Public missiology and anxious tribalism

It is beginning to appear that modernity and postmodernity have undermined the strength and meaning of a personal identity that participates in and yet is distinct from a universal humanity. Such a shared humanity has been steadily reduced to a barely unique set of biological and social tendencies. The individual, the self, is both accidental and incidental. Trapped between the meaninglessness of the individual biological machine and the fissiparousness of the concept of the human, people are vesting meaning into group identities that promise both endurance and particularity. And just as these groups offer some a more enduring locus for a sense of self, they equally come under threat of dissolution and destruction. We are mercilessly conscious of history, and of all the lost tribes for whom it is the graveyard. The result is a new anxious tribalism. The sense that a tribal identity is crucial for a meaningful life, lived out in the threat of the destruction of the tribe. A public missiology must understand the social and political effects of this emerging anxious tribalism as it enters into a public discourse about the meaning of the gospel in contemporary society.