Social Holiness as Love of Neighbor: Why Social Holiness?

Why Social Holiness?: Maintaining an awareness of who we are and what we do is as integral to loving our neighbor as the actual actions toward our neighbor that demonstrate our love. Christian Smith is a world recognized scholar in the field of sociology, including the sociology of religion. He is presently teaching at Notre Dame, and in the interest of full disclosure is a Gordon College graduate. One of his books is entitled American Evangelicalism Embattled and Thriving, but in spite of that title there are principles that he discovered in this definitive work that are important to the wider Church. I will dwell on only one here. Christian Smith states that:




We might hypothesize that religious groups that are more capable of constructing distinct identity boundaries vis-à-vis outgroups will produce more satisfying morally orienting collective identities and will, as a consequence, grow in size and strength. By contrast, religious groups that have difficulty constructing identity distinctions in a pluralistic environment will grow relatively weaker.10




Simply put, this is not the time to discard our identity boundaries for the sake of being relative to our age—in the pluralistic age in which we live what the culture deems appropriate is always a moving target. But for the sake of love of our neighbor, and therefore for the sake of fulfilling the commandment, this is the time to affirm our identity. Christian Smith has demonstrated that affirming our identity will therefore produce a “more satisfying morally orienting collective identity”—in our case an identity that wants to love our neighbor. Likewise, I am prepared to demonstrate that we grew in size and strength for one reason because we constructed an identity that was quite distinct from the broader culture. Likewise, an inability to construct or maintain such an identity will result in a weakened identity and therefore a weakened ability to carry out the mission.