We Need Post-Church Spaces, Part 6: Personal Growth Is More Important Than Ever
“A metaphor for personal growth,” generated with Stable Diffusion 1.0
A quick recap of where we’ve been in this series of posts: I’ve laid out an argument that we modern humans (which I refer to as WEIRD—Westernized, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) have lost spaces in our lives for deep, rich community and regular moments of transcendence that support community. As humans, we need these types of community and transcendence, and their loss has come with steep costs. But we also have a third need, that has only arisen in the modern age: personal growth.
We modern WEIRDos need spaces in our lives that can give us all three of these—community, transcendence, and growth—but without the baggage of OLD, pre-modern religion. I’m laying out an argument for building post-church spaces. Currently, I’m in the part of the argument where I’m describing our unmet needs for community, transcendence, and personal growth.
In the last two posts, I wrote about the modern loss of community and transcendence, and in this post I’m going to write about the modern need for personal growth. What I’m calling personal growth breaks out into two different processes: psychological development (i.e., seeing the world in ever more accurate and nuanced ways), and emotional healing (i.e., seeing oneself in ever more accurate and nuanced ways). Psychological development encompasses activities like advanced education, self-development trainings, and life-long learning. And emotional healing encompasses activities like therapy, retreats, and certain spiritual practices.
I’m going to argue that the need for personal growth is new in modernity; for the vast majority of human history we only needed to psychologically and emotionally develop to a stage where we’re able to blend with our tribe (what we now achieve in adolescence). But with the rise of modern WEIRD life, we are now forced into more advanced levels of personal growth. And if we reject this modern demand for growth, then we’ll be left behind in nearly every way imaginable: career stagnation, dysfunctional relationships, isolation, depression and anxiety, and a sense of confusion and despair toward modern changes.
So, yeah, personal growth is really fucking important. And we need post-church institutions that can support it.
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For 99.9% of the last 250,000 years—as long as Homo sapiens have been on this planet—adult personal growth only needed to reach a stage where we had the capacity to bind together into tight-knit social groups, follow and enforce social norms, and commit our lives to the good of others in our group. The psychologist Robert Kegan calls this stage of growth “Social Mind,” but I think “Tribe” more completely captures this stage. Our ancestors achieved the Tribe level of personal development with flying colors. If they hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here.
Stage 1 of adult personal development: Tribe
What’s important to note is that they did not need to psychologically and emotionally develop any further than this. They didn’t need to discover themselves, construct an authentic self-identity, heal emotional wounds, or self-actualize because nothing in their physical or social environment demanded it. They lived only around people who looked like them and believed the same things as they did. As long as OLD-world humans had rituals and myths that tied them to a community and produced a sense of transcendence, they were all good. In other words, for 99.99% of human history, we had no need for growing beyond the level of Tribe.
Things change, however, when the WEIRD modern world starts to spread. Nearly every force of modernity disrupts the OLD world community by forcing people into bureaucratic institutions and transactional relationships: early in their lives with schools and universities, and later with corporations and governmental and legal institutions. These institutions force us to interact not through family and personal ties nor religious and social norms but through anonymous, contractual rules AND with a wide diversity of people with different worldviews. It is no longer enough to achieve the developmental stage of binding together in tight-knit communities. Modern adults need to grow beyond this into a stage where they can follow and enforce anonymous, bureaucratic rules in diverse contexts, regulate their mental and emotional states on their own, and commit to their own well-being.
This is what it means to “grow up” in the WEIRD modern world. We also have a new word for it: “Adulting.”
Stage 2 of adult personal development: Adulting
This is not the final stage of adult development, as we’ll see, but it’s necessary and important. However, there are some obvious problems with the modern “Adulting” stage in personal growth.
First, it’s disconnected from community and transcendence. How many movies have been made about the teen to 20-something confusion and dissatisfaction with growing up? Following and enforcing bureaucratic rules, regulating ourselves, and committing to our well-being lacks a certain appeal (or we could just say adulting is boring). It’s disconnected from the family and friend community we grew up with but doesn’t re-connect us to a new and nourishing community outside of the nuclear family. And it lacks any practices or even acknowledgement of transcendence (i.e., that there could even be anything more than this modern, capitalist, bureaucratic system).
Nevertheless, if you choose not to go through this stage of growth (i.e., “adulting”), you’re in trouble. You will not be able to find stable ways to make money, get a partner and build a family, and achieve some material and emotional security in the modern world. So, as much as it sucks, this adulting stage of growth is not optional in the modern world. But very few WIERDos know that there is a personal growth stage beyond adulting, where community and transcendence come back in, but in deeper, more authentic, and dynamic ways. But that’s the subject of a future installment.
