Community

n. a social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage

History: According to the Oxford English Dictionary, community first appeared in writing in The Bruce by the Scottish poet, John Barbour. In that epic, Barbour used the word to mean “the body of those having common or equal rights or rank, as distinguished from the privileged classes." By the late eighteenth century, the growing number of meanings for this essential word included “joint or common ownership.” Subsequent to the publishing of the Communist Manifesto in 1848, it took on the specialized definition of “a socialistic or communistic society,” akin to the short-lived “utopia” founded in 1825 by Robert Owen in New Harmony, Indiana. As the term expanded in meaning, twentieth-century speakers began to use community to describe “a group of people having common interests.” By the twenty-first century, the connotation began to creep toward “faction” or the ever-evolving tribe.

Etymology: Community derives from the Latin adjective communis, “common, public, universal, ordinary.” The Latin noun, communitas, “fellowship,” passed into Late Middle English as communite, “citizenry.” The root from which it shoots is munus, “gift, spectacle, function, tribute, or service.” You can see how the different meanings of the original have yielded now familiar English words such as common, communication, communion, immunity, and municipal. Combining the Latin prefix con- with munus and the suffix -ity, “quality or state of,” yields the etymological meaning, “the state of serving or functioning together.” It eventually took on its current spelling in the sixteenth century.

Effect: Since the first time community appeared in English, the common usage has evoked images of civic pride, moral coherence, and neighborliness. Writing in the eighteenth century, however, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, saw the community as an obstacle to the fullest realization of the “authentic individual.” The contemporary heirs of that view have developed critical theory as a tool for eroding the older concept. As part of that process, identity politics seeks to supplant the idea of a civic community with a multiplicity of shared racial, sexual, and other traits typically called communities despite the fragmentation. Whether in a medieval village, a modern suburb, or the LGBTQ+ movement, “communities shape consciousness,” as Carl Truman observes in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Truman further asserts, “Our moral consciousness is very much shaped by our community.” So, he calls on Christian churches to function as Christian communities once did in earlier times, caring for people’s needs and passing on the moral structures based in the realities of the body and objective truth. In his conclusion, Truman recalls the world of the second century during which the church “laid down the foundations for the later successes of the third and fourth centuries . . . By existing as a close-knit doctrinally bounded community that required her members to act consistently with their faith and to be good citizens of the earthly city as far as good citizenship was compatible with faithfulness.” Distinctly different from communities based on online anonymity and an ethic of condemnation, the early Christian communities grew from personal interaction and care for others, united by a shared faith. Today, faithful Christians could counter evolving fragmentation by heeding Truman’s advice and building on that ancient model of community focused on faith rather than politics.