He Who Behaves as if He Has No Family

On individualism, the responsibilities we owe one another, and what happens when a civilization forgets God.

I began my professional career working in counseling, specifically with offenders, some of whom had committed terrible crimes. It was work that exposed me to a great deal of human suffering, but also to people, cultures, and ways of understanding the world that were quite different from my own.

Among the people I encountered were members of various Native American and First Nations communities. I remember one particular teaching I encountered during that time. I was told that in the Navajo language, the word for a criminal translates roughly as "he who behaves as if he has no family."

I've never forgotten that.

Rather than defining a criminal simply by the act he commits or the law he breaks, this understanding describes something about the way he sees himself in relation to the world.

He behaves as if he has no family. As if his choices belong to him alone, and the consequences are his alone to bear.

Of course, we know that isn't true.

Our choices affect other people. Sometimes they affect them profoundly. The things we do, the things we neglect to do, and the ways we treat others ripple outward into the lives of our families, our communities, and people we'll never meet.

What struck me about this teaching was its deeper understanding of what it means to be a person. We don't exist in isolation. We are connected to the people around us and indebted, in various ways, to those who came before us. We inherit a world we didn't create, a culture we didn't invent, and responsibilities that don't disappear simply because we would prefer not to acknowledge them.

Our lives are not entirely our own. And yet, we've increasingly come to behave as if they are.

A Society of People Without Families

One of the defining characteristics of modern American life is a kind of hyper-individualism. We've become remarkably good at thinking about what we want, what we deserve, and what makes us happy. We've become much less comfortable talking about what we owe one another.

The underlying assumption seems to be that if something is personally gratifying, and if it doesn't violate some clearly defined boundary of individual rights, then it must be acceptable.

My happiness is my business. My choices are my business. My truth is my truth. Who are you to tell me otherwise?

There is, of course, something valuable in individual freedom and dignity. But freedom without responsibility is something else entirely.

When we begin to think of ourselves primarily as individuals whose choices belong only to us, we lose sight of the relationships and obligations that give those choices their meaning.

We start to treat other people as supporting characters in the story of our own lives rather than as people to whom we owe something.

Families weaken when personal gratification consistently takes precedence over the sacrifices required to sustain them. Communities weaken when service becomes an optional burden rather than a responsibility. Institutions lose trust when people treat them as instruments of personal advancement.

We want the benefits of belonging without the responsibilities of membership. And that is a recipe for social disintegration.

He Who Behaves as if He Has No God

There's an even deeper problem here.

What if the issue isn't simply that we've come to behave as if we have no family? What if we've also come to behave as if we have no God?

For Christians, sin is not merely the violation of a rule or the commission of a forbidden act. At its heart, sin involves a rupture in our relationships: with God, with one another, and even with ourselves. It is, among other things, the decision to turn inward, to make ourselves the center of our own moral universe, and to reject the obligations that come with being creatures rather than the creators of our own reality.

In that sense, perhaps we might think of sin as behaving as if we have no God.

I'm not suggesting that people who don't share my faith are incapable of living virtuous lives. Clearly, people of many different beliefs demonstrate extraordinary generosity, courage, and concern for others. Rather, I'm asking what happens to a civilization when it loses its shared understanding of a reality beyond the individual, a reality that places demands on us regardless of our preferences.

Christianity offers an answer that goes beyond social convention or the practical advantages of cooperation.

We are created by God, made in His image, and called into relationship with Him and with one another. Our lives have meaning beyond the satisfaction of our own desires. We have responsibilities that we don't get to invent or discard according to our preferences. And those responsibilities are not restrictions on our freedom. They are what make freedom meaningful.

To love someone is to recognize that their good matters, even when pursuing it requires sacrifice. To be faithful is to honor commitments when doing so is difficult. To act justly is to recognize that what is right doesn't change simply because doing the wrong thing would benefit us.

These aren't merely useful habits for maintaining a stable society. For Christians, they are expressions of a life properly ordered toward God and neighbor.

Reaping the Fruits Without the Roots

This brings me to a concern I've had for some time about Western civilization, and American society in particular.

The core what we value most about our civilization has been shaped by a Christian understanding of the human person and our obligations to one another. Our language of human dignity, our concern for the vulnerable, and our insistence that even the powerful are accountable to a moral order beyond themselves are all derived from Christian moral teaching. The concepts were simply simply co-opted and secularized during the so-called "enlightenment" and modern eras.

Of course, Western civilization has many sources, and its history is complicated. Christians themselves have often failed, sometimes terribly, to live up to the principles they profess. We shouldn't over-romanticize the past. But it would be a mistake to overlook the centrality of Christianity to the world we inhabit.

My concern is that we increasingly want to retain the fruits of that tradition while abandoning the roots that helped sustain them. The fruit will not continue without the root.

We want compassion, but we're less certain about the obligations that call us to sacrifice for others. We want justice, but we struggle to agree on a standard that exists independently of our competing interests. We want strong families and healthy communities, but we're increasingly reluctant to accept the duties and constraints that make those things possible.

We want people to be generous, faithful, honest, and self-sacrificing. But we also want to insist that each individual is the ultimate authority over what is good, what is true, and what is right for them. Can those two visions coexist indefinitely? I'm not convinced they can.

A civilization can live for a long time on the moral inheritance of earlier generations. The habits and institutions that sustain a society don't disappear overnight simply because people begin to question the beliefs that gave rise to them. We continue to benefit from the sacrifices of people who came before us, often long after we've forgotten why they made those sacrifices in the first place.

But inheritances can be squandered.

If we no longer believe that we owe something to those who came before us, to those who share the world with us, or to those who will come after us, eventually our behavior will reflect that belief. We will consume what others have built without accepting responsibility for maintaining it. We will demand benefits without assuming obligations.

And we may not recognize what we've lost until the institutions and relationships that once sustained us become much more difficult to repair.

Remembering Who We Are

I keep coming back to that teaching I encountered early in my professional life. He who behaves as if he has no family.

It reminds us that our choices are never entirely private, that our actions have consequences beyond ourselves, and that our obligations don't disappear when we choose to ignore them.

But perhaps the deeper challenge is to remember that we are not merely individuals with families, communities, and obligations. We are creatures who belong to a world we did not create and whose meaning we do not determine entirely for ourselves.

For Christians, that means remembering that we belong to God. It means recognizing that our lives are gifts, our freedom comes with responsibilities, and our vocation is not simply to pursue our own happiness but to love God and serve our neighbors. The demands of love, justice, and sacrifice are not arbitrary impositions on our lives. They are part of the purpose for which we were made.

And it means asking ourselves some uncomfortable questions.

When I make a decision, do I consider the people who will bear its consequences? Am I willing to sacrifice some of what I want for the sake of something greater than myself? Do I live as though my life belongs to me alone, or do I recognize that I am accountable to Someone beyond myself?

We cannot build healthy communities if we insist that we owe nothing to one another. And we cannot sustain a civilization indefinitely if we forget the moral foundations that helped make it possible.

Perhaps the first step is simply to remember that we are not alone, that we are not entirely self-made, and that we have inherited responsibilities along with our freedoms.

We have a family.

We have neighbors.

We have ancestors whose sacrifices helped make our lives possible, and descendants who will live with the consequences of our choices.

And, we have a God to whom we are accountable.