Why is Christian community so hard to cultivate in contemporary culture? In this episode of Pivot Podcast, host Dwight Zscheile continues his conversation with Dr. Jennifer Wojciechowski, a professor of church history at Luther Seminary, tracing the deep cultural roots of our present challenge. From the Enlightenment's reimagining of the human person as an autonomous individual to the seismic cultural shifts of the 1960s and 70s, Jennie and Dwight examine how Western culture arrived at a place where shared frameworks for truth and the common good have largely dissolved, and how both mainline and evangelical churches have accommodated themselves to that story in ways that have undermined their witness.

But the conversation doesn't stop at diagnosis. Jennie draws on two thousand years of church history to identify what has actually produced renewal: communities defined by credible Christian living and the clear proclamation of the gospel. From the mendicant movements of the High Middle Ages to the witness of St. Francis, the pattern holds. In a culture that measures human value by productivity and self-optimization, the message of grace turns out to be genuinely strange and genuinely needed. This episode offers church leaders both an honest reckoning with the forces shaping their congregations and a historically grounded reason for hope.

Sure, you can improve your youth programming at your church, but that's not going to fundamentally change the story, right? I think having this radical accept, really, really taking the Christian story seriously, embracing that instead of just whatever cultural piece we're inheriting, and then proclaiming the gospel to people.

Hello everyone, welcome to the Pivot Podcast where we explore how the Church can faithfully navigate a changing world. I'm Dwight Zscheile Today I'm continuing my conversation with Dr. Jennifer Wojciechowski Professor of Church History here at Luther Seminary. In our last conversation, we explored some of the deep historical roots of our present challenge in cultivating Christian community today, going back into the Renaissance and Reformation up through the Enlightenment.

And today we're going to pick up that thread and we're going to look at how these forces accelerated in the latter half of the 20th century in particular and brought us to where we are now. So Jennie welcome back to Pivot. So we were talking about individualism, right, as this ⁓ shift that took place in particular in a kind of new founding myth, if you will, that emerged in the Enlightenment, rather than seeing people as basically defined by relationships with each other and with God and with

Thanks for having me.

the natural world, we had this reconceptualization of humans as these autonomous, rights-bearing individuals who could kind of exercise their freedom however they wanted, pursue their own feelings and desires as long as they didn't harm others, right? That's kind of the basic story. ⁓ So let's jump ahead to the 60s and 70s and look at American culture in particular. And ⁓ let's just unpack a bit of how all of those things came into some new expression in that.

period of time.

Right. Well, a lot happened. I mean, you have some excellent things. You have the Civil Rights Movement. Absolutely. You have the 60s, beginning of the women's rights movement. You have a time that's mired by foreign wars, very unpopular foreign wars. And you do sort of have this shift away from the previous generation.

which you even think about like being more self-sacrificing, right? The World War II generation to the baby boomers and this very different kind of cultural idea of what it means to be human, what it means to be American. And this does seem to be like the hinge point. You know, we talked about last time, like all these cultural things were happening, but something happened during this timeframe.

in our society seems pretty different now and no one seems to agree on exactly what happened but I don't know maybe you have some opinions.

Well, I wonder if it isn't really a kind of, again, a working out of that trajectory around individualism with a kind of emotional therapeutic dimension to it, right? So if Rousseau and some of these other figures early on were saying you should just trust your emotions and pursue your true self, right? So even that language of true self that emerges, it's not very so much present even in those.

Okay.

It's so, I think it's meaningless. don't, in fact, I even called it as vapid as it is meaningless in my last book, I think. Sorry if I offended anybody, because people love it. And I understand that people, I get what people are going for, but like, what does that even mean? Like, do you really have this, it implies that there is a core self that you have to discover. And

When I think about myself and I think about like my relationships, it's like I'm a different person with my husband than I am with my children, than I am with my friends, than I am with my colleagues. No version is lesser than the other. I just, guess I don't believe in this, this myth of an authentic soul.

Right, right. Yeah. So, and this has become so powerful as we think about ⁓ how people are focused and like the kind of the point of human life becomes identifying, ⁓ understanding, and then expressing that self, right? That authentic self, but also looking for it to be recognized by others. Well, we were all

I'm special. We're

all special. We are, we're all, and you know, we are, we are all beloved children of God made in God's image. We are special, but that's not what's happening here with that phrase in my opinion.

