Stresses That Shape
In the previous reflection, we lingered with the world into which Jesus first spoke the words, “Follow me.” It wasn’t an unformed world; the people of God don’t provide Jesus with a clean slate upon which to work. Social contagion, in the form of economic pressures, political longings, and religious habits already shaped what felt reasonable to hope for, what kind of rescue made sense, and what sort of future could even be imagined. That generation didn’t simply hold ideas about salvation; they lived in an environment of desire that quietly trained what a saviour ought to look like.
However, that’s not unique to them. Our wants and longings rarely fashion in isolation either. Desires carry through communities, caught from people with shared fears and hopes, and rehearsed through the stories that groups of people tell themselves about what’s wrong with the world and how it’ll be set right. Before desire becomes a personal conviction, it’s often the social air we breathe long before we learn to name it.
More Than Memories
The Scriptures are really honest about this. Again and again, Israel’s story shows how memories of God’s promises and commitment shape their vision of God’s rescue, but dominant powers, pressures, and promises of their time also influence their future deliverance. When Jesus announces a kingdom that didn’t fit the long-rehearsed profile of rescue, the resistance He encounters isn’t just theological disagreement; it set a collision course between two competing cultures of desire. Each one insists, “this is the way things are done around here.” Sure there’s plenty of artistic license, but I really like how The Chosen TV series accurately dramatizes biblical realities like this.
If we think we stand at a safer distance from such pressures; we better not kid ourselves. A previous review uses a river as a snapshot to help visualize the internal mechanism that shapes our desire. In that way, you can see yourself like a river and every person in your circle of contact is also a river. Their past experiences also shape their desire. Consequently, shared environments also shape our own longings.
Media ecosystems, political speculations, economic narratives, and technological pathways quietly teach what feels reasonable for us to hope for and to whom we give our trust. Desire stays contagious. The question isn’t if society shapes us, but rather, by which stories, toward which endings, and in the direction of which kind of saviour.
Where We Are Today: Rehearsing Our Endings
Once again, our social environments train us to imagine how the story of our world must end. For example, rehearsed endings like collapse, cultural takeover, civilizational decline, technological salvation, political rescue, or moral panic. These all quietly teach our desire toward the kinds of saviors we’re ready to trust. Last year in an article I asked, “What kind of god do we believe in?” Now I ask, “What kind of saviour do we serve?”
Today, our digital ecosystems amplify urgency, outrage, and fear, forming communities around rage farming and fear mongering. Instead of fashioning social circles around shared memory of God’s promises and commitment, groups form around shared perceived threats. In that kind of environment, desire is hardly free to attend patiently to God’s slow work of renewal. Instead, we lean toward quick resolutions, decisive interventions, and people who promise clarity in a world that feels increasingly complex and unstable. The danger isn’t only that we hold unhelpful opinions about the future, but that our shared social thinking shapes us to want endings that bypass critical thinking and the slow, patient, relational way God has always told His story in the world.
So now, the question is no longer whether our social environments help fashion our wants and longings. Instead, do the endings we rehearse as a community help us recognize the kind of kingdom Jesus actually brings?
The Saviour We Learn to Want vs. the Saviour We’re Given
From the start of Scripture, God’s way of rescue stands at odds with the rescue stories cultures tell about themselves. The world learns to long for saviours who secure order through strength, restore stability through dominance, and resolve threat through decisive control. These are the saviours that make sense within social dreams shaped by fear, scarcity, and rivalry. They promise protection, clarity, and the removal of enemies. They feel like common sense; the desire that still moves us today.
Yet the Saviour revealed in Jesus moves in a different direction. Contrary to Jewish expectations, Jesus doesn’t seize power but He comes off as weak. Jesus doesn’t secure safety through coercion and control but He absorbs violence without returning it. Christ doesn’t restore order by defeating enemies but He reconciles them. Where a social saviour promises to rescue us from suffering, the suffering Saviour steps into suffering to redeem it from within.
This contrast exposes more than a theological disagreement; it reveals the shaping of desire itself. The truth is, communities learn to recognize salvation in forms that mirror their own fears and hopes. The tragedy isn’t that we just misunderstand Jesus, but that our shared vision may no longer know how to desire the kind of salvation He offers. For many today, the cross remains outrageously delusional not only to belief, but to the socially trained desires we hold.
If our culture teaches us to want social saviours who promise control and certainty, following the suffering Saviour will always feel disorienting. That’s until our desire itself slowly re-pastures within His way of life.
How Social Contagion Work
If true, that our social environments shape our desire before we’re able to explain it, how does that play out?
- Desire spreads through proximity (who we’re around)
- Desire is normalized through repetition (what we hear/see often)
- Desire is intensified through belonging (what bonds us to a group)
- Desire is stabilized through shared threat or hope (what we fear together / hope together)
Understand, in our modern, Western society, we value logic and reason above all. However, social contagion doesn’t need to be logical or convincing to be effective. The point is, it works best through familiarity, belonging, and repetition. Over time, what a community fears together, hopes together, insults together (didn’t expect to read that did you), and celebrates together, desire starts to feel like common sense. Desire settles where people learn to feel at home.
Why is This So Hard to Notice From the Inside
What’s culture? Google says, “Culture is the shared set of beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that characterize a group, society, or organization.” True, yet I’ve lived long enough to see culture (workplace, church, family, social circles and many others) as defined: “this is the way we do things around here.”
Our surroundings shape our desire but we don’t usually feel or see the influence; it just feels like normal life. No, we’re not helpless dupes but we aren’t fully sovereign over what shapes us either. Sometimes, we do notice the pull. Sometimes, we catch the manipulation or when someone blows sunshine. Yet still, the deeper desire of belonging, safety and shared story keep tugging at our desire in ways that aren’t solved by just more information or insight alone.
Jesus Breaks Contagion Without Coercion
Jesus doesn’t combat socially formed desire by shouting stories over the noise of the same formation systems. Instead, He gathers people into a different way of living life together – eating, walking, listening, failing, and being restored in close proximity to Him. Isolated insight won’t conquer social contagion. Instead, inhabiting a different field of shared life is where a different desire takes root. It requires following the Good Shepherd in a pasture where He leads.
Yet a Tension Remains
Since desire is socially contagious, following Jesus always carries a social cost. It means standing at some distance away from environments that used to feel familiar. We may have a personal desire for God’s kingdom, but do our shared worlds make space to sustain that desire?
In lived experience, desire doesn’t drift toward the Kingdom on its own. Rather, it’s carried by communities, rehearsed in shared life, and sustained, not by effort of more willpower but within particular environments of belonging. Furthermore, if social contagion shapes what we come to want, then the hope of re-pastured desire isn’t found in isolation. It fashions in the slow, patient shaping of communities into a different story.
In our next, and final article on Part 2, we’ll briefly review our discovery of the human psychology of desire. Then, we’ll set the stage to pivot into Part 3, with three “Competing Stories of Desire;” how modern forces shape what we long for and how the Gospel reorders those longings.