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Reclaiming Objective Faith in an Individualistic World

Reclaiming Objective Faith in an Individualistic World

Last updated on: September 6, 2026 at 9:24 am by David Schloss

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Reclaiming Objective Faith in an Individualistic World 2026-09-06T09:24:38-04:00 David Schloss

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Catholic Ecclesiology

Anyone with even a minimal exposure to religious dialogue has heard the declaration, “I have a relationship with God (and/or Jesus).” Such a claim should certainly be considered positively. However, I want to argue that this sentiment can be problematic.

To understand why, we must explore and contrast our present psychological age with the objective teachings of Catholicism.

The Psychological Age

We live in a time when what we feel matters more than what is real. Very often, subjectivity is given more weight than objectivity.

Modern social discourses place significant value on what is called “personal truths” and individual experiences. In discussions about culture, psychology, and identity, a person’s subjective feelings are often treated as paramount.

Additional evidence of our subjective and psychological age appears in places like social media and the economy.

Social media algorithms prioritize engagement over factual accuracy. Content that triggers strong emotional, subjective responses (outrage, validation, or excitement) spreads much faster than dry, objective facts. (Milli, S., Carroll, M., Wang, Y., Pandey, S., Zhao, S., & Dragan, A. D., 2025).

In economics, companies no longer sell only a product’s objective utility; they sell how a product makes one feel or what it says about one’s identity. (He, X., Zhu, L., Sun, L., & Yang, L. [2022]. The influence of brand marketing on consumers’ emotion in mobile social media environment. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 962224).

How does this stress on the subjective and the psychological affect religion and faith? To answer, we must examine the nature of faith.

The Nature Of Faith

Within the Catholic tradition, five fundamental elements make up the nature of faith. First, faith is a theological virtue. More specifically, faith is a supernatural gift infused by God into the soul, enabling humans to trust completely in Him and His word (Catechism of the Catholic Church, Paragraph 1814).

Despite its nature as both a virtue and a gift, faith entails (and this is the second element) an assent of the intellect to certain numinous truths. As such, faith must be an act of free will.

The third element follows from the first two. Coined by Saint Anselm, fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding) asserts that faith and reason must work together like two wings, helping the human spirit contemplate objective truth.

Fourth, faith incorporates charity. Driven by love of God and neighbor, Saint Paul observes that “faith apart from works is dead” (James 2:26).

Finally, faith in Christ and the following of His teachings are required to attain salvation, though God’s grace initiates and sustains this journey.

These five elements of faith also constitute acts that make up religious worship. As such, they contain a significant degree of objectivity.

This objective nature of worship is at risk when it is reduced to a subjective relationship. This is so since faith requires intellectual assent to revealed objective truths*.* It should not become a private emotional state; it naturally demands public, communal profession (creed) and action (liturgy/sacraments).

Worship And Relationship

It must be admitted that a strong personal element must exist in spiritual life. What is of concern is a hyper-individualized, extra-ecclesial, and purely subjective interpretation of faith born out of post-Reformation and modern therapeutic culture. Therefore, this subjective, personal element must be balanced by a rigorous religious anchor.

Moreover, a personal relationship is often synonymous with a private relationship. In turn, a private relationship naturally brackets or dismisses organized religion.

It is telling that the Bible makes no definitive or specific arguments for a personal relationship with God. Rather, the Bible – and this is true of the Old and New Testaments alike – is focused on a covenant relationship, not a personal one.

Nor did the Church fathers stress a personal relationship. As an example, early Church writers like Saint Ignatius of Antioch prioritized visible unity, shared sacraments, and communal gathering over modern individualized expressions of religion. (Ignatius of Antioch, “The Letter of Ignatius to the Smyrnaeans,” in The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations, ed. and trans. Michael W. Holmes, 3rd ed. [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007].

Others, like Saint Cyprian, famously stated that no one can have God as Father without having the Church as mother. This, too, ties faith in God with ecclesial attachment.

These teachings influenced the early Christian community’s understanding of worship, which in turn saw salvation as adoption into God’s collective body and family rather than an isolated, private transaction.

Christ’s own words make this point clear. Jesus so identifies himself with His Catholic Church that He can say, “Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Saul was not, of course, persecuting the risen Christ personally, nor was he concerned with individual Christians. Rather, Saul was persecuting the Church community. (Acts of the Apostles 9:4).

As has been shown, both the Bible and early Church tradition emphasized an objective and communal element to practicing the faith.

One reason for this is that the subjective aspect of faith makes one’s spiritual life ego-centric. Denied access to the transcendent (which must be objective), the soul turns inward.

Moreover, a subjective spirituality means that God becomes a concept or abstraction. A Jesus removed from the Church He founded is a Jesus removed from the Bible, at least partially. The allure of this mistake lies in allowing one to “mold” Jesus to fit one’s own will. God becomes whomever the individual wants Him to be. At the extreme, the individual becomes his own God, determining for himself such things as morality and objective meaning.

In contrast, Catholicism asserts that one loves God by worshiping Him and doing His will, and that proper worship requires the Church’s liturgy. This is because to be followers of Christ means being grafted onto His mystical body (this occurs at baptism), which is the Catholic Church.

The liturgy allows Catholics to enter into the Trinitarian dialogue by sharing in the Paschal mystery of Christ’s suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension to the Father. In turn, Christ presents his body (of which we are a part) to the Father in sacrifice on our behalf. Through sharing in Christ’s sacrifice to the Father, we participate in the divine life of the Trinity. By participating in the divine life of God, we grow in holiness.

Ultimately, the virtue of being spiritual exists only to approach God in prayer and in living out the Gospel. As I have shown, this cannot occur apart from an adherence to religious practices.

Conclusion

The idea that faith and salvation are predicated on a personal relationship with God is a relatively recent development. However, as this paper has shown, practicing the Catholic faith requires a nuanced balance between the public and objective practice of the liturgy and a personal relationship with God.

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