Yeah. then, and then this gets, ⁓ one of the moves that comes out of this, this moment culturally, in particular, latter half of the 20th century is, ⁓ oppression then becomes psychologized in certain ways. Not that there isn't physical oppression, economic oppression, political, but, but we're all oppressed if our true self isn't recognized. Right. Right. ⁓ and so, so, you know, one of the things that becomes interesting about this, as we think about ethics is that.

with this turn toward the self as the sovereign arbiter really of truth and meaning and all of that and of ultimate reality, we lose the grounds for there to be kind of shared framework for what is true and good. So Alistair McIntyre of course argued this in his book, After Virtue and he talked about emotivism. And he said, emotivism is a doctrine that all evaluative judgments

and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling in so far as they are moral or evaluative in character. It's basically saying, you know, we all end up basically deciding on our emotions, what's true or good. And then, but your emotions may be different from mine. So how do we actually find common ground? It becomes pretty hard.

it does become really hard. then what is truth then? Or, you know, I suspect the, you know, alternative facts and such can be funneled back to this idea of, know, everyone's interpreting their own truth.

Yeah. And so if we think for a minute about ⁓ one of the classic Christian practices of witness or evangelism, right? One of the things that makes it so hard for people to imagine that in churches today is that if you believe that there is actually an ultimate truth that has a claim not only on you, but on your neighbor, and you actually want to engage in a conversation around that, you are breaking all kinds of taboos. Yes, you are. Because, you know,

the assumption would be your neighbor has their truth and ⁓ the last thing you should be doing is judging or saying that there's anything beyond that neighbor's own sense of what is true.

Right. you know, my choice to be a Christian is fine, but it's my individual choice. And their beliefs are their individual choice. And I'm infringing on their rights as a being if I want to share the good news. And I notice a lot of that is how they feel about this. It's like, don't want to offend them. I don't want to, I think, break these social norms.

Yeah, yeah. So you can see how it becomes very easy for churches simply to affirm this kind of very privatized understanding and then to be incredibly ineffective at actually sharing any sense of truth that exists beyond the individual or collection of individuals, right? ⁓ So, yeah, so I wanna talk also though about ⁓ some of the ways in which biology gets

⁓ reframed in this kind of world. So Jacques Ellul wrote this famous book back many years ago on the technological society and what he talked about as the machine or technique, like technological force being this kind of ⁓ power that kind of is destroying in modernity all sorts of traditional local cultures and ways of life. And then ultimately the planet itself, right? ⁓

because the trajectory from going back to Rousseau and through all these thinkers is that the most authentic self is that which is actually most detached from biology and society. So what do you make of that as we think about the challenge of having community today?

That's a really interesting question. ⁓ Especially you do see so many like Christian communities. It is the faith is, you're right, so intellectual. It's not bodily, even though we know it is actually a very bodily faith. Right. Right. And then, yeah, like tying this to like eco-ethics and eco-theology and that, yeah, we're all supporting these systems, this technology that is

in a sense, destroying both the planet and us in many ways.

Yeah, so we have now with AI this whole phenomenon of transhumanism, which is idea that we can surpass being human. Right. And store somehow our intelligence in the cloud or whatever that be.

Yes.

Billionaires

trying to upload their consciousness and live forever. It sounds so silly and it is silly, but it's also this really interesting sign of the times. Right? like I can transcend being human. I can live forever.

Yeah. So let's just pause on that for a minute. Like, was not a strange idea that we, we would want to transcend being human. I mean, that only makes sense in a context in which the framework of, of another transcendent reality of God and communion of saints and enduring relationships that are not constrained by space and time, right? Heaven. Right. Right. All of that's gone. Yes. And we have to make it up ourselves and use machines and technology to sort of get us there.

Right. Did you hear about that ⁓ new AI company friend where you wear this little, you wear like a little AI and it's always listening and it'll be your friend and it'll talk to you and the creator of it almost talks about it as if it's like a god.

