when words lose their meaning* (6)

Christians love the word “community” and we like to use it liberally in our conversations, our blog entries and our prayers. There’s just something about the phrase “building community” that seems to justify any activity or desire.

It’s not just Christians who are fond of the word. Nonprofit mission statements often reference “serving the community”. We talk of the artistic community, the anarchist community, the gay community etc… The Internet has further nurtured the growth of various communities. For instance, sites like ravelry.com, craftster.org and personal blogs have contributed to a vibrant knitting and crafting community.

But what do we really mean when we say we build community or that we are part of a community? What is the nature of this community that we refer to? What exactly is our commitment to it? Is it just a group of people who share conveniently common interests, tastes and perhaps even religious beliefs? Or is it, or should it be, something more interdependent and inclusive?

Whereas a community attempts to be an inclusive whole, celebrating the interdependence of public and private life and of the different callings of all, lifestyle is fundamentally segmental and celebrates the narcissism of similarity. It usually explicitly involves a contrast with others who “ do not share one’s lifestyle.” For this reason, we speak not of lifestyle communities, though they are often called such in a contemporary usage, but of lifestyle enclaves. Such enclaves are segmental in two senses. They involve only a segment of each individual, for they concern only private life, especially leisure and consumption. And they are segmental socially in that they include only those with a common lifestyle. The different, those with other lifestyles, are not necessarily despised. They may be willingly tolerated. But they are irrelevant or even invisible in terms of one’s own lifestyle enclave.

Even those of us who are trying to create true community inevitably find ourselves in a lifestyle enclave:

(Wayne) sees his life as that of a full-time activist contributing to the community by organizing its members in efforts to create a more equal and just society…. It does not denigrate Wayne’s aspirations to point out that Santa Monica (where he lives) is a very special kind of place with a very high concentration of people like Wayne. Even more to the point is that Campaign for Economic Democracy activists share a lifestyle, even down to similar tastes in music, wine and food. Thus even those who would most like to think of our society in organic communitarian forms cannot avoid the lifestyle enclave as the effective social expression of our personal lives.

We say we go to a certain church because we enjoy its diversity. But when we embark on our church-shopping, we’re most likely intent on finding a church where there are like-minded people who we would enjoy spending time with.

To be fair, "most groups in America today embody an element of community as well as an element of lifestyle enclave". But it bears asking whether the activities we conceive of as “community-building” are more about lifestyle and preference than interdependence and commitment.


*Despite caring deeply about what words mean, I seem to use the wrong words ALL THE TIME. For instance, a few entries ago, I initially used the word "mulch" instead of "munch". And at home, I always say one noun when I really mean another: I'll say "cup" instead of "plate" or "downstairs" instead of "upstairs". Sigh. I have some bizarre form of verbal dyslexia.
**All italicized sections of the above blog post are from Habits of the Heart, a book that I am enjoying immensely in case you haven't picked that up yet. It might even get 5 stars.