Not An Error but A Preparation
Rugged Individualism
What are we to make theologically of American individualism? Is it really true that it can be a preparation for the Gospel as I asserted earlier or is this just wishful thinking on my part?
Individualism, especially as it has come to be understood in recent years, is hardly unalloyed moral good. Moreover, we should be mindful of the limits of the term and its negative effects on society.1
At the same time, the term does capture something of the centrality of human freedom and personal autonomy to Orthodox theological anthropology and so social teaching. American individualism, our love of personal autonomy, is not necessarily meant to foster isolationism. Rather it is meant to protect the conscience from external coercion by not only the State but the Church as well. We must not as Orthodox Christians limit our understanding of freedom to personal morality or soteriology—freedom from sin. Doing so I think is to make ourselves the same mistake we find in many of the popular understandings of individualism as the pursuit of virtue apart from the life of the broader human and ecclesiastical communities.2
“Rugged individualism and American character,” write David Davenport and Gordon Lloyd, “are inextricably intertwined, the one essentially defining the other.” The term “rugged individualism” was coined by “Herbert Hoover, … in 1928” and offered in contrast to “the soft despotism and totalitarianism of Europe.” The relatively recent addition of the adjective shouldn’t obscure for us that “the pioneers and founders” of America “sought to establish” a “new country” built on “individual liberty.” In the American Experiment, “It would be the individual, not the monarchy or the social class, who would be the essential unit of analysis and action.”
As we saw earlier and will come back to in a little while, for Holy Tradition while a necessary first step in the spiritual life, freedom from sin is insufficient. In the civil realm, secular authorities seek to impose order or punish criminals (that is keep society free from sin), through the use of force. As we’ll see in the Church’s teaching on war, the coercive exercise of authority is only acceptable (if regretfully so) when persuasion has failed. But when governments use police powers to secure, specific good outcomes, they often commit other equally grievous or even more serious injustices.
For now, though, I want to suggest that American individualism as described above finds its fulfillment not in ontological or radical forms of individualism but in ascetical effort and liturgical prayer. Indeed as Davenport and Lloyd argue “Americans exercise their rugged individualism when they consent to the government, church, and economy of their choosing.” And if, at “a deeper psychological level” it proved to be a moral and political philosophy “especially good” for “conquer[ing] new lands, territories, and ideas” this should not obscure for us its “deeply religious nature”
The pilgrims and Protestants, with their belief that they were individually responsible to read their Bibles and follow God as best they could reinforced this individualistic mind and spirit.3
Though the concept comes from outside the Tradition of the Church and can (especially in its secular form) lend itself to serious deformations and injustices, we can’t overlook the “counter-narratives, or perhaps companion narratives” that historically have accompanied “the narrative of individualism in the American frontier … community. … We will nearly always find that American individualism is not naked individualism; it is accompanied by, or moderated by, something else.” That something else is religion and specifically, the Gospel.4
Though it might rub us the wrong way, for all its philosophical shortcomings and practical deformation, American individualism represents a point of convergence between American culture and the Orthodox Church. Much like ancient Greek philosophy or Roman law, American individualism is not simply a bit of Enlightenment political philosophy or the handmaiden of the free market. It is also the potentially rich soil for cultivating the life of the Orthodox Church in the often rough and tumble world of American democracy, religious freedom, and capitalism.
For more on this see Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality, trans., Elizabeth Briere (Crestwood NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984).
Why we should reject any such privatization of virtue is a central theme in Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality.
Davenport and Llyod, Rugged Individualism, p. 18.
Ibid.