When I was in high school, and before I was a Christian myself, I remember driving by the local Catholic church with my father one day. Mass must have just been getting out, as people were leaving the church en masse and walking to their cars. "Sheep," I muttered under my breath. "They're all sheep." As a general non-conformist and angsty punk-rock teenager who was ignorant of religion, it was a predictable response. But I remember it being visceral as well, a kind of disgust of "the masses" blindly following social norms and conforming themselves to something "good people did" (which was going to church). The fact that I remember using the term "sheep" was curious in itself, given the scriptural foundation for followers of Jesus. The reaction from my father--himself a Catholic, though one who left my brothers and I to our own discernment regarding religion--was swift, a kind of "How dare you" response.
Curious also was my feeling of being conflicted over the scene and the competing emotions. I scoffed at groups of people all doing and thinking the same thing in uniformity, pitying them in a sense. But there was also a part of me that envied them. I wrestled with the human and religious questions as a teenager--why are we here? what is the purpose of life?, where do we go when we die?, how can I be happy?--but I was like an explorer without a map. Here were people honoring a prescribed mandate (to keep holy the Sabbath), and they knew where to go to do that (in this case, Our Lady of Mt. Carmel parish).
Like many of the teachings of Christ, The Way is paradoxical--God gave us the Law through Moses and the fulfillment of the Law He gave to us in His son. Those who were once in darkness have seen a great light, for they now have a way back to God: through Christ.
W.C. Fields said, "A dead fish can float downstream, but it takes a live one to stream upstream." We fight against our own concupiscence, as well as the allure of the world, the flesh, and the Devil. And as the Lord Christ makes clear in his teaching, “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it" (Mt 7:13-14).
If we follow the ways of the world, we can be assured we are not on the narrow road. And so we are expected to follow Christ, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and conform our life to his. As Catholics, we know we are meant to travel this road as a corporal body, not as individuals divorced from it. We account for our lives before the just Judge alone, but we do not get before the Throne on our own.
There are times when it is good practice to follow the herd, for sometimes it is for good reason. If you are driving on the highway and everyone is merging to the right lane because of construction, we would do well to follow suite. We all know that guy who insists on doing the opposite and then finds himself stuck with his turn signal on at the last moment, trying to make his way in to avoid the barriers.
Likewise in the liturgy. As Catholics, we sit, kneel, stand at prescribed times, respond in unison at the appropriate times. It is not the place for following one's whims, or improv-ing with raised hands or free-wheeling vocal prayer. Were one to do so, they would not be praying with the mind of the Church in this context.
And yet, even within the Church we are sometimes faced with scenarios in which we are called to swim upstream. When you look around you and everyone is receiving Communion in the hand, for instance, one may think this is what they should do so as not to stand out. But sometimes conscience dictates we do otherwise--either through refraining from receiving at all, or doing so by kneeling and receiving on the tongue. If you are blessed with a Latin Mass parish, this is a non-issue, as Communion in the hand is not given (which is how it should be). In this sense, conformity with established norms and practices is a light yoke, since it removes the tension and burden of having to buck the trend by being an outlier.
The Asch "Line Experiments" in the 1950's were an interesting case study, where 75% of 123 college-aged males answered a relatively simple question incorrectly when influenced by the majority. In the control group (not exposed to majority influence), the rate was 1%. "That intelligent, well-meaning, young people are willing to call white black is a matter of concern," he noted.
In "The Hardest Thing For A Person To Do Is Go Against Their Tribe," I made reference to an Atlantic article from 2017 in which the author wrote,
“A man with a conviction is a hard man to change,” Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schacter wrote in When Prophecy Fails, their 1957 book about this study. “Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point … Suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before.
“You spread stories because you know that they’re likely to be a kind of litmus test, and the way people react will show whether they’re prepared to side with you or not,” Boyer says. “Having social support, from an evolutionary standpoint, is far more important than knowing the truth about some facts that do not directly impinge on your life.” The meditation and sense of belonging that Daniel Shaw got from Siddha Yoga, for example, was at one time more important to his life than the alleged misdeeds of the gurus who led the group.
Shaw describes the motivated reasoning that happens in these groups: “You’re in a position of defending your choices no matter what information is presented,” he says, “because if you don’t, it means that you lose your membership in this group that’s become so important to you.” Though cults are an intense example, Shaw says people act the same way with regard to their families or other groups that are important to them.
The inference of conformity to the state of the world should be obvious. But it gets a little more gray when it comes to our duty as Christians within the Church. The strongest Christians are usually those who have weighed the evidence, determined the stakes, and discerned the costs of following Christ and do so anyway. This can include those who have a strong non-conformist personality but who nonetheless discern the truth of Catholicism. The weakest are those who go to Mass or believe "because I was raised this way," or "I don't know, it's just what we do" unreflexively.
And yet, in relation to Christ, he still refers to his flock as sheep--those who follow a voice they know, who act unthinkingly in a herd, who have an innocent desire to simply follow. The wolf, by contrast, is one who breaks in to the pen to cause carnage--instinctual, prowling, aggressive, and led by no one.
In Matthew 10:16, Christ admonishes us to be "wise as serpents, and innocent as doves," and commends shrewdness as well (Lk 16:1-15). He tells his disciples regarding the Pharisees, "do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach" (Mt 23:23). Again, there is this uncomfortable paradox: we are not to conform ourselves to the ways of the world, but to Christ and his teachings, which should be obvious. Less obvious is how we should conform our behavior of our fellow Christians within the Church.
As in many instances, the saints give us the example, as St. Paul gave to the Corinthians to "be imitators of me" (1 Cor 11:1). Were St. Thomas More or St. John Fisher to conform themselves to their fellow bishops during their time, they would have found themselves on the road to perdition. Were St. Teresa of Avila not to have urged Pope Gregory XI to return to Rome from Avignon, we may have a very different Church today. Even modern day followers of Christ like Fr. Benedict Groeschel found it necessary to establish a new religious order (the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal) to get back to the roots of their charism of poverty, though it would have been 'easier' to stay with the Capuchins.
In all these instances, this was not a matter of conformity, but conscience. As Cardinal John Henry Newman wrote so eloquently,
"The rule and measure of duty is not utility, nor expedience, nor the happiness of the greatest number, nor State convenience, nor fitness, order, and the pulchrum. Conscience is not a long-sighted selfishness, nor a desire to be consistent with oneself; but it is a messenger from Him, who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by His representatives."
And therein lies the paradox: that Christ speaks to us behind a veil, and yet teaches and rules us by His representatives, just as he commanded his disciples to do everything the Pharisees told them, but not to do what they do. And so we conform in the macro, and discern in the micro.
My personality as a non-conformist has not changed over the years; it is both surprising and unsurprising that I became a Catholic twenty-five years ago as a teenager, and have remained so to this day by God's grace. In doing so, I have sought to conform my will to Christ's, and my life to the teachings of his Church. I follow the same road as those who have gone before me, rather than bushwhacking and getting lost in the forest. In that, I am a sheep.
But if it is God's will I be a saint, there may come a time in which conforming my life to that of those around me within Her walls and resting in that comfort is not enough, as our Lord told St. Peter, "when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go" (Jn 21:18). This applies to all who wish to follow Christ and be baptized into his death. For the saint must walk alone.
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