individualism on Pop Culture

You don’t need to look far today to notice that personal identity is a do-it-yourself project. A gym near where I live advertises itself with the slogan: “Be Fit. Be Well. Be You.” A new apartment com...

Some of the inability of American Christianity to understand the corporate and social nature of culture arises from the excessive individualism entrenched in Western culture.

The digital age is about getting what we want, when we want, how we want, and as much (or as little) as we want.

A survey in 2015 found that 91 percent of adults in the United States agreed that the best way to find yourself is by looking within yourself. Everything else flows from this conviction. The thinking ...

The difference between collectivist and individualist cultures is not a surface value, such as “some people eat more rice than we do.” Individualism and collectivism describe two very different ways p...

Because American evangelicalism tends to reduce everything to a personal application, we limit the way we engage with the culture around us.

The problem is not recognizing the importance of the individual. The problem is the glorification of the individual. When the individual self is glorified over the greater good of the community, right...

Cultural transformation in a church or organization must go beyond interpersonal models of changing “one person at a time,” which dominates Western evangelical thinking. The goals of reconciliation ne...

We individualists generally belong to what anthropologists term low-context cultures. That means that when we communicate, we assume a low level of shared information. We therefore assume it is good c...

Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede measured individualism and collectivism across people from fifty-three nations. He found the three most individualistic nations in the world were the United St...

I am among those who do not believe that “the percentage of people who have anxiety has always held pretty constant; rather, it’s just that today we’re more open to speaking about it.” No, I am convin...

In the twenty-seven years since the killing of President Kennedy, there has been a good deal of disturbance in the American dream. The cult of individualism, of a man's (not so often a woman's...

In this past century, Christians have all but ignored biblical teaching on the corporate nature of following Christ. Our churches anew awash in self-centered narcissism, hyper-individualism… Jesus nev...

Our modern theology, which in many ways has ceased to be personal, i.e. centered on the Christian experience of "person," nevertheless - and maybe as a result of this - has become utterly in...

Far too many people, especially within evangelicalism, think that the individual is all that matters, and that the corporate dimension is a distraction or diversion. Of course Christianity is deeply p...

We have been so soaked in the individualism of modern Western culture that we feel threatened by the idea of our primary identity being that of the family we belong to-especially when the family in qu...

Almost every African Bantu dialect includes the saying, “I am because we are,” which is captured by the term Ubuntu. The word literally means “human-ness” and roughly translates to “human kindness.” T...

Individualism has never been tried.

Today friendship has fallen on hard times. Few men have good friends, much less deep friendships. Individualism, autonomy, privatization, and isolation are culturally cachet, but deep, devoted, vulner...

Because of the bankruptcy of the older individualism, those who are aware of the break-down often speak and argue as if individualism were itself done and over with. I do not suppose that those who re...

When we turn the Bible into an adjective and stick it in front of another loaded work (like manhood, womanhood, politics, economics, marriage, and even equality), we tend to ignore or downplay the par...

Everybody is somebody, but nobody wants to be themselves.

Individualism at first dries up only the source of public virtues, but, in the long run, it attacks and destroys all the others and is finally absorbed into egoism.

It is tragic how few people ever ‘possess their souls’ before they die. ‘Nothing is more rare in any man,’ says Emerson, ‘than an act of his own.’ It is quite true. Most people are other people.

Brian (Graham Chapman) and cast Brian: “Look, you’ve got it all wrong. You don’t need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anybody. You’ve got to think for yourselves. You’re all individuals.” Crowd...

The people I know who are the most concerned about their individuality, who probe constantly into motives, who are always turned inwards toward their own reactions, usually become less and less indivi...

80 percent of Americans agree with the statement “an individual should arrive at his or her own religious beliefs independent of any church or synagogue.”

Tradition is a willingness to read Scripture, taking into account the ways in which it has been read in the past. It is an awareness of the communal dimension of Christian faith, which calls shallow i...

I often found myself preferring the company of people outside my congregation, men and women who did not follow Jesus. Or worse, preferring the company of my sovereign self. But soon I found that my p...

[In expressive individualism] each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized.