Ever since I received my April 2023 Issue 568 of The Sun, a magazine of brilliant writing and photography with no advertisements – beholden to no one except its readers, I have been considering the juxtaposition of a reader’s letter with a featured interview.

The final letter of the issue was from Paul DuNard who said in part,

I was sent to fight in Vietnam when I was seventeen, and from that moment on I felt the world was insane. …. [S]ociety seemed like a never-ending puppet show. [His mother gave him a subscription to “The Sun“.] …. One time, … I had a thought: Where are the puppet-phonies in this magazine? …. “The Sun” was about real people, and it helped me navigate my way out of hell.

Turn one page and you are presented with Staci Kleinmaier’s interview “Losing Our Religion: Molly Worthen on the Modern Search for Meaning”. Molly Worthen is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill where she focuses on religion in the United States. Her most recent book is “Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism” and at one point she even spent time immersed in a community of Russian Orthodox Old Believers in Canada.

Worthen explores the importance of meaning in human life, a discussion which can not be had without a look at human institutions because of our communal nature and how so many derive meaning from those institutions. Institutions sent DuNard to Vietnam. She asks, “If more and more humans are not worshipping in a traditional religious context, then where and how and why are they worshipping?” And that if the authority of institutions is in decline, particularly transcendent authority, where will “meaning-making” be found? She comments:

In exchange we’ve gotten the glowing rectangles that we all carry around in our pockets, and they provide an illusion of connection and community.

She turns to the rise of the individual and the epidemic of isolation. Here is the conflict. We are simultaneously social creatures and meaning-seeking creatures, resulting in these factors often going hand-in-hand. Webs of relationships offer greater meaning. She believes that the individual seeking freedom, happiness, meaning outside of the social web places us out of touch with our human nature resulting in anxiety and loneliness. Seeking those social webs can also, however, have very negative results. Attaching to your tribal identity results in viewing those outside it as a demonized “other.” This is especially true if you believe your tribe is in decline or being attacked. Your meaning is threatened, and you can kill the others if you have to in order to survive. Who was DuNard’s tribe? Meaning shifts to a question of power in the group setting.

I accept most of Worthen’s propositions. She has done the research, but it sort of leaves us between a rock and a hard place. She discusses a loss of faith in experts, American progress and reason, after the Vietnam War. She says, “[t]his type of disillusionment, especially for younger people who are coming of age, creates a power vacuum, ….” To my mind it also creates an opportunity: An understanding that we need to work together, communally, to create societies that provide the health, wealth, and safety generally, so that the individual (by themselves or in a tribe) may explore their time in this world in a way that is meaningful to them. Big institutions tend to steamroll meaning for the individual. Ask Paul DuNard.