How do we define who and what constitutes our community?
In a curious fluke of my upbringing, my “community” was, for many years, my immediate family: my mother, my father, my younger brother. My parents, who had children later in life, had few friends with children of comparable ages. And because they had waited so long to become parents, they were vigilant about those with whom my brother and I socialized. They were wary of external influences on the family.
I made friends easily during my three years at a small private grade school, but that period turned out to be something of an interregnum. From the third grade onward, I was homeschooled. My brother eventually joined me.
My father was given the impossible task of teaching me math and, later, algebra; my mother gamely handled everything else, including English, history, Greek mythology, and other stimulating subjects. In the 1990s, homeschooling was such a novelty that I became accustomed to not correcting nosey adults when they assumed that I went to a regular school—a sin of omission for which I am sorry. More distressingly, I lied when asked by authority figures—say, the dentist—whether I was making friends at “school.” My father counseled me to respond to such inquiries forthrightly: “I do not have any friends my own age, nor do I want any,” he told me to say. But, with his firm tone and emphatic manner, my father could deliver such lines far better than I ever could.
Don’t misunderstand me: I relished this arrangement because my parents were such smart, funny, caring, and indulgent people. I would have rather been with them than anyone else. I went to the office with my father; I went to the movies with my mother. Who but my father would have humored my literary ambitions so eagerly? Who but my mother would pepper conversations with quotes from old movies that we both knew by heart?
Consequently, I grew up without a strong sense of having any identity but my parents’ son. I did not attend a school from which I would acquire “school spirit,” and I did not have enough same-aged friends or contemporaries from whom I would pick up passing enthusiasms for rock stars or sports heroes. In many ways, my upbringing turned me into a strong critical thinker. I did not carry with me the pieties, platitudes, and prejudices of many of my generation. When, decades later, it emerged as a cultural force, I was not susceptible to wokeism.
Yet I have found that the pull of community is greater than I would have ever guessed as a teenager. One needs to belong to more than one’s family. After all, one’s parents eventually recede from the scene; one cannot spend one’s entire life echoing their views, opinions, and habits of mind—although one should always honor those things.
Even so, throughout my young adulthood, I found myself latching onto the sort of ersatz communities that I had once spurned. There was the community of my chosen profession of journalism. I loved interacting with my fellow ink-stained wretches, whether they were across town or across the country: grizzled, no-nonsense editors who thought nothing of pulling me into an assignment on a day’s notice or emailing me an edit of a story at 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning, as did my favorite editor at National Review, the late Mike Potemra. In my twenties and early thirties, I identified profoundly with the cynical, sarcastic, sensible ethos of the veteran practitioners of my trade.
As the years marched on, my yearning for community intensified, but my definition of it became looser and broader. Could a community somehow revolve around one’s favorite books and movies? I thought so. I sought out quasi-friendships with the clerks at, or proprietors of, my favorite bookshops, who came to know my literary tastes and, thus, me. By the same token, I always considered shared taste in movies to be a strong starting point for any potential friendship; even if someone had nothing else in common with me, if they shared my excitement over the dramatic camerawork in the melodramas of Douglas Sirk or the austere elegance in the Westerns of Budd Boetticher, I imagined they somehow saw the world as I did. I once attended a classic film convention, whose participants attempted to wring community out of a shared interest in obscure black-and-white movies from the 1930s and ’40s.
Looking back on it now, this all strikes me as desperately sad—a pitiful substitution of mere enthusiasms for real fellowship. It is all well and good to share interests with likeminded people, but I recognized that I was identifying with increasingly obscure, specialized, and, above all, superficial groups. Readers of literary fiction? Fans of old movies? Please. Was I so different than sports nuts who imagine they have deep kinship with other sports nuts because they each wear the same jerseys or hats?
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It was not until late in my fortieth year, with my parents both gone and my attempts to bind myself to my profession or my interests having left me unfulfilled, that I first perceived myself as being part of an authentic community. That year, having become a confessional Lutheran in the wake of my mother’s death, I received the Sacrament of the Altar for the first time. At the Lord’s Table, I found myself tethered to a community defined by faith—the sort of community that I had been seeking for so long. My parents, with their good but naïve intentions, supposed that they could provide everything for their sons. But they could never provide what is offered in the Lord’s Supper: the forgiveness of sins received by brothers and sisters in Christ. At last, at the altar, I had genuine fellowship with my fellow inhabitants of our fallen world.
The extreme fractionalization in modern American society has many sources, but from where I sit, chief among them is the pull of false community in the absence of real community. We are born wanting to locate common points with each other, but without the true common point of faith, we are left with mere imitations. Membership in a political party (even one sympathetic to MAGA), participation in a protest, intense identification among those with a health issue with other people suffering from the same affliction, obsessive devotion to a particular cause, like climate change—these things are all as appealing, but finally as empty, as attempting to build a network of friends through a mutual love of books or movies.
On this Easter, at last, I am part of a community.