Well, mean, so the kind of ways in which it's just sort of pretty obvious idolatry ⁓ and a lot of the current tech writers, the sort of AI, ⁓ you know, philosophers and people like that use very much this language of we are creating ourselves as gods or we're trying to make ourselves into gods and all of this. ⁓ So there's a piece of this also that is interesting. Like, so the premise in this kind of modern Western myth of

autonomous individualism is always one of liberation and freedom, but it actually ends up being quite oppressive in certain ways at the same time, right? Because I mean, if I'm gonna transcend my humanity, right? That's a lot of work. It sounds like a lot of work. You gotta be your best self to do that, right? So we're always working to kind of improve ourselves ⁓ and to meet up this sort of, meet up with this very competitive

It does sound, you gotta be your best.

⁓ social context where, you know, it's only the fittest survive in all of this. And there's always something more to do, we're always trying to improve. ⁓ And so much is up to us. I think one of the most oppressive things you can say to someone is, it's up to you to write your own story. That's an enormous burden.

It is a huge burden. you have to make yourself the best version. You have to be as thin as possible, as smart as possible, as productive as possible. You always have to be on. I mean, this is in. And you can never really achieve that. And then it's all your own failure.

Exactly, there's no grace in that. No wonder there's so much depression, anxiety, despair, pervasive in the culture, because it seems like on the one hand there are these utopian visions, either of if we get the right political leader or if we get the right policy or whatever it might be or the right technology, we'll have a kind of utopian view. Or on the other side, it's very much.

grace.

dystopian. Yes. It's not, it's not anything in between. It's either utopian or dystopian. It is. And of course, you know, the irony of utopianism, mean, the word utopia just means no place. Right. It's, it's a nowhere, right. That we're searching for. So, so, so let's just get back into this theme about community, right? Why is it so hard in, in, the community is fraying on a lot of levels. I think in the society, you know, James Davidson Hunter talks about how

we had an American culture at least, both the sort of Judeo-Christian stories. And then we had this enlightenment myth of classical liberalism that provided a certain kind of cohesiveness. That everyone bought into those on some level to be part of American society for generations and generations. ⁓ Now as we come on the 250th anniversary of the founding of America, both of those have

have now lost a lot of credibility across the political spectrum, actually.

Right,

they have. And then I would add kind of the long history of the voluntary institution in American life. Exactly. That was always very, very unique aspect of American culture. And that's really disintegrated too. I mean, people aren't going to church, but they're not joining the Knights of Columbus or the Lions anymore either, or bowling leagues, or people aren't doing this stuff.

Yeah, so those containers, again, it's really important to think about the kind of decline in church participation and support for church institutions as it's part of this larger context of a shift toward everyone's got to go their own way. Technology's there to facilitate that in some various kinds of ways. But Hunter points out that what you're left with when you remove those two shaping stories in American culture is ⁓

There's really no shared notions of the common good. People are living in this sort of, you know, hermeneutically very different environments where they have very different sense of reality and truth. And then you end up with will to power and you really end up with Nietzsche and you end up with a kind of fight for annihilation almost on the political side, because it's not that there's space for everyone. It's, know, your way or my way or

there's nothing in between. So solidarity as a kind of feature of what it means to even have community in American life, which was taken for granted for so many centuries and to a certain degree is now eroded. And then you end up with authoritarianism, left or right wing authoritarianism. Indeed. So, okay, so let's talk about the church. Where does this leave the church in the midst of all of this, right? To what extent,

Which we are definitely starting to see.

have the churches actually been caught up in this, accommodated themselves to it? How has it played out in the churches?

That's big question. I mean, I think this is going to sound critical, but I think both ⁓ churches, evangelical churches, mainline churches, I think both have become pretty accommodating of political systems. And we're seeing that in very, very negative ways. You'll see the evangelical accommodation of Trumpism or the

Yes it is.

For sure.

left has similar accommodations. ⁓ And where do you go from there? There's other options. are other Christian options. ⁓ But that's what I've seen.

