Note: The following is an excerpt from The Journey of God: Christianity in Six Movements (IVP, 2025)

When I was seventeen, my high school, Prince of Wales Secondary, had all the graduating seniors write a blurb to go along with their picture in the yearbook. For mine, I quoted John Lennon:

I don’t believe in Bible

I don’t believe in Beatles

I just believe in me.¹

In other words, I don’t need the rest of the band, I just need myself. Expressing the same sentiment but in nonmusical form, is Jean-Paul Sartre, who writes, “Hell is other people.”² Sartre was a famed philosopher who placed the individual’s existence above the attempts of society, morality, the church, or other people to limit and define us. For, first off, we are born to parents who never cease overbearing us. Sure, you eventually graduate and move out, but your deference to your parents only transfers from them to your employer, your overbearing boyfriend/girlfriend, your country, your ideology, your church, your pastor, your favorite authors and podcasters and pundits and likeminded groupthink-ers. Everything you’ve done, you’ve done for others or copied from others or repackaged from others. Everyone is the other, and no one is themself (as if to prove the point, I stole that sentence from Martin Heidegger).³ Hell is other people, and we are too afraid to leave their warmth to carve our true, authentic, solitary self from the frost.

And at seventeen, I could already see how the community was destroying individuality. They say society is a melting pot, but what that actually means is all differences are melted down and overwhelmed into a homogenous, bland broth. As soon as we are placed alongside others, they begin to grate against our edges until we are sanded down into good little boys and girls who fit the mold. Boyfriends change for girlfriends; wives change for husbands; children become who their parents want them to be; teachers mold us into carbon copies; peers fold to pressure; congregants conform to their congregation and denomination and pastor and God. Indeed, the church is almost a punch line today, representing the last place that unique individuals with unique identities and proclivities might wish to go. Congregations stampede over any individuality or uniqueness or diversity, flattening us into cardboard cutouts of formerly full individuals. As soon as your spiritual journey needs the approval and input of others, it ceases to be your spiritual journey. The self gets swallowed up in the other.

These sentiments define the Western world in which I was raised. We value freedom, autonomy, and self-determination; consider our formative revolutions in England in the 1640s, America in 1776, and France in 1789. We prize independence, individualism, and pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps; consider any modern political debate about almost any issue, from welfare to capitalism to vaccinations. We value individual authenticity and being yourself; consider the perfume commercial I watched yesterday that went, “Bleu de Chanel—a fragrance for an individual who is deeply themselves.” We believe our purpose on earth is to find out who we are and stay true to it; just watch any Disney movie ever. We listen to our own heart and mind over the wisdom of others, family, society, authority, and tradition; just read Dr. Seuss, who writes, “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”⁴ We think the meaning of life is not at the bottom of a bottle but at the bottom of ourselves, and if we could just dive deep enough, meditate long enough, psychoanalyze inwardly enough, we would finally return to the hearth within, knowing the place for the very first time. Our modern age is the age of the individual self.

This is perhaps why so many in today’s culture define themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” It’s a way of saying we have a personal sense of the divine but don’t pursue that sense in a communal or church setting. As Deepak Chopra writes, “Religion is belief in someone else’s experience. Spirituality is having your own experience. . . . You should be totally independent. . . . you should have faith in yourself.”⁵ Spiritual guru Ram Dass reiterates this, saying, “The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can’t be organized or regulated. . . . Listen to your own truth.”⁶ Or, as Eckhart Tolle states, “I cannot tell you any spiritual truth that deep within you don’t know already. . . . The real spiritual awakening [is] when something emerges from within you.”⁷ And growing up, these kinds of sentiments were very much my world. I was born in Vancouver General Hospital, and grew up right next to the Cambie Street Bridge, in an intensely secular world where less than 1–3% of the population attends a weekly religious service. Yet more than half the Vancouver population still believes some sort of divine entity or spiritual realm exists.⁸ Which means we’re still spiritual but want to get away from religious communities, churches, clergy, dogma, groupthink, and so on. The problem isn’t God but his people.

