Is Thanking God Counter-Cultural These Days?

A few weeks ago I posted a blog, “Thanks Be To God: Expressing Gratitude and Keeping Alive the Energy of Hope”.  As a matter of fact, I took a lesson from my own blog and on Thanksgiving wrote my first annual Thanksgiving Letter of Thanks to a couple who have been so important in the life of my wife and me.   The couple appreciated the “Thanks” and commented that they too would like to start that tradition next year.  In any case, I felt very good about writing that letter -- as my wife and I have, for years, felt so grateful for the generous and thoughtful ways in which that couple has affected our lives.

As a result of all of this I began to look at the scientific literature on “gratitude” with more care.  Although the research focus is recent, there are a surprisingly large number of scientists who are exploring the personal, social and neurological impact of gratitude felt and expressed. 

But I also had an amazing and disappointing discovery in the literature.  Gratitude is apparently counter-cultural for many people.  For a person, let me call him, Eliot, to feel gratitude toward others for ways that those others have helped him create positive events in his life suggests that Eliot did not have enough ability on his own.  In our culture that stresses independence and self-sufficiency, this is, unfortunately, a negative impact.  Eliot would likely want to avoid being cast as somebody who needed help from others to do what he wanted to do. 

For a person who understands the necessity of family and friends for finding well-being in life, the idea that some (many?) successful people would reject being labeled as having gratitude for what others have done for them personally is revealing.   Assuming that at least some of the people who reject the importance of personal gratitude for the help of others, also are church-goers, when they mouth “Thanks be to God” at church, what are they thinking?  Do they have their fingers crossed behind their backs – symbolizing to themselves that they really don’t mean it?

What’s going on here?  It leads me ask the question, can Christianity really survive in a culture like ours that stresses and admires individual strength and minimizes the need for others?  Christianity, it seems to me, calls for seeing ourselves as a Community of God.  It asks us to be humble in the face of our Creator.  We humans are all created in the image of God.  We are asked to treat each other as we would be treated.  We Christians are called to have a sense of Gratitude for our life, our abilities, our family, our friends, and for the beauty of the earth.  

So where does this leave our cultural obsession with individual strength and ability?  Certainly not in the Community of God.  Is this at the heart of our disappearing church?  Does Christianity ask people to live lives that they no longer believe in?

Bruce