The second problem with the adulting stage of personal growth is that we don’t have effective institutions dedicated to helping us move in and through this stage. Schools and universities, therapists, and self-development retreats do this in varying degrees. But they all do it in fragmented and partial ways. Schools and universities help us move into adulting but cannot help us move beyond it. They give us technical knowledge to participate in the post-industrial economy, but more importantly, they expose us to a diversity in worldviews. I think it’s this latter function that is most important for adulting because it encourages us to leave our childhood religion, politics, and social norms and begin the difficult journey of building an identity of our own.
Psychotherapy and self-development retreats help with adulting by giving us containers and tools by which we can examine and heal childhood and adolescent emotional wounds. This is perhaps the most important part of adulting because without it, our thoughts and actions are driven by young, wounded parts inside. As Carl Jung wrote, “Until we make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Unacknowledged and unsealed, these wounds end up sabotaging our careers, relationships, and mental health.
But therapy lacks community and transcendence, and it often doesn’t have a framework for personal growth beyond healing old wounds. This is certainly not a knock on therapy! It’s a necessary part of adulting in the WEIRD world. I’m just saying that it needs to be woven into practices that build deep community, support transcendence, and point us to personal growth beyond healing.
Self-development retreats fall into this same category but are more of a mixed bag than therapy. Quality control is a huge issue, but even the best ones leave their attendees adrift after they return to their regular lives. I attended an AMAZING 5-day retreat in Sedona last October in which I had several important growth experiences (one which included spiritually grieving my grandfather’s death and walking him out of the bardo realm and onto the other side). And I had a glow that lasted at least a month after I returned home. I’m still in touch with several other attendees, and they had similar experiences. But now we’re all back in our everyday lives, wondering how to integrate these experiences into modern, WEIRD life.
And this is the best case scenario for retreats. There are many varieties of bad cases, like my friend who went on a retreat where the leader ended up being an abusive narcissist, or those retreats that are just step one into a cult.
Finally, the Adulting stage of personal growth doesn’t point beyond itself to the next stage of personal growth. Let’s say you’re one of the lucky ones. You made your way through university, found the right career for you, got the life partner and 2.5 kids, and even got into therapy and healed some big childhood wounds. Life’s perfect, right? Except that there’s a nagging feeling that there has to be more. You hear an inner calling to do more with your lucky draw in life, the kids eventually go away to college, and then what? The only thing the adulting stage can tell us about what comes next is that the adulting stage is not the final step. The identity we built in the Adulting stage is not solid; the social, political and philosophical worldviews we built up are not sufficient and never will be; and focusing only on our own well-being is never going to fulfill us.
These realizations push modern WEIRDos into a stage beyond adulting that I’ll call “Wisdom.”
Stage 3 of adult personal development: Wisdom
Many different thinkers in the last 80 years have started to characterize this stage. Carl Jung wrote about the “synthesis of the Self,” Abraham Maslow wrote about “self-actualization” and “being drives,” the psychologist Robert Kegan wrote about the “self-transforming” stage of adult development, John Vervaeke writes about “relevance realization,” and Ian McGilchrist writes about moving from a reductionist, materialist worldview to one that is holistic and relational. Obviously there are many different ways to think about the Wisdom stage of personal growth, but what these all have in common are
An appreciation for nuance, multiplicity of viewpoints, and relativity
A cosmopolitan concern for all of humanity, and a desire to work on behalf of humanity
A recognition of the interconnectedness of one’s being
An acknowledgement of one’s unique contribution (or calling) to the song of the universe
An openness to a post-religious spirituality
There are exactly zero institutions in modern life that support the move from adulting to wisdom. Those who make this leap seem to be doing so through an ad hoc mixture of personal growth practices and sheer luck. However, most who claim to have made this leap to wisdom seem to me to be still carrying a lot unhealed, emotional wounds from the adolescent “Tribe” and “Adulting” stages of growth.
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To summarize: we need post-church spaces not only to bring rich, nourishing community and deep, profound transcendence into modern WEIRD life, but we also desperately need them to support personal growth. In our WEIRD world, we are all forced to grow beyond Tribe and into Adulting (and then eventually into Wisdom). Some of us make our way through in fits and spurts, and some of us get stuck. But all of of us are making the journey alone.
We need post-church spaces that are built with an awareness of this need for personal growth in the modern world. Growth is not an option. Those who don’t make their way from Tribe to Adulting become angry and suspicious toward modern WEIRD life, and fill the ranks of paranoid, confused political and social movements. Or they just withdraw and lead lives of quiet desperation (as one famous WEIRDo put it). And those who see nothing beyond Adulting can easily succumb to an insular, avoidant materialism in an effort to distract from that nagging calling to keep healing and growing.
In the next installment, I’m going to finally start laying out what a post-church space could look and feel like. I’ll see you next week!