Yeah, so the political dynamics become predominant in that kind of will to power moment. But I think also, you know, the accommodations, I think about it on a couple levels. So through the mainline, really going back into the mid 20th century, the mainline accommodated itself in many ways to expressive individualism, to the whole therapeutic relativist turns that were going on at the time, certainly in its theology, morality, in a sense in the optionality of community, right? It's really not that important.

to have community to be a good person or to belong, right? So you end up having a kind of ⁓ undercutting of ecclesiology. Church community isn't really that important. And then of course we can't imagine God acting, right? In that enlightenment worldview. The evangelical side is also very individualistic. And then the kind of romantic emotionalism that's very much a feature of this modern story we've been talking about.

plays out in thinking about evangelical worship and it's about getting this kind of experience of having this intimate emotional encounter with Jesus and relationship.

I would say behavior modification and regulation is a big thing on the evangelical side.

Yeah, so you can kind of have a moralism that's pretty thin in that sense. ⁓ And you don't really need church for that, you know, for any of this. Yeah, exactly, that's pretty common, Right. And of course, Pentecostalism has its own versions of some of this, certainly the emotional side and the individualism. ⁓

to be a good person, right?

though they have a transcendent aspect that I the others are maybe, and I don't wanna make blanket statements, but has a tendency to not.

And that's perhaps one of the reasons why ⁓ Pentecostalism is, as some mainline Christianity is declined significantly, Evangelicalism also has peaked and declined. Pentecostalism is also declining, but it's been more robust. ⁓

I

think estimates are a quarter of the world's Christians are now identified as charismatic or Pentecostal,

And

this is a very, we're talking about a very kind of Western cultural phenomenon. course, most cultures in the world are influenced by this, but not captive to it. And these stories in the same ways. let's talk, I'm just curious about your own story, right? Because you grew up in ⁓ a home and a context that didn't have meaningful Christian faith for understanding you became a Roman Catholic. So how do you locate yourself in this?

Right, we're both secular kids. Yeah, we are. I mean, this is the world I grew up in, right? The secular world, like this is the values that, you I held until I was in my twenties. And then, you know, I converted. It was actually a vineyard church. So the Pentecostals are great at evangelism. Yeah. We're going to put that out there right now. But yeah, I found my way to the Catholic Church, which for me,

As a church historian, and the more work I did, the more clear it was that, this is my faith tradition. When people would ask me a joke, well, I'll rosely to Rome. But in a sense, for me, it did. What I love about the faith is that it has this deep, deep history. It's 2,000 years old.

⁓ you know, say what you will about the church. They don't jump to accommodate culture. It'll be like, let's give it a hundred years and see, right? Like just the trajectory of a church like that versus a church that has only been, you know, together for a couple of decades. It's just a very, very different mindset. And so while you might be frustrated by certain aspects, that really, really appealed to me. And also just kind of the

the beauty and the transcendence of the liturgy, of the buildings. It made me really feel not only a connection to God, but a connection with ⁓ kind of this whole history of the Christian faith, the Christians who had come before me. ⁓ Not only the church militant, which is those of us alive, I want to make clear on that definition, versus the church triumphant, those who have already passed.

Yeah, so I mean, I think it's so interesting to think about people growing up like you and I did without the roots. I I grew up in the California coast and very much in this expressive individualist world where that was the whole game. you know, it was all hedonistic. was do whatever you want, make up your own morality, no limits. And for me, that was a very death dealing culture to live in. was...

was one that I wanted to find an alternative to. so the last thing I want church to be is simply a replication of that surrounding culture, maybe with some weird antique aesthetic rituals or whatever. It's gotta be something that's offering an alternative story. And so what I want as we wrap up this episode, I wanna just think with you a little bit about where church leaders

can turn amidst all this and what are some places to focus on? So one of the temptations would be to double down on being relevant to this broader culture and to accommodate more, right? So if people are about the age of authenticity, would be, well, let's help you live your best life now and help you ⁓ find your authentic self and really sort of abandon more and more traditional Christian teaching, whether it be, you know,

⁓ whatever sort of ways or traditional Christian practices ⁓ and I think that's a dead end.

I think it is.

I

mean, we're seeing actually the death of churches that are doing that, whether they be the actual demise institutionally, because they're not passing their faith on to the next generation or to their neighbors, or the spiritual death in the sense that they become so co-opted, whether it be to politics or various sorts or to other social causes that they're ceasing to offer any kind of alternative embodied witness to the gospel. And people just say, I'm not interested. Yeah.

