The Hidden Generals of the Culture Wars: When Individualism is Lost and Collectivism Weaponised

A sweet old man gave me a pamphlet at the train station the other night. It has been over a year since I temporarily lost my licence to drive, and while I’ve tentatively slipped back behind the wheel, I’m mostly a train guy now. It’s fun, actually…I wanted to be a train driver when I was young. The station is a colourful place. Mad, but colourful.

On this occasion, I was drunk(ish) and hurrying to catch the express home, so I didn’t have time to look critically at what I was picking up. It turned out to be a religious piece featuring a suspiciously pallid cartoon Jesus and a call to ‘spread the word!’ and ‘join our community!’

The website it led me to features a smug young man with crazy eyes justifying the existence of the almighty with a terrible metaphor about the construction industry, and some passive aggressive guilt-tripping directed to a much, much younger man—a child, really—who is told, among other things, that he’s damned for eternity if he isn’t thankful to Jesus.

Over a series of leading questions, the interviewer slowly brainwashes his target. The besieged kid openly says, “you’ve got me messed up, bro!”, which deftly summarises the whole twisted conversation. Theirs is a coercive and predatory exchange.

The clip reminds me of when I attended a friend’s Confirmation, many years ago, and the pastor gathered all the local children at his feet to ask: “Is it wrong to share the Lord’s words? No, it is not wrong”… “Is it wrong to judge others? No, it is not wrong.”

I remember my thought at the time: If that’s the case, Father…I’m judging you right now.

The idea that someone has not only the right but the duty to evaluate and insult strangers is as bizarre to me as assuming that, just because there are patterns in nature, a magical cloud jockey mustbe credited for it all. To me, this is childishly simplistic thinking bordering on psychological abuse. It’s hard to look at stained glass depictions of a sombre Santa impersonator and reconcile ‘His grace’ and ‘His love’ with cot death, starvation, war, violence against children, the refugee crisis and all the everyday cruelties inflicted on the innocent and the unlucky. I couldn’t even reconcile ‘His grace’ and ‘His love’ with all the lamb sacrifice in the Bible. As a little boy in Sunday school, I remember reading about animal murder and thinking God’s just mean. My own experience with this babytalk, via the Lutheran Church, set me up early to find preachers highly suspect. Julian Beck did the rest.

Still, the stranger handing me that pamphlet did so from the goodness of his heart. I’m not disputing his intentions.

It made me think about how different people see the world. We all know this, obviously…but we gloss over it in our day-to-day interactions and pretend we have a shared baseline. Or I know I do. It’s hard for me to process that some of my fellow travellers genuinely believe that ‘the devil, a fallen angel, is the spiritual enemy of all people, who enslaves humanity by empowering their choices against submitting to Christ’s authority and salvation.’

Stop and think about that.

Really think.

Adult humans are outsourcing their personal decisions to a magical, malevolent creature.

They further absolve themselves of individual responsibility by conjuring a horned bogeyman to make sense of all the world’s evils. As a pragmatist, that’s…clearly mad. It clearly speaks to a lack of personal character. It clearly isn’t something any sane person would buy into.

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? What I frame as ‘clear’ is sacrilegious and irresponsible to others. Contemporary politics, with all its discourse between the right and the left, scarcely takes stock of what is running beneath our most heated debates. Many of us are reluctant to admit that we’re weaving between diametrically opposed worldviews that are incompatible to the point of incomprehension. I will never be able to understand the perspective of someone who prays to sky pixies—sorry, angels—and rejects scientific enquiry and empirical evidence in favour of an old book of parables (i.e. myths), written to reflect the social mores of its time. I cannot take it seriously.

Theologians are getting cranky as they read this, and that’s fair enough…they can’t understand how I could be so naïve as to place manmade ideals ahead of divine scripture. Some would see this piece of writing as vile and foolish, and destined to send me on a one-way ticket to that less desirable, less scenic of train rides…the one that stops at Hell’s terminal.

Others would claim—indeed, have claimed many times—that ‘degenerates’ like me threaten ‘young minds’ with our ‘dangerous’ views. We are looking at the same world through different lenses and singular mindsets. And we all believe we are looking clearly.

Now, I don’t really want to parachute into the weeds around religion itself, as that always seems to end in a stack of hate mail from those who worship a ‘loving God’. All I’m interested in is a mutual acknowledgement that what we call ‘culture wars’ may be, among other things, a proxy religious war that many of us skirt around. Australian politicians, especially, are reluctant to confront the incompatibility of a strict monotheist’s worldview and an incredulous atheist’s worldview. It’s easier to play pretend…why else would we see so many well-educated and logic-driven PMs attending Church on Sunday morning?

