Kingdom Thinking vs. the Cult of Individualism
by Jim Burklo | 26 February 2025 |
If we are looking in the Bible for specific public policy prescriptions for the present day, we’re going to be frustrated.
But if we’re looking for inspiration to practice compassion through our social, political, and economic systems, we’ll find plenty of it in the scriptures.
In the gospels Jesus made many references to the “kingdom of God” or the “kingdom of heaven” as the state of the world to which we should collectively aspire. He made it clear that this kingdom was one of justice and compassion.
A kingdom is a social system. There’s nothing individualistic about it. Of course, Jesus taught that individuals can make choices about whether or not to advance the kingdom of heaven on earth. But the kingdom was social, communal, and collective.
Cooperation vs. individualism
Fundamentalist Christianity in America generally delivers the opposite message. It preaches a gospel of individualism. Your salvation is your personal business. You decide whether or not to accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior. It is important to note that this idea is relatively recent in the history of the faith. If you were a Pilgrim living in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620, and someone had asked you the question: “Have you accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior”— which is the question that evangelicals consider essential today—the Pilgrim would have been flummoxed. The response might well have been: “But we as a people are the elect of God, predestined for his salvation!” The idea of individual salvation, as opposed to collective, communal salvation, would have seemed very strange. And these were among the founders of Christianity in what is now the United States!
I had a young friend who years ago did a stint as an actor at the Plymouth Plantation. Her role was that of the daughter of the pastor of the community. She was asked regularly by visitors who were fundamentalist Christians if she had accepted Jesus as her personal Lord and Savior. And in order to stay in character, she had to express bewilderment at the question. Because it was not the question at the time, nor was it the question in Christendom up to that era.
The idea that salvation is social and not just individual is lost on very many Christians in America today. America has turned personal responsibility into a cultish mantra, and twisted Christianity into giving it religious cover. The head of the White House’s new “Faith Office” preaches the “prosperity gospel,” which contorts Jesus’ message into making personal wealth the measure of individual religiosity. Obviously it is important for individuals to take as much responsibility for themselves as they can, and do their best to survive and thrive. But it is also quite obvious that we depend on each other in very profound ways. And that we should expect each other to cooperate in doing so.
Jesus’ kingdom of heaven on earth is not a kingdom of the individual. It is a social kingdom, where people work together to take care of each other. But just how do we take care of each other? And how do we make decisions together about it? Just where do we draw lines between individual and social responsibility? How do we protect individual freedoms while at the same time require individuals to make contributions to the common good? Inevitably, it is a messy process. And the Bible doesn’t give us nice, tidy answers to these questions.
Jesus’ kingdom
Jesus lived in a province of the Roman empire, a huge kingdom that encompassed virtually all the world that was known to the people subject to it. So when he talked about the kingdom of heaven, the language he was using was outrageously revolutionary. He was advocating a social system ruled not by an individual emperor, but rather by God ruling directly over people.
Anyone who thinks Jesus wasn’t political needs to engage in a closer reading of the Bible.
“They (Jesus and his disciples) came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gerasenes. And when he had stepped out of the boat, immediately a man out of the tombs with an unclean spirit met him. He lived among the tombs, and no one could restrain him any more, even with a chain; for he had often been restrained with shackles and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the shackles he broke in pieces; and no one had the strength to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones. When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and bowed down before him; and he shouted at the top of his voice, ‘What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.’ For he had said to him, ‘Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!’ Then Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’ He replied, ‘My name is Legion, for we are many.’ He begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country. Now there on the hillside a great herd of swine was feeding, and the unclean spirits begged him, ‘Send us into the swine; let us enter them.’ So he gave them permission. And the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea, and were drowned in the sea.” Mark 5: 1-13, NRSV
The man known as the Gerasene demoniac suffered from what we now would call mental illness. But at the time he was thought to be possessed by demons. Upon being asked the name of the demon, the man answered, “My name is Legion.” That is a direct reference to a Roman legion of thousands of soldiers. Nearby was a herd of pigs. Jesus directed the demons out of the man and into the pigs, which then went over a cliff to drown in the water. Why were pigs being raised in Israel, a nation of people who do not eat pork? They were being raised to feed the Roman legion! No wonder that when the townfolk nearby discovered what had happened to the pigs, they begged Jesus to go away! They were terrified of reprisal by the Roman legions.
Jesus was advocating for an alternative communal system in which divine compassion was the constitution.
How does that aspiration translate for our time?
Very clearly, it suggests a social structural system that is not centered on the whims of a tyrant. That perspective was baked in to Jesus’ Jewish religion. Long before his time, the people of Israel clamored for a king in a time when the country was under threat of invasion. The prophet Samuel’s eloquent, prescient warnings against the inevitable depredations of tyranny ring as true today as they did then (I Samuel 8). The Bible was an inspiration to the founders of this nation to embed checks and balances against tyranny into the United States Constitution. Today the scripture inspires us to preserve those constraints against real and present threats against them.
Bringing the kingdom closer
We didn’t get to this constitutional crisis overnight. A highly orchestrated and extremely well-funded campaign has been underway for decades to focus the attention of the public on anecdotal, individual cases instead of on reliable information about systemic social problems. If bad things happen, it is because individuals screwed up. Don’t blame the Empire! Don’t blame corporations. Don’t blame unfair laws. Don’t blame institutional racism. Don’t blame systems. And don’t blame the big shots at the top of those systems! Instead of relying on unbiased, professionally gathered statistics to determine the nature of a social problem, the oligarchs want us to focus on outlying individual anecdotes that give cover for their preferred positions. The result of this ongoing campaign of privatizing public problems has been disastrous.
If we rely on individual anecdotes to come up with public policies, we’ll fall into the rabbit-hole of “what-about-ism.” You’ve got your anecdotes—but what about mine? To bring the kingdom of heaven closer to earth, we’ve got to get out of that vortex and use a scientific approach instead, looking at the wider population. But the cult of privatization wants us to focus on individual exceptions.
A very bright and determined girl growing up poor in a poor neighborhood and going to an underfunded public school, with a mother who demands that the child do her homework, goes on to a very successful adulthood. Should we base public policies about education on the assumption that every kid growing up in poverty is equally exceptional, and has equally exceptional parenting?
Determining the safety of vaccines isn’t a matter of telling stories about somebody you know who knows somebody else who got sick after getting a vaccine. It is about careful gathering of population-level data without prejudice, and then weighing the risks versus the rewards of the vaccine. And recognizing that, ultimately, there’s really no such thing as individual health. There’s only public health. Of course, individuals can make choices to improve public health. But, ultimately, if we want to be healthy, we’re going to have to work together to make it happen.
You can call this “kingdom thinking.” At the moment, this is counter-cultural thinking. But it is the kind that Jesus practiced and preached.
Jim Burklo is an ordained United Church of Christ pastor. In 2022 he retired after 14 years as the Senior Associate Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life at the University of Southern California. He now serves as pastor of the United Church of Christ in Simi Valley, California. He also serves as executive director of Progressive Christians Uniting/ZOE: Progressive Christian Life on Campus, a national network of progressive Christian campus ministry groups. Jim is the author of seven published books on progressive faith: the latest is Tenderly Calling: An Invitation to the Way of Jesus (St Johann Press, 2021). His weekly blog, “Musings,” has a global audience. Jim and his wife, Roberta, live in Ojai, California.