Growing up, I read Walden in my high school English class, one of the defining texts of the modern Western canon. It condenses the true story of Henry David Thoreau escaping civilization to live alone in the woods for two years. How wonderful that sounded to me, to cease being a social animal and simply be an animal, alone and scrounging in the wild. I got giddy with introversion. Oh, to get away from the whining and fighting and etiquette and gossip and insults and passive-aggressiveness and cruelty and complications of others and civilization. One-way ticket for one, please! I thought to myself.

The only problem, which I realized later, is that Thoreau was, and I’m quoting here, a “miserable [expletive].”⁹ He once visited the site of a shipwreck that killed a hundred people days earlier and commented on how he felt pity not for the lost souls but for the wind and waves that had to deal with them. He was well known for being a puffed-up, sour, judgmental, cold misanthrope. The irony, then, is that Thoreau fled the evils of society, only to bring them all along within him. He escaped society but was still stuck with his miserable self. Our fallenness follows us wherever we go—it’s not just social but individual. The problem isn’t just out there; it’s in here. It’s in me.

Isolate me in the woods and I’m not going to get better but, if anything, worse. My inner demons will finally have me all to themselves. My thoughts will bounce around incestuously in the echo chamber of my own mind, with no one to bring me back down to reality. Sure, I may have less social anxiety at first, but my existential dread and cosmic isolation will slowly begin to toy with insanity and suicide. No one will be there to stir me awake from my nightmares. My basic need for touch, conversation, and intimacy will funnel itself into increasingly deranged fantasies. I will begin to talk to myself and the walls. I will find a round object, smear it with my own blood, and call it Wilson. Sartre may have been right that hell is other people, but hell is also yourself, raveling further in forever.

Humans are inescapably social creatures, even the weird ones. Which is why Christopher McCandless, an Emory grad who fled society in 1992 to go live alone in the Alaskan wild, later scribbled next to his dying corpse, “Happiness only real when shared.”¹⁰ According to the World Health Organization, loneliness is equal health-wise to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.¹¹ These effects can be so detrimental that some countries have even appointed an official minister of loneliness to address it.¹² And a Harvard medical study following the health of 168 men over eighty years found that medically the “only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”¹³ What is more, community isn’t just essential for the health of the individual but for their existence to begin with. Sorry, Rousseau, but man is not “born free.” No, he is born umbilically chained to another who is not disposable but rather essential to the whole birthing process.

Then we are raised up, nursed, potty-trained, given a common language, and shown the way of the world by others, in the lengthiest dependency period in the entire animal kingdom. Kangaroos only depend on others for half a year, humpback whales for a year, and giraffes for a year and a half. In contrast, humans are dependent on others for a decade or two, and this dependency has been linked to our higher brain functions and abilities (so at least in this case, the more dependent we are, the more empowered). We do not exist first as individuals and only later get placed into relationships. Rather, we are in relation from the very get-go. We are conceived through an act of intimacy, carried to term inside another, and then raised up by the community. No others means no self.

The fantasy of personal independence has only been plausible for a few centuries and only for wealthier countries. It now feels possible for an individual to stock up on groceries, work from home, never come out, and live in total isolation and independence. Yet the groceries do not magically appear on the doorstep but are placed there by another human, who is a member of an intricate social system requiring dozens if not hundreds of others to be working together in unison, both at the store itself and at the app company that processed your order, as well as the bank that forwarded the money and the internet provider through which they forwarded it. And don’t even get me started on household electricity, water, heat, and so on. The contemporary creature comforts of isolation are only made possible because of the social and economic communities we exist in and benefit from. A thousand treaties had to be struck in order for you to treat yourself. Even Thoreau popped into town to get groceries.

This illusion of physical independence has been coupled with intellectual independence. The creed of the Western Enlightenment was “Think for yourself.” This is ironic, because what we define as valid thinking was itself the result of thousands of years of communal reflection and tradition. While we tend to think of our individual self as the one thing that hasn’t been hand-fed to us from the outside by others, our Western individualism is arguably what is most unique to our specific community, culture, time, place, and tradition. Even science is not just thinking for yourself but thinking with others; one of the main causes of the scientific revolution was the printing press allowing scientists to widely disseminate their work to others and thereby converse and learn from the global community of scientists. Most of what the individual scientist believes is not because they’ve done all the experiments for themselves but because they trust the scientific community. A marine biologist doesn’t have time to double-check every single conclusion of past marine biologists, let alone those in their parallel discipline of astrobiology, and certainly not an entirely distinct field such as astrophysics. You can’t rebuild from scratch the entire history of thought on your own any more than you can retile every time you go to the bathroom. This is why Isaac Newton, arguably the most important scientist in history, said, “If I have seen farther than anyone else, it is only because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”¹⁴ You cannot think for yourself unless you first think with others.

One might point out similar issues with the “spiritual but not religious” crowd, which tends to believe it is thinking, feeling, meditating, journeying in isolation from the system and tradition and community and dogma. Yet we inherited these New Age and individualistic sentiments from our parents and grandparents in the sixties and seventies, and they themselves appropriated these ideas from Western individualists and Eastern religious communities going back thousands of years. Even when you are meditating or reading alone in your room, you’re not escaping the human race or tradition or social system.

Remember those New Age thinkers I quoted a few paragraphs back, who said to set out alone on your own spiritual path? Well, Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle both have a net worth of around $70–80 million.¹⁵ What they should have said was, “Pay me to tell you to think for yourself.” The “spiritual but not religious” crowd is still part of a collective system, economy, and ideology. They are still putting coins in the coffer, just not at church. They still have gurus and teachers and yogis, and so still have corruption and infighting and sexual abuse, just without the accountability or appeal process of a more established religious denomination. They still tend to meet in groups, and as soon as you start meeting with any regularity you start to get the trappings of religion, so perhaps they should just accept that and try to do religion better than others have done it. They still have their dogmas, except no one else is allowed to question them because their spiritual journey is deeply private and all that matters is what’s true for you. And they only believe that to begin with because they’ve inherited it from a spiritual community of thought and practice, which likes to fancy it has somehow evolved beyond the communal nature of religion and humanity. But it’s not less communal; it’s just less aware of the social privileges that allow them to play at being authentically themselves, while not actually making the world a better place for anyone else. And if you are reading this and think that’s an unfair caricature (which I’m sure for some people it is), then great; I am so happy to hear you actually are deeply embedded in spiritual communities of support. I’m glad we agree that’s important.

Because it really is important—more important than I could have realized at seventeen. Luckily, my spiritual community did not give up on me even though I had given up on it. A small group of Christians met together during the week for food, games, conversation, debate, and prayer, and I’d begun to join them regularly. The way they did church constantly challenged my assumptions. With them, church wasn’t about the building; we often met at the McDonald’s on Broadway and Granville, or at Kits beach, or at someone’s house (just like the early church). With them, church wasn’t a pastor telling us what to think; it was a pastor listening to me rant and process everything I was thinking. Church wasn’t about force-feeding me dogma; it was a lively discussion and late-night debates about whether we have free will and other crazy questions. The fire of my own thoughts became infinitely larger and more provocative for having been stoked and kindled by the thoughts of others. Church wasn’t about hiding who we were as individuals but opening up the doors and letting others see us fully, sharing and confessing and processing together—I told them things about myself I’d never told anyone. Church wasn’t about money; I was a teen with no job or money to give, and I later learned the youth pastor made only $500 a month.¹⁶ Yes, that church was bound within a system, tradition, and community, yet it wasn’t boggied down by it. Rather, it was buoyed up and given breath and life and songs and potlucks by it. I could feel the divine Spirit through the community, for, as Jean Valjean sings: to love another person is to see the face of God. I was no longer alone in the wilderness trying to track down God; other lights were gathering around me in the night, and the brighter we were, the easier it was for God to find us. I was a self who had encountered an other.

So I got special, last-minute permission to change my yearbook blurb after the deadline. I didn’t take anything away. I kept the quote from John Lennon. I just added something after it:

“I don’t believe in Beatles.

I just believe in me.”

—John Lennon.

I love you John, but in the past year many things have changed. I don’t think I am ready to turn my back on it all, on hope for the world. There’s cud yet to be chewed here.

