Community, Character, and the Governance of the Social Commons

By Ben Peterson, CCS Fellow

The Center for Christian Studies is happy to congratulate Dr. Ben Peterson, CCS Fellow and guest editor of JCS II/2, "The Church and the Polis," on the publication of his forthcoming book, Community, Character, and the Governance of the Social Commons: Sanctuaries of Order, set to be released in June of this year by Bloomsbury Academic. We are happy to share with our CCS community the preface to the book, included below!

From the book description:

Preface:

When my great-grandfather Maurice Alexander Weed Sr. was a teenager, his father Benjamin Alexander Weed told him that if he impregnated a woman out of wedlock or was publicly drunk, he would no longer be welcome at the Weed home. "Clarity is kindness" might have cache as a saying today, but I doubt such unyielding bluntness would win any parenting awards.

It worked. By all accounts, Papa was an exemplary person. Although he never went to college, his sons, both of whom had postgraduate degrees, spoke of him as the smartest man they ever met. He worked for many years as a construction supervisor and tirelessly around his house for decades. When my father met him in his 70s, he was on a ladder carrying an air-conditioning unit on his shoulder to reach the second floor of his house. He served as a church elder and studied the Bible assiduously. He taught himself to play some piano. He came home every day for lunch and went with his family to church every week. His wife, my great-grandmother Lelabel Robbins Weed, loved, trusted, and respected him. Together, they raised their two sons, my grandfather who worked as a preacher and my great-uncle who worked as a seminary professor, each of whom had their own families and children. As my mother put it, Papa consistently showed up in every part of his life. His memory and legacy still inspire reverence and appreciation in my family.

He was exceptional, yes. But I do not believe he was extraordinary. For one, in many ways his achievements and mode of life represent the common aspirations of millions upon millions of ordinary men and women. Secondly, the society around him helped form his character. The firm boundary his father set about sexual behavior and alcohol abuse is only one example of the strictures and clear expectations that authority figures in his society set for him, expectations he internalized, embraced, and sought to pass on. While those expectations and the way they found expression may have seemed harsh, they came with loving and committed bonds of affection and obligation. Together, those expectations and those bonds set Papa up for a life of purpose, service, meaning, and connection, a life well-lived.

Today, we can scarcely imagine life in a society with such clear and firm expectations. With leniency and patience, we tell our children they must unconditionally esteem themselves; with tenderness we bid them express their every feeling and jealously guard their autonomy. We fill them with dreams of a limitless future, but they starve for the simple sureties of connection, purpose, and meaning. Smartphones and social media have laid bare the weakness of the permissive society, a society without strictures and expectations that has left millions of Americans adrift and lonely. We have constructed a social world in which the seemingly ordinary achievements of many, many, men and women like my great-grandfather—finding decent work, participating in family, community, and church life—somehow seem out of reach for so many people.

In their later years, my grandfather Maurice Alexander Weed Jr. and his wife Judy frequently expressed shock about homelessness in Austin, Texas, where we lived. They truly could not fathom that able-bodied, young men would spend their time panhandling on street-corners. They had a palpable sense that something fundamental had gone terribly wrong, that disorder and lawlessness had taken a foothold in our society.

Some of this, no doubt, is repeated in every generation. The elderly look back wistfully on the good old days when men were men, when we had standards, when children obeyed parents, when we respected God or the gods. Decline narratives abound in many cultures, and the Golden Age Fallacy perennially appeals.

The early part of the twentieth century was not a Golden Age. There was racism and systemic discrimination of many kinds. Even after the passage of the 19th Amendment, women had more limited social and professional options. Members of the Greatest and Silent Generations probably buried unspoken traumas. No doubt, there were unhappy marriages and secret affairs. There was abuse. There was unbelief, religious hypocrisy, and undue striving for wealth. 

Yet, there is more than a grain of truth in my grandfather’s worries about the permissiveness of contemporary society. In 1925, when my great-grandfather was about 13 years old, divorce was rare and marriage for adults was the norm. Religious participation was high, and people were part of all kinds of other local associations. The murder rate in the U.S. was a bit higher than it is today. But children and parents had no reason to fear mass shootings at schools and churches, despite the prevalence of a gun culture. Drug overdose rates were a small fraction of what they are today. The imprisonment rate is some four or five times what it was then, even after recent declines.

French philosopher Simone Weil described order, a clear sense of what one is to do in life, as “the first of the soul’s needs.”^[i] Papa’s time was no Golden Age, but it was an age of significantly greater social and personal stability, of significantly greater order, than ours. The men and women of that era weathered hardships, wars and rumors of wars, that all but a few of us in the U.S. today have been spared. They were shaped and formed in a culture of strictures, boundaries, and expectations, yes, but also a culture of faith, family, and community: a culture of connection. There was discipline, but that discipline supported, often enough, enduring bonds of loving and committed relationships and communities held together by those bonds.

The philosopher Leon Kass spoke of a trip he took in 1965 to do civil rights work in Mississippi. He was an Enlightenment liberal at the time, full of faith in the power of reason. Yet, he found something among the poor black farmers of Mississippi he encountered that he never expected:        

On returning to Cambridge, I was nagged by a disparity I could not explain between the uneducated, poor black farmers in Mississippi and many of my privileged, highly educated graduate student friends at Harvard. A man of the left, I had unthinkingly held the Enlightenment view of the close connection between intellectual and moral virtue: education and progress in science and technology would overcome superstition, poverty, and misery, allowing human beings to become at last the morally superior creatures that religion and social oppression, in addition to nature’s stinginess, had kept them from being. Yet in Mississippi I saw people living honorably and with dignity in perilous and meager circumstances, many of them illiterate, but sustained by religion, extended family, and community attachment, and by the pride of honest farming and homemaking. They even seemed to display more integrity, decency, and strength of character, and less self-absorption, vanity, and self-indulgence, than many of my high-minded Harvard friends who shared my progressive opinions. How could this be?^[ii]

The farmers, poor and uneducated though they were, threaded together a culture of connection.

