The language is familiar: community, solidarity, inclusion, justice, equity, belonging. All good words, which is what makes them dangerous. A politician must manufacture his moral vocabulary; the church inherits one. And so the collective project can proceed accompanied by bible verses, hymns and clerical advocacy.

            The ecclesiastical collective speaks of “community values,” “shared commitments,” and “our common witness.” The pronoun we has entered the sanctuary.

            And once a man has disappeared into that warm, enveloping syllable, he is spared the embarrassment of asking what he has done, what he believes, or whether he might be wrong. The collective supplies him with a conscience ready-made. One begins to wonder whether God has anything to say or has merely been retained to endorse the minutes of the last church convention.

            The collective offers borrowed righteousness. The Christian no longer needs to ask: What have I done? Whom have I wronged? Where have I lied? What must be forgiven? Such questions leave a person standing before God without a committee.

            How much more comfortable to confess someone else’s sins: those of the nation, the institution, history, the other party, the other church, or people conveniently dead. Corporate confession becomes a hiding place. The sinner enters as a defendant and emerges as a prosecutor.

            The collective church confesses broadly and accuses specifically. Moral seriousness is measured not by honesty, forgiveness, or self-examination, but by correct affiliation. There is no righteousness quite so effortless as the righteousness of the group.

            The church once warned against self-justification. Now it provides workshops.

            This is how the church becomes a collective while continuing to call itself a communion. Communion gathers sinners around a gift they did not create. Collectivism gathers approved people around an identity they must defend.

Communion says, “Christ is for you.”

Collectivism asks, “Are you with us?”

The first gives. The second recruits.

            The collective need not deny Christ. It merely converts him into a symbol of its aspirations: the original activist, revolutionary, advocate, social justice warrior, or spokesman for whatever position the denomination adopted last Tuesday.

            The Jesus who demands love and justice is celebrated. The Jesus who names us all as loveless, unjust sinners is quietly escorted from the building.

            Most chillingly, conformity is enforced in the name of love. Dissent is called unloving, harmful. The dissenter is told that he has excluded himself. And once he has been shown the door, everyone inside congratulates themselves on their loving inclusivity.

            Religious collectivism can make cruelty feel sacramental. A reputation is destroyed and called accountability. The troublesome are expelled and called discernment. Silence is compelled and called unity. Because everyone acts together, no one is responsible. The committee decided. The denomination spoke. The community discerned.

            Neither progressives nor conservatives are immune. The slogans differ, but the temptation is identical: a Christianity in which righteousness consists chiefly in knowing whom to despise.

But the church is not a coalition of the approved. It gathers the righteous and disgraceful, respectable and embarrassing, and informs them that none has entered by merit.

            The collective says your identity saves you. The Gospel says it cannot. The collective tells you to find your people. Christ gives you your neighbor. The collective requires enemies. Christ has the appalling habit of dying for them.

            This is why the collectivized church grows cold toward the Gospel. The Gospel forgives without permission, justifies the ungodly, welcomes the wrong people, and destroys the moral ranking system. It tells the activist he is not the Messiah and the reactionary he is not civilization’s last defender. It leaves everyone with empty hands.

            And empty hands cannot display credentials.

            The church does not need more warmth of this kind. It needs the dangerous freedom of Christ: freedom to speak when the crowd demands silence, to remain silent when it demands a declaration, and to admit that one’s own side is capable of cruelty, vanity, stupidity, and lies.

            The church is not held together by unanimous opinion, shared politics, approved language, or the suspicion that everyone outside it is wicked.

            It is held together by the forgiveness of sins.

            That is a less flattering arrangement, which may explain why so many churches have exchanged it for a cause.

            Beware the church in which every sermon tells you what we must think and do and almost none tells you what Christ has done for you.

            The church began with a man crucified for sinners beyond the city walls.

Whenever the crowd grows pleased with its collective righteousness, it should remember that the crucifixion was one of its collective achievements.