False Gods

This Sunday we'll hear the story from Exodus of the Israelites at the foot of Mount Sinai. Moses has gone up the mountain to meet with God, but when he's away for forty days and nights, the people get restless. So they ask Aaron, Moses' brother, to make gods for them out of their gold. He melts it all down and turns it into a large golden bull, and they fall down and worship it: a god of their own choosing and fashioning and control.

All these years later, we're still worshiping false gods that we believe will give us meaning and purpose. They go by the names of ambition and consumption and work and countless other things that have come to dominate our society. But it's one of our society's false gods in particular that I've been thinking about this week: individualism.

That's because of an editorial I recently read by David Brooks in the New York Times in which he describes a study published by some sociologists about morality. In 2008, these scientists interviewed 230 college students about moral issues. What they discovered was not that college kids are more immoral than past generations. Instead they found that young adults are completely incapable of thinking or talking about moral issues.

When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot. The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “I would do what I thought made me happy or how I felt. I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel."

The sociologists found an atmosphere of "extreme moral individualism" - of relativism and nonjudgmentalism. As one of the students said in his interview, “I guess what makes something right is how I feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn’t speak on behalf of anyone else as to what’s right and wrong.”

I believe that individualism has become an idol that we worship. We declare things "not our business," or believe that we have no more right to evaluate moral behavior than anyone else. We've done such a good job of making things "not our business" that our next generation of teachers and elected leaders and scientists and business owners, at least according to this study, don't even know what a moral decision looks like, let alone how to address it with more than "what feels right" to them.

But as Christians, we are the inheritors of a morally defining framework that offers us guidance. We are part of a tradition that directs our moral lives. Yes, we respect the privacy of others, but we also recognize that individualism is a false god that prevents us from being guided by the wisdom of God through Scripture and the Church. Our first identity is not as individual. We don't answer just to our own, personal feelings. We belong to God because Christ has made us his own. And that means, unlike the student quoted earlier, we do have way so knowing what to do beyond how we internally feel.

It's time we stopped worshiping the idol of individualism. It's time we were guided by more than "what feels right." The Christian life is so much more than that.