Right. mean, when I think about sort of, and I mean, I think just because I'm a modern American, like I still will fall into this, but this are like, you can never be good enough, right? Right. You just can't. And I mean, what the Christian message is, it's like, it's grace. is God breaking into your life and loving you, not because you worked hard, not because you earned it, because it's because God loves you anyway.

And just that transcendence of God, I think that's what appeals to people. It's this radical thing that's so different than our own culture of work harder, be better, make more money. Your value is not actually in your productivity. It's as a child of God.

Yeah.

Yeah, and that means then that there is a reality outside of you who has a normative claim on your life, rather than your own self being the ultimate authority. So, you I think for a lot of churches, ⁓ one of the other dangers of course would be to say, how do we get cultural control back again, right? And various versions of kind of retaking Christendom. there's really left and right wing versions of us. And there's the left wing version that would say,

we just need to sort of abstract from Jesus's life certain moral teachings about fairness and equality and things like that. And we just need to assert those in the public sphere and try to kind of do it that way. Again, detach from Jesus himself or his people, the church, right? Or of course the right-wing version, which is we're gonna bring God's law back to control society. We're gonna actually, yeah, we're gonna, so various forms of Christian nationalism, et cetera, all of which,

We're to actual Christian get back.

you know, are, are I think really misguided in this moment, but I think there's an opportunity to turn to the small and the everyday. You know, Vaclav Havel, in his, he talked about in the power of the powerless, he said a best, a better system will not automatically ensure a better life. In fact, the opposite is true only by creating a better life can a better system be developed. It seems like for the church right now, the opportunity is actually to rediscover what it means.

to live Jesus's way in the local, in the small, to rediscover ancient patterns of community life that we've somehow lost rather than trying to prop up these institutional empires or reclaim a kind of national empire. So where would you go in church history for inspiration for this moment, like what we should be kind of reclaiming or what would be most helpful?

all right. So the church has had many sort of cycles of decay, decline of, then revival renewal. ⁓ and I think every single time we have a renewal movement, boils down to two things. Living a Christian life and good preaching. No, but, but I mean, really like I don't, you know, sure you can improve your youth programming.

at your church, but that's not going to fundamentally change the story, right? I think having this radical accept, really, really taking the Christian story seriously, embracing that instead of just whatever cultural piece we're inheriting, and then proclaiming the gospel to people. ⁓ If I were going to...

pick like a time frame, maybe read about the mendicants in the high middle ages. They took God seriously. They lived admirable lives that other people wanted to emulate and they were excellent preachers. They wanted to proclaim God's story to the people.

Well, and they lived with a kind of profound trust upon God's provision. ⁓ yes. Through the broader community. They did. ⁓ And I think perhaps that's one of the most basic things we need to learn in the American church is how to trust in God and not our own resources, our own skills, our own agendas in this moment. Yeah.

⁓

right. Like, yeah, St. Francis and the, I'm not, I'm not telling you to sell all your possessions and, but I mean, they did, they had nothing and they just lived on the generosity of others. I mean, talk about a different mindset than what we have today. Always be better, faster, stronger.

Yeah. Well, ⁓ thank you for this conversation, these two conversations for this rich historical perspective ⁓ on how we got to this moment. And I think, you know, one of my words just to enclosing to our listeners and viewers would be, this is so much bigger than, you know, you being able to lead your church a little better, right? I mean, there's such profound cultural currents and forces that we're all contending with, that we're all shaped by.

and that are shaping our people, are forming the people in our congregations all the time. And so, ⁓ are no easy things for us to experience and ⁓ to navigate through faithfully. And it does invite us to seek God's leading in ways that are at the forefront of what it means to be a disciple and to be community.

⁓ So the rest of this season, we're going to be exploring some dimensions of this challenge of how to cultivate Christian community and why it's so hard. ⁓ So thank you for joining us on this episode to help spread the word about Pivot. Please like or subscribe if you're catching us on YouTube or share a review on your favorite podcast platform and pass word on to your friends.