Totalitarian or individualist

Christianity thinks of human individuals to as mere members of a group or items in a list, but as organs in a body- different from one another and each contributing what no other could. When you find yourself wanting to turn your children, or pupils, or even your neighbours, into people exactly like your self, remember that God probably never meant them to be that. You and they are different organs, intended to do different things.
On the other hand, when you are tempted not to bother about someone else's troubles because they are "no business of yours," remember that though he is different from you he is part of the same organism as you. If you forget that he belong to the same organism as yourself you will become an Individualist. If you forget that he is a different organ from you, if you want to suppress differences and make people all alike, you will become a totalitarian. But a Christian must not be either a totalitarian or an individualist.
I feel a strong desire to tell you- and I expect you feel a strong desire to tell me- which of these two errors is the worse. That is the devil getting at us. He always sends errors into the world in pairs- pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight thought between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them.

C. S. Lewis, "Two Notes" in Mere Christianity

upon reading these paragraphs during a sunday school lesson, a student found it appropriate to conclude that it is all about moderation. Be an extremist and you find yourself becoming either a totalitarian or an individualist.

Now the word moderation has always ruffled my feathers.
The middle ground, the "balanced" quite often seems to be some watered down, half-hearted, compromising thing. Furthermore, moderation gives us no guide at all. What is moderation? It seems to be something defined on the fly, a simple way of saying "what you are doing now feels extreme to me".

Anyway, Christian unity can be seen in two ways. First, I'm sure we know of unity in uniformity, that is, people are united because of some commonality, they are united because they are similar. Is this not the case in Christianity? It is, one Lord, one faith, one baptism. One Spirit which dwells in all, two gifts (or maybe more), of love and priesthood, which all have. One mission, to witness for Christ and preach the gospel. One duty, to take up the cross. On paper, we ought of have all of these. It's the mark of a Christian and so it is unsurprising to see if all Christians approximate to this over the course of their lives.

Then there is the sort of complementary unity and this is where the analogy of the body comes in. Each part of proficient in a particular scope of work but hopelessly deficient in the others. Their deficients coincides with the proficiency of other parts and so they form this tight network of interdependence which when complete, forms an exceedingly efficient system.

So, should a christian be a totalitarian or an individualist? I think that's the wrong question to ask. Instead, if we ask "in which areas should a christian be a totalitarian and in which areas an individualist?" we see that perhaps a christian ought to be, in a sense, both totalitarian and individualistic.

So we can be totalitarian (attempting to make other people like us) in some ways, for instance, insisting that all our brothers confess that Christ is Lord.
On the other hand, we can be individualistic, making no attempt to insist that all Christians should be speaking in tongues, be prophets, be teachers etc.

To say that we should be neither totalitarian or individualistic will, in this light, be very misleading indeed.