Those kinds of threads have frayed to an alarming degree. No doubt there are many men and women of exemplary character today. Many of us enjoy the goods of connection, structure, and order, but we do so against the grain of our social milieu. The least educated and prosperous among us increasingly live without the connections of faith, family, or friendship.^[iii] As Yuval Levin insightfully points out, our social breakdown often shows itself in stagnation and emptiness more than wild living.^[iv] Yet, the evil that comes forth from the human heart bares itself in the acts of violence that punctuate our news cycles. Undirected and misguided impulses govern youth in online interactions and often in public demonstrations.

Although religious membership and participation have declined in the last few decades, and the class divide is evident in religious participation as well, churches and religious congregations remain sanctuaries of order. Americans without college degrees are more likely to join a religious organization than any other type of group.^[v]

My grandfather delivered a sermon in March 1991, a few weeks after his 52^nd birthday. Granddad faced plenty of hardships and ways life turned out differently than he would have wanted, both relationally and in terms of physical health. Yet, at age 52 he found himself remarkably contented, hopeful, and at peace. In the sermon, he told of the “pillars” that made him so:

For me at least, life has these four supporting pillars…It [takes] the Book—the testimony of the mighty acts of the God of Israel! It takes the Man, Jesus, who is God with us and for us, conquering sin and death! It takes the Spirit, who is God happening within us to produce power, love, and sanity! And it takes...Us! You! All of us to be ‘real live saints,’ the very successors of the apostles in the world today. We are walking demonstrations that faith is alive, and that through faith God can dwell within human persons.^[vi]

In the sermon, Granddad acknowledges it is hard for some people to trust the Bible. He says he sometimes felt disillusioned with the church, and that it is far from perfect. But he offers his life, lived among people genuinely reaching for God, as one more testimony to the surety of these pillars. Like his father, Granddad lived a life of purpose, meaning, and order, full of direction and hope. He found pillars for life in the faith handed down to him: the Christian gospel preached and practiced, however imperfectly, in the church. 

I make no claim to the excellences of Papa and Granddad, but I have found those same pillars they relied on to be sturdy supports. My first sanctuary of order was the University Avenue Church of Christ in Austin, Texas, where my parents brought my younger sister, brother, and me whenever the doors were open, where I came to the Christian faith, where my father baptized me. The Churches of Christ are a nondenominational fellowship, one of the “American originals” that emerged out of the Second Great Awakening.^[vii] One distinctive element of our fellowships is an historic insistence on a capella congregational singing. Whether or not the scriptural arguments for keeping instruments out of worship hold up—I tend to think not—I am grateful they won out in the Churches of Christ. The beauty of raising our unadorned voices in worship to the Creator is sublime. In congregational singing the voices of men and women, basses and altos, tenors and sopranos, all unite in harmony, often according to the music of great hymns in the Christian tradition.

Some 2,000 years ago, Ignatius, a second-century church father and the bishop of Antioch, linked congregational singing with life in community as the body of Christ:

Therefore in your concord and harmonious love, Jesus Christ is sung. And man by man, become a choir, that being harmonious in love, and taking up the song of God in unison, you may with one voice sing to the Father through Jesus Christ, so that He may both hear you, and perceive by your works that you are indeed the members of His Son. It is profitable, therefore, that you should live in an unblameable unity, that thus you may always enjoy communion with God.^[viii]

The harmony of congregational singing is an image of the ordered life possible in the church and, to a degree, in all well-ordered communities.

Membership in a well-ordered community comes with constraints, impositions on our choices and wills. Yet, in submitting to authority, bearing each other’s burdens, dying to our selves—in attuning our voices to the music—we share in community in a way that is impossible without those curtailments of our autonomy. I offer this book as an invitation to embrace, enliven, and build anew sanctuaries of order, to find pillars for our lives amid ruins of confusion, anchors for our souls in a sea of disaffection. 

Notes

[i] Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (New York: Octagon Books, 1952), 10.

[ii] Leon R. Kass, Leading a Worthy Life: Finding Meaning in Modern Times (New York: Encounter Books, 2017), 278.

[iii] Daniel A. Cox and Sam Pressler, “Disconnected: The Growing Class Divide in American Civic Life,” Survey Center on American Life, American Enterprise Institute, August 22, 2024, https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/disconnected-places-and-spaces/.

[iv] Yuval Levin, “The Changing Face of Social Breakdown,” The Dispatch, November 16, 2021, https://thedispatch.com/article/the-changing-face-of-social-breakdown/.

[v] Cox and Pressler, “Disconnected.”

[vi] Maurice A. Weed Jr., “Pillars of My Life, A Testimony,” March 1991. I am happy to share a pdf of the sermon with anyone who is interested.

[vii] Paul K. Conkin, American Originals: Homemade Varieties of Christianity (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Press, 1997).

[viii] Ignatius of Antioch, “The Epistle of Ignatius to the Ephesians,” New Advent, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0104.htm.