A Reflection from The Rev. David Hoster
Dear People of St. James’,
Human beings aren’t built to be alone. Our ancestors were tribal. They established their personal identity, grew that identity and sustained it not by individual achievement but through their interaction with other members of the tribe.
The Judeo-Christian tradition is based entirely on community. The isolated individual who goes his own way and rejects family and clan is identified as Cain, who refused to be his brother’s keeper, and Judas, who betrayed Jesus and his brother Apostles. Nearly everything Jesus says or does—care for neighbor (and everybody is your neighbor), reintegrating lepers into the community, telling his disciples his legacy is that they love each other sacrificially as he loved them—to repeat, nearly everything Jesus says and does is about relationship and commonality.
There is a deep and powerful movement in American mythology, however, that is profoundly not about relationship—indeed, is anti-communitarian. The cult of rugged individualism, the solitary cowboy out west, sees the world as a vicious, chaotic place where “townspeople,” those who try to form community, are weak and corrupt while only the heroically self-sufficient individual can (and always does, in the movies) triumph in the end. Our culture, in part, discourages reliance on other people and wants us to succeed without needing anybody but ourselves.
For my money, one of the only really good westerns was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a thorough take-down of the anti-Christian myth of individualism. Liberty Valance (what a name!—”intrinsic freedom”) is played by the marvelously obnoxious Lee Marvin, who delights in bullying townspeople and, occasionally, shooting them. He is the quintessential self-made man. Jimmy Stewart, by contrast, is the quintessential townsperson, awkwardly mumbling his way into being the voice of the community as their newspaper editor. Jimmy is cared for by John Wayne, a patronizing mentor, though also a self-made man in the image of the cowboy, who kills Liberty to protect his friend Jimmy Stewart. In the end, though, the Duke is the Duke, and he cannot find his way into the communitarian future that Jimmy Stewart builds in the creation of a Territory, followed by Statehood and his election to the US Senate. John Wayne burns his own house down in a drunken rage and dies alone (wonder what the Duke really thought about this role).
Our national response to pandemic isolation seems to be organizing itself along political lines drawn directly from Liberty Valance. The guys strutting around with semi-automatic rifles proclaiming their personal liberty to act any way they want look a lot like Lee Marvin in the movie. The National Review proclaims the return of the hyper-individualistic Tea Party in the face of overbearing government regulation. Contact tracing, necessary to public health, is attacked as an infringement on personal liberty.
The people on the other side—those who are derided for wearing masks in public places to protect the community—are the spiritual descendants of Jimmy Stewart and the townspeople. They realize they are connected to everybody else in their local or national community. They act out of responsibility for these relationships.
Human societies have always understood that civilization is about relationship, and relationship is about yielding our personal liberty to serve our bonds with others. Only the United States, with its unusual democratic tradition, has gone the way of individualism. The reality is that civilization is strong, while the individual, any individual, is weak. The worst thing that could happen in primitive times was to be cast out of the tribe and forced to deal with the wilderness alone. Nobody was that strong.
St. James’ identity was formed by people committed to the strength of community. Our Founders knew that their bonds with one another were a matter of life and death in the face of a society organized against them. They sacrificed self-interest for solidarity.
We, too, are now in a similar moment, needing to rely on one another in the face of an oppressive disease and a society that seems to be self-destructing. We need Jimmy Stewart, not Liberty Valance or John Wayne. The bonds of St. James’ are the way of health and strength that will stand up to whatever comes, however long it takes. Long ago, we turned away from liberty’s valance.
The Rev. David Hoster