I had a good experience with church. I was lucky enough to see what a good and healthy spiritual community could look like. Yet I am not naive enough to think that everyone is so lucky. Some of the most egregious desecrations have occurred in church basements and Sunday schools. Some of the worst oppressors and most terrifying ideologies have found shelter in the church. For some of you, just reading an article about church has likely been a triggering experience, and justifiably so. I wouldn’t want to argue with any of that. It’s all true; in fact, the truth is probably even worse than what we know about. I swear this article is not about trying to get you to go back to a specific church, such as perhaps your childhood church. I’ll take your word for it that it’s terrifying, backwards, repressive, and xenophobic. I’ve been to churches like that myself over the years. I have no interest in pressuring you to go back to that particular church, or any specific denomination or cultural movement (because sometimes it’s not just a few bad apples but the broader systemic tree). If someone gave you this [article] as fuel for further gaslighting, then use it to instead drive as far away from them as you can to a healthier spiritual community.

So, I’m not saying you should go back to any specific church. Rather, I am simply suggesting you don’t give up on the general idea of church as church—as spirituality pursued socially with others. Now, it makes sense if you don’t go to church because you think Christianity is untrue or harmful. But that’s a problem with the Christian beliefs explored in churches, not a problem with the idea of communal spirituality itself. That’s a world-view question I aim to address in the broader book this article is excerpted from (The Journey of God, 2025), and not here in this specific section on church. And it makes sense if you don’t want to go back to your particular church because it’s terrifying and traumatizing. But that’s not necessarily a problem with spiritual community in general but with a specific church, denomination, or cultural movement. And it makes sense if you’ve been burned, hurt, or even abused by the fallenness of others. But you can’t escape that by ditching people altogether or going to live in a cabin in the woods. And it makes sense if you’ve had some rough experiences and need to take some time away from church to reset. But while those may be healthy rhythms, they can’t be the end of the song. For to give up on church as church, not for one of those other reasons I listed above but because you are tired of dealing with other people as other people—as complicated, messy, fallen mortals—is to give up on humanity itself. To paraphrase Bob Marley: other humans are always going to hurt you, you just have to decide which ones you’re willing to suffer for.

Now, despite everything I just said about community, I still go on personal retreats. I still take off on my own for a few nights every other month just to read, write, pray, sleep, and walk alone. I would still say that if you’re in an unhealthy community, you as an individual should push back against that and possibly consider leaving. And I still disagree with my church community about a lot of things; in fact, I’m often the one pushing the envelope. For while it would have been easy to go from the one extreme to another—from holding the individual self above the community to holding the community above the self—I believe the truth is in the tension. We are not just individual persons or just our relationships. Rather, we are persons-in-relation.

When community overwhelms the individual, we get conformity, homogeneity, assimilation, abuse, cover-ups, groupthink, mob mentality, 1984, and totalitarianism. People repress and hide whatever parts of themselves don’t fit into the social box. Diversity, difference, and otherness are sliced away, leaving only a homogenous unity and artificial oneness. People stay in harmful marriages, submit to unhealthy churches, and suppress their personal qualms for the sake of the whole. Yet on the opposite end, when the individual trumps the community, we get selfishness, narcissism, broken communities, broken families, isolation, loneliness, anarchy, and so on. Individuals place themselves above others, or isolate themselves from others, avoiding some pain but also avoiding all the joys, support, and accountability of community. So, individuals without community doesn’t work. Community that overwhelms, stifles, and homogenizes individuals doesn’t work either. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. Hell is other people, and hell is also yourself.

But heaven is yourself-with-others. My seventeen-year-old individualistic self wasn’t lost but balanced out by a church community that loved and supported and challenged and refined me. Rising up as fully myself, I came face to face with others who saw me, challenged me, pushed me, supported me, enjoyed me—who made me more than I was and all that I could be. I only came to know myself fully through seeing myself reflected back in their eyes. In turn, I challenged and supported them. I pushed them on some of their views and dogmas, and they pushed me on some of mine. I called my community out on ways it could do better, and it called me out too. I would not be who I am today without the community that shaped me, and that community would not be fully what it is without me and the other individuals within it.

There is no whole individual without their community, and no community without the individuals that comprise it. Problems arise when we try to make one side of the equation bigger or more dominant than the other. I truly believe everything I said in the first half of this chapter, but I also believe it is incomplete and lopsided unless balanced by everything said in the second half. Humans are not just individual persons or just our relationships. Rather, we are persons-in-relation. Which should make intuitive sense to Christians, given we already believe we are made in the image of a Trinitarian God—in the image of the one who is also three, who eternally dwells in the tension between individuality and community.¹⁷