Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, September 4, 2022
I’ve yet to talk to a Christian who doesn’t think community is inherently good for us. We’re meant to be a people. The local church is supposed to be the household of faith—something different to our modern concept of family but in the same broad arena—where everyone fits and is loved and is able to develop deep and abiding relationships with others. We can still do that, but if because never seen it modelled, we find it hard and sometimes oddly unnatural. I write not with solutions but to highlight a problem. I’ve never met a church that doesn’t talk a good talk about community, whatever language they choose to use. I’ve met plenty of churches full of people who find that community difficult to access. Modern life makes it hard for us.

Everybody loves community, or they say they do at least. We live in a land that is parched of the life-giving water of friendship and stripped bare of many of the settings that used to make this easy for people.
Robert Nisbet in his book The Quest for Community argues that what he calls a strong associational life that would have been found in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the home, the village, and the church has been slowly replaced by a weak associational life. His examples for weaker associations are the union, the workplace, the political party, and the state.
To put it in language we’re familiar with, the settings that used to provide the ability for community to grow have changed and morphed over time, but these newer settings provide a thinner context for bonds between people to grow.
Or think of this way, where do people make their friends? Compared with a century or two ago the settings we have for making friendships that are strong and lasting are not as good at that as they used to be.
He was writing in 1952. Unions and political parties do not have the strength that they used to, and our connections to the state have weakened in the last fifty years. Bonds formed in the workplace are probably still as strong, or at least they were pre-pandemic. The rise of remote-working, which is here to stay at least short-term, also reduces the way the workplace can form these associational bonds.
The western workplace, especially for so-called knowledge-workers in office jobs who make up around a third of the workforce in WEIRD nations, is ephemeral. We do stuff on computers that has weak connections to physical things. I’m not sure that’s bad in and of itself, but it does tell us a story about ourselves—that everything is ephemeral, if you’ll forgive me to quote Marx out of context, that everything that is solid melts into air—which I think makes physical community more difficult. Even the way that the annual appraisal process in so many workplaces suggests that only this year matters truncates our view of reality—we then treat our relationships the same way.
Perhaps if he was writing now, Nisbet might include the Facebook page, the Discord server, and the MMO. Which, because they’re disembodied, are forms of ‘weak associational life.’
I think this sort of thing should concern the church. Not least because it sounds remarkably like C. S. Lewis’ vision of Hell in The Great Divorce where everyone is constantly drifting apart over the millennia.
It’s not good for us as a society, for all we don’t need to go backwards, we will need to strengthen community settings if we want our communities to flourish.
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Meta and Mark Zuckerberg wish to make money. They will addict your children in order to do so. The next time you see your child slap on a VR headset, find out if they are entering the metaverse. You have a responsibility as a parent to know. If you are an adult emersed in the metaverse, you are an addict and don’t even know it. 

Facebook announced a name change for its company this week. Meta is its new name.
You probably have little idea of the significance of the name change. I believe Meta has the capability of destroying the discipline, drive, and determination in future generations of Americans.
Have you heard of the Greatest Generation? These were American men and women who sacrificed everything during World War II to protect our land, our liberty, and the American way of life.
Meta could be the seedbed that destroys what the Greatest Generation obtained.
Meta is a Greek word that means “higher,” or “beyond,” or “behind.” It is carried over into English to refer to an alternate reality to something concrete. Meta (Facebook) is wanting to help you create an alternate life (e.g. “second life”) through virtual reality that takes you “beyond” the real-life that you are living on earth.
Meta is a drug. It is a form of escape. It is a game.
But don’t tell people involved in Meta that it is a game. It will anger them. Just like when you tell a person hooked on heroin that they’re addicted. “What do you know? Nothing that feels this good and is as beautiful as what I have experienced can be bad for me.” 
Oh, yes it can.
Here’s how Meta works. Meta (Facebook) will soon be opening storefronts around the world to sell you next-generation virtual reality glasses called Oculus. Slap those glasses on, integrate with the digital world, and soon, you will be living a Second Life, an alternate reality.
In this virtual world that exists in your mind, you will interact with other people who enter your Second Life by asking you (audibly through Oculus) if they can join you in your virtual house, your virtual business, your virtual lakefront home, your virtual gym, your virtual vacation, etc. You live the life that you want to live but can’t live in the real universe.
That’s right.
It’s the metauniverse. You are in control of parallel universes that you digitally create to escape the reality of the one real universe in which you live. You become your own god. You ignore the real God. You go beyond the real truth to create your own version of the truth. You go beyond reality to escape the harsh world in which you really live – and which the one true God can help you thrive, not just survive.
But why bother with the real world?
In the digital metauniverse of Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, people can hide behind an Avatar (a character) that they create in the metauniverse. The Avatar represents them in their alternate reality.
Here’s how it works.
You upload an image of your face (or someone else’s face) after digitally manipulating it to remove those characteristics you don’t like.
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However, if they put their case in such clear terms, it couldn’t do the other thing that such assurances are designed to do: to ease the consciences of the chosen members of the NP that they are not doing anything wrong. As a result, the NP emails almost all sound like this: the PCA is wonderful, and everyone is wonderful, and we are the most wonderful, and our cause is worthy of tireless and sacrificial advocacy.

