Faith and the Crowd: Pursuing Christian Vocation in a Mass Society
Adam Stewart
This article originally appeared in the September 2025 issue of FOCUS Magazine.
Practicing the Christian faith in a mass society, which best characterizes our contemporary Canadian context, is categorically different from its practice in early traditional or modern societies. Under mass society’s regime of anonymity, manipulation, and precarity, Christian discipleship must be intentionally re‑formed as a public work of personalist love that converts anonymity into reciprocity, replaces manipulation with communion, and rebuilds durable places and practices out of precarity. In contrast, in traditional society, the faith is primarily received through inherited roles and embodied rituals and in modern society it is primarily chosen through conscience and institutional differentiation. Mass society requires the faith to be performed as resistance to depersonalization, a deliberate enactment of the Christian anthropology that treats each human being as a subsistent individual of a rational nature and therefore an end in and of itself, and never merely as a means.
Place, Mobility, and the Church
In traditional society, the Church’s life is rural and intergenerationally bound to place. Parish rhythms, sacramental calendars, and “cradle‑to‑grave” rites mirror a world where people, objects, places, and information are, figuratively speaking, solid and heavy. Because identity is conferred by heredity and values by family and clan, ecclesial belonging is coterminous with kinship. Christian practice is a communitarian labour of self‑control aimed at stability and solidarity.
In modern society, the Church unfolds in urban contexts amid intergenerationally migratory patterns. People, objects, places, and information become liquid and light. Identity is conferred by voluntary association, values by social class, and belonging is negotiated in a plural market of institutions. Christian practice becomes an individualistic, inner‑directed work of conscience and institutional choice oriented towards liberty and emancipation, often expressed through denominational differentiation and programmatic specialization.
In mass society, the Church ministers within increasingly connected global cities under intergenerationally precarious conditions. People, objects, places, and information are more gaseous and weightless. Belonging is unstable, as identity is conferred by involuntary selection and values by consumption. Christians are interdependent on crowds for affirmation. Identity spreads by contagion within standardized channels. Here Christian practice cannot rely on continuity (traditional society) or mere choice (modern society), but must build place out of placelessness, cultivating stable, embodied communities that resist the centrifugal pull of constant mobility and algorithmic sorting. Parish becomes not a given but a counter‑cultural construction.
Identity, Formation, and the Moral Subject
Traditional formation assumes a monism of shared belief and practice. Because roles are inherited and hierarchical, the tradition‑directed personality learns by immersion. The catechumen’s primary challenge is not selection but fidelity. The social definition of success is solidarity. Under such conditions, the Church’s task is custodial, guarding the treasury of practices that anchor persons who are dependent on others and whose identities are created by cooperation and yield affective, shared experiences.
Modern formation assumes pluralism. Roles are emergent and flattened, the inner‑directed personality must adjudicate claims, and identities are created by competition, yielding rational, interlocking experiences. Here conscience is honed through deliberation. The social definition of success is emancipation. The Church’s task is pedagogical and apologetic, forming agents capable of rational judgment and durable commitment amidst optionality.
Mass formation assumes standardization. Roles are constantly changing. The other‑directed personality is tuned to the crowd’s signals. Identities are created by contagion and result in irrational, shared desires. Relationships are anonymous and others are diminished as sources of affirmation. Because values are conferred by consumption, the believer is tempted to curate a “personal brand” rather than receive an ecclesial identity. The social definition of success is conformity. Here the Church’s task is ascetical and reconstructive, breaking the liturgies of self‑abnegation before the mass and re‑inscribing the believer in practices that personalize—naming the person, narrating vocation, and training attention for presence rather than performance.
From Reciprocity to Instrumentality to Anonymity
Traditional sociality is dependent on others. Relations are reciprocal. Others appear as extensions of oneself. Christian love is “near at hand,” mediated by clan, neighbour, and ritual obligation. The pastoral dangers are parochialism and oppressive hierarchy, but the affordance is depth. The grammar of covenant easily translates into a world of cooperation and affective, shared experiences.
