tribalism. They are becoming a tribe, rather than a divine parody of the tribe.

Tribalism is perhaps a good strategy for Christian survival in the present. But the gospel is not a message of survival, and the church is not a community of survival. It is the people of the Lord Jesus, the heir of all things who shares all His inheritance with His people.