Kierkegaard on Modernity [Christianity]
2 min read
Churches and secular culture may look like opposites, yet both often offer ready-made identities that spare people the frightening, personal question of who they are and what they live for.
In his Denmark, almost everyone was born into the Lutheran state church, and he attacked this “Christendom” for making faith as automatic as nationality. Today the remnants still exist…Scandinavian churches count citizens as members only by baptism, while few attend or have devotion, or look at many non denominational ‘consumer churches’ that sell faith as a route to success. In each case, Christianity is an identity, something you belong to rather than something you risk your life on. This is only increasing, as many younger people are turning to faith for asthetic or cultural driven reasons.
The crowd is of course the untruth, because no one has to take responsibility for what they think. Kierkegaard would view social media as taking this to an extreme. The anonymity in particular is the purest untruth yet invented, for a man may judge everything while answering for nothing, and so he never has to become anyone at all.
The age has given you infinite choices so that you need not make a single choice that costs anything. Yet a day will come when you stand alone, unfollowed, untribed, unplugged, and the silence will ask were you ever truly you?
What The Sickness Unto Death calls the worst despair, the kind that does not know it is despair. Endless choice and constant busyness keep people outwardly content but inwardly empty. Look no further than rising anxiety and loneliness in wealthy societies suggests that comfort has not cured the sickness.
Kierkegaard’s remedy is to stand honestly before God. What might that mean - practically speaking? Stepping out of borrowed roles and asking who you are without them, perhaps admitting the restlessness under the busyness instead of numbing it. Definitely seeking silence away from screens and praying with your real doubts rather than polished words. Above all, living as someone ‘completely seen’.
For believer and skeptic alike, his warning stands: an age can have every comfort and still be full of people who have never become themselves.
JC