As I read the now public emails of the secret society called the National Partnership (NP), I was not at all perturbed by their occasional willingness to speak ill of their enemies (people like me). It was obvious from the structure of the group that I stand in the way of what they view as a healthy Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). That they would call me “unhealthy” or “dry bones” makes perfect sense. In fact, I would be disappointed if they didn’t say it because it’s clear enough that we are on entirely different teams, perhaps down to the very bottom of our souls.
What first bothered me about the emails was the sheer number of times that one of the NP leaders reminded his colleagues that what they are doing was not wrong. I thought about it like this: If I told my elders at every meeting that we were not doing anything wrong, could they be faulted if they concluded that I was giving them such assurances because things were really not as rosy as I was proclaiming? It may be that NP members are weighed down with guilty consciences if the leaders must assure the members frequently that their cause is noble.
What also troubled me is that men listed in this group were their repeated accusations of others breaking the ninth commandment. I have heard it from so many and in such varying circumstances that I have wondered why they talk about it as often as they do. For example, a minister with stature in my presbytery, who apparently is some kind of minor director within the NP, has personally threatened me and my session that we would be breaking the ninth commandment if we were to say something is a sin which our confessional documents bluntly call a sin, namely, attempted suicide (cf. WLC 136).
The reason I find their appeals to the ninth commandment so troubling is because their involvement in a secret society designed for the purpose of consolidating political gains is itself one of the most obvious breaches possible of this commandment.
The first thing WLC 144 says is this:
“The duties required in the ninth commandment are, the preserving and promoting of truth between man and man, and the good name of our neighbour, as well as our own; appearing and standing for the truth; and from the heart, sincerely, freely, clearly, and fully, speaking the truth, and only the truth, in matters of judgment and justice, and in all other things whatsoever…”
In other words, what God requires of us most of all in the ninth commandment is truthfulness. A truthful representation of neighbors, ourselves, and in all other things whatsoever.
However, the first requirement of membership in a secret society is that members misrepresent themselves to others. Recall the first rule of Fight Club: Don’t talk about fight club. Other people are not allowed to find out who we are or what we are up to. That is the essence of a secret society, and it is why those who desire to keep the ninth commandment do not join secret societies.
NP members must misrepresent themselves to those outside of their society, because they know that Presbyterians believe that secret societies are impermissible in a denomination that depends upon open discussion and debate in order to promote the general welfare of the church and its mission.
The second requirement of a secret society is that members misrepresent themselves to each other. If they see themselves correctly, then they will realize that what they are doing is wrong on its face and their consciences will suffer dearly for it. Therefore, secret societies wind up misrepresenting themselves to themselves.
It’s striking how often in the emails the NP leaders reassure the members that they are in the majority, and that they are fighting for a grand future which they alone can bring to fruition. We read for example, “If we are clear in advocating for greater health in the Presbyterian Church in America, we will all be part of a more beautiful, more orthodox denomination for Kingdom work around the world. But as always, it will require dedicated and sacrificial efforts” (p. 288).
On the face of it, such sentiments sound noble and virtuous. But only until we realize what it implies about those who are outside the inner circle. It means that those outside the circle are the enemies of beauty and orthodoxy, and the secret members must work tirelessly to defeat them.
However, if they put their case in such clear terms, it couldn’t do the other thing that such assurances are designed to do: to ease the consciences of the chosen members of the NP that they are not doing anything wrong. As a result, the NP emails almost all sound like this: the PCA is wonderful, and everyone is wonderful, and we are the most wonderful, and our cause is worthy of tireless and sacrificial advocacy.
Someday in the not-too-distant future, when the PCA has been splintered, everyone will know that it was the NP who charted the course. The NP will secretly applaud themselves when they are victorious, meanwhile reassuring the losing party that they had no idea that becoming “more orthodox” would make anyone want to leave the denomination. But they will seethe if they are the ones who are cast out.
The members of this secret society clearly perceive that another public group, the Gospel Reformation Network (GRN), is their rival for the future of the PCA (p. 347). However, their leader goes to great lengths to remind the members of the NP that they are not in fact rival political parties, but merely groups that are always opposite sides of the direction of the PCA and the issues related to it.
What is a rival political party if not a group that all of the members of your secret society are always to oppose in votes, committees, etc.? So we find that the destruction of the ninth commandment runs very deep in the National Partnership. Deception to others, bolstered by willful self-deception.
These emails are in fact a study in self and group deception. I accept that everyone who is or has ever been a part of this group are within the fold of Jesus Christ and committed Christians. However, it is striking to see the ways in which their leaders and members gather together to salve each other’s consciences, to the point where they apparently believe that the ninth commandment only forbids speaking poorly about people who are not in their non-secret society.
If you say it within the confines of an exclusive group, whose members are all known to one another, who all imbibe adult beverages too much at General Assembly, and laugh about the “idiot” conservatives, then it’s just words between friends, as Pastor Cassidy so kindly reminded us. On further reflection, I do recall having been to one NP fellowship gathering; I did not find it especially beautiful, orthodox, or sober. And we are to remember that we are not supposed to think critically of the several hundred PCA/NP members who believe that the rest of us are merely “dry bones.”
Mike Littell is a Minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is Pastor of South Dayton PCA in Centerville, Ohio.