Modern sociality is independent of others. Relations turn instrumental. Others appear as a means to an end. Christian love must displace utility with gift. It proceeds by promise and principle in a field of contracts. The pastoral danger is atomization, but the affordance is conscience. Inner‑directed believers can articulate and defend moral claims in a marketplace of ideas.
Mass sociality is interdependent of others yet anonymous. Others function as a source of affirmation rather than partners in mutual upbuilding. The believer’s attention is captured by standardized signals. Desire is choreographed by platforms. Association is sorted by involuntary selection. In this environment, Christian love must be enacted as recognition over visibility, showing up in person, receiving the stranger as subject not object, and converting feedback loops into participation. Here small, concrete acts—learning names, lingering presence, shared tables—become theologically charged, because they resist depersonalization.
Work, Time, and Sacramentality
In the traditional economy of tenant labour and in‑kind remuneration, ecclesial time aligns with agrarian time. The calendar orders 
life. The tradition‑directed personality can be habituated by slow, repeated rites. In the modern economy of wage labour and salary, time is scheduled, but still tethered to place. The inner‑directed believer can protect sabbath and cultivate disciplines within institutional frames.
In the mass economy of emotional labour and pay according to productivity, time fragments and bleeds. Availability becomes a currency. Presence is mediated by devices. The other‑directed believer is perpetually “on.” Sacramental life, therefore, requires reassertion against the grain. Fixed hour prayer against endless scroll. Weekly Eucharist against episodic attendance. Fasting against frictionless consumption. The Church must teach temporal resistance—not as nostalgia for “solid” time, nor as retreat from “liquid” mobility, but as a humane limit within the gaseous stream of time and space.
Power, Knowledge, and the Person
The Christian claim is fundamentally an anthropological claim, God’s message of hope against sin’s destruction of the human person. Against Hobbes’s reduction of worth to price, the Christian tradition (read through Boethius and Aquinas) insists that the human is a subsistent individual of a rational nature. With Kant it adds that the person is an end never “merely as a means.” And with Wojtyła it specifies that “only love constitutes the proper and fully mature relation to the person.” In traditional society, this claim disciplines communal power, in the modern it disciplines market and state, and in the mass it disciplines the crowd and the systems that standardize it. Because mass society treats persons as constructed identities to be compartmentalized through constantly changing roles, the personalist norm must be performed rather than merely asserted—especially in institutions like healthcare, where standardization and productivity threaten to anonymize, and, possibly, even eliminate, the patient. To greet a patient as subject, to tolerate strategic “inefficiency” for dignity, to explain rather than process—these are not discretionary niceties, but enactments of Christian anthropology against the destructive metrics of the mass.
From Custody to Choice to Counter‑Liturgy
The Church’s operative posture in traditional society is custody, conserving monistic inheritance through self‑control toward stability. In modern society it is choice, forming inner‑directed agents who pursue liberty without dissolving covenant. In mass society, it must be counter‑liturgy, crafting practices that interrupt standardization, undo involuntary selection, and unlearn self‑abnegation before the crowd. This strategy is not strategic, but sacramental. It presumes that the Spirit reconstitutes persons into a people capable of cooperation amid contagion and communion amid conformity. Concretely, mass society calls for parish‑level placemaking, slow pastoral presence, catechesis in attention and speech, and works of mercy that dignify the “unseen,” all calibrated to transfigure anonymous contact into reciprocal relation.
Conclusion
Practicing the Christian faith in mass society differs substantially from its practice in traditional and modern societies, because the basic social mechanics have changed. Where the traditional world embeds the believer in inherited roles and the modern world invites the believer to choose among voluntary associations, the mass world selects, sorts, and standardizes persons within crowds whose desires spread contagiously and whose rewards are affirmation and conformity. In that world the Christian vocation is to humanize, to proclaim with practices that a human person is not a brand, metric, or node, but someone whose identity cannot be priced, whose destiny cannot be outsourced to a crowd, and whose life can only be adequately met by love. The faith that was once primarily received in traditional society and then primarily chosen in modern society, must, in a mass society, be performed as a public contradiction of anonymity—an embodied “yes” to the person that restores what mass conditions relentlessly erode.