American politicians are not so coy…

September 11 is a folk tale as far as my students are concerned. It’s ‘prehistoric’. Many are surprised to learn the details. I remember it as though it were last week. For me, it was a realisation that ideas could wound the world: a flashpoint between incompatible perspectives that shook up my sense of safety, my belief in decency, and my trust in civilised thought. What followed was not just a conflict between Bush-era evangelicalism and Islamic extremism…but between those of us who don’t buy into a religious worldview at all and those who would destroy us in the name of their personal belief. One friend, at the time, called it “reason vs hocus pocus.” I didn’t disagree.

Yet, importantly, to censor others grates against my liberal ideals. I would fight vociferously for the right forothersto believe whatever they choose to believe. Even if there’s no evidence. Even if I think it holds us back as a species. It’s an internal contradiction, a cognitive dissonance within oneself, to say “I’m certain that what you’re saying is absolutely stupid, but I’ll defend your right to say it.” But that’s what believing in democracy means.

The vilification of Muslim citizens that followed the attack on New York was disgusting, and that it has continued into the second and third decades of the new millennium through travel bans and hate rallies is indefensible. Likewise, I don’t consider every evangelical Christian to be a bigot or a warmonger because of what Bush, Blair, Howard and others did in their name. Or our name, I should say, since we are all swept up in the crimes of those we elect to represent us.

It should be possible to hold all of these views in one mind. It should be possible to deny religious dogma and defend religious freedom, to deplore extremism without vilifying an entire faith, to be sceptical without being ignorant, to be critical without being cruel…

It should be possible to co-exist with humanity and compassion. It is possible. Ifwe do still believe in democracy.

And that’s where the word ‘community’ has started to become synonymous with ‘mob’ and ‘groupthink’ in my mind, and, increasingly, in my experience. I no longer trust anyone who uses ‘community’ to assert their personal agenda. It’s a ‘might is right’ perspective, or “if you are not with me then you are my enemy!” as a young Darth Vader once declared.

I see this cultish tendency not just in organised religion, but in rallies of all kinds and from every political persuasion.

Community in the local sense , bake sales and fêtes, is all well and good. Community in the context of organised charity and advocacy groups is vital, so long as governance remains democratic. Community built around an egotist pontificating from a stage is a bastardisation of the term and a misrepresentation of the speaker’s intentions. I won’t go near it.

That kind of ‘community’ is built on preaching to the indoctrinated, othering one’s enemies and feeding arrogance under the guise of altruism. When a performative sideshow of sloganeering, chest beating and snapping fingers replaces reasoned debate, we lose ourselves. We lose, in fact, our ability to co-exist in a multifaceted, politically diverse, secular and pluralistic society.

Margaret Thatcher famously said, “there’s no such thing as society, only the individual” and I’ve long found that kind of selfish thinking ethically abhorrent, especially in the context of Thatcher’s Britain.

In 2025, however, deep in the age of pervasive social media, I think we can afford to assert a little individualism in the face of algorithms, ticked squares and superficial identity markers. These days, everyone wants us to sign on to their perspective and they’ll shun us if we ask original questions…as the man upstairs once shunned Adam and Eve for seeking knowledge on their own terms.

Maybe that’s why I can’t come to religion. It robs me of my right to be me.

Even so, if it helps you to be you, then I’ll respect your choice as you respect mine.

Whatnone of us should accept is our individual choices and personalities being diluted, packaged, and subsumed into ‘identities’…and for those ‘identities’ to be weaponised by ideologues and extremists to split, scare and enrage us.

I picked up that pamphlet again yesterday. It wasn’t deliberate. I thought I was picking up a $10 voucher for Menulog (yup, I’m cheap). The man handed it to me with a generous smile and I thanked him. It was, strangely, quite nice to see him again.

We’re allowed to believe different things. That shouldn’t make us all enemies. But we need to be upfront about the anxieties that drive us, we need to understand how those anxieties can be manipulated by bad operators, and we need to remember that history is often twisted to match a contemporary con job.

If we’re going to have a war, cultural or otherwise, let’s be mindful of the ideals we doshare…

Anyone who assumes they have the right to judge or control us should be laughed from their pulpit, or their rally, or their tower. Democracy is messy. Democracy is imperfect. It can be slow. It can be frustrating. But democracy means standing up and defending the right for others to have their say, and to be who they wish to be. It means acknowledging complexity and intersectionality, rather than boxing individuals or denying their unique circumstance. It means letting people be people. Not categories. Not ciphers. Not targets.

I want to be part of a robust and healthy democracy, where people authentically engage and care for one another, but I’ve no interest in joining a ‘community’ where I’m expected to repeat catchphrases and march to the beat of someone else’s worldview. I’m doing my own thing.

Clearly.