Unity Isn’t Whatever We Make It

It’s a reality of our baptism we can choose to reflect.

This is the final installment in a series on the book Influence by Robert Cialdini in which we’re considering how the gospel turns levers of influence upside down. Read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, and part 7 to get caught up.

I don’t have many memories from my childhood, but one of them is my baptism.

I was nine years old. It was April, though I don’t remember the exact date. The church my family attended at the time met in an elementary school cafeteria, so there was no baptistry. Instead, I was immersed in my grandparents’ pool in the middle of a trailer park, under the clear blue sky of Southern California’s Colorado desert. I squinted my eyes against the sun and caught sight of a few Washingtonia filifera palm trees bending in the spring winds at the edges of my vision. A moment later I was wiping chlorinated water from my face, dead to sin, alive in Christ.

I don’t have any memory of a pre-baptism class, or a conversation with my parents or the pastor who submerged me, one arm behind my shoulders, the other hand cupped over mine as I pinched my nostrils closed. I don’t recall how I felt on the short drive home from the trailer park or what I did later that day (though I do remember that we forgot to bring a towel, so I shivered in the spring breeze). But whatever I cannot conjure about that day, whatever theological understanding of baptism I was lacking, I knew that I had joined myself to something otherworldly, beyond my comprehension. I entered that water a solitary body. I emerged from it one piece of Christ’s Body.

Cialdini lists unity as the final lever of influence in his book.¹ Unity reveals itself as a lever of influence when “people are inclined to say yes to someone they consider one of them.” (364) “The experience of unity is not about simple similarities,” he clarifies. “It’s about identities, shared identities.” (364) The influencing power of unity is apparent in our business dealings, including sales and other financial transactions, our politics, our sports fandoms, and all our personal relationships, both romantic and platonic. When we feel a shared identity with a group of people we favor the outcomes and welfare of other members of that group over non-members, and we use their preferences and actions to guide our own.

Cialdini identifies two groupings of factors that lead to a feeling of unity: belonging together and acting together. Belonging together includes kinship, or feeling like you’re part of a family, and place, our homes, localities, and regions. Most of us feel an organic and natural sense of belonging and unity with our immediate families. If we happen across someone while traveling who is from the same small town, we feel a unique sense of camaraderie. Cialdini observes that the language and imagery of kinship is often used to create and strengthen bonds between individuals who share no genetic connection. 

Collectives that create a sense of “we”-ness among their members are characterized by the use of familial images and labels--such as “brothers,” “sisterhood,” “forefathers,” “motherland,” “ancestry,” “legacy,” “heritage,” and the like--which lead to an increased willingness to sacrifice one’s own interests for the welfare of the group.” (382)

Scripture uses this language throughout the New Testament when it refers to the Church. We are brothers and sisters (Heb. 10:19), adopted children of God our Father (Rom. 8:15), the bride of Christ (Eph 5:22-33), members of the household of God and citizens of a new kingdom (Eph 2:19). But this is no mere influence tactic, imagery employed to inculcate our loyalty to a system of belief. This belonging is our new spiritual reality, realer than real. The blood of Christ is thicker than the water of the womb. The water of baptism ought to shape our identity more deeply than the blood of kinship or the land on which we were born.

Acting together also leads to feelings of unity. Cialdini identifies four practices that are especially potent builders of unity: music, repeated reciprocal exchange, suffering together, and co-creation. I was struck by how each of these practices are not only included in the life of the Church, but integral to our communal faith.

• “Be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart.” (Eph. 5:18-19)

• “Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed.” (James 5:16)

• “If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.” (1 Cor. 12:26)

• “According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building upon it. Let each one take care how he builds upon it. For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” (1 Cor. 3:10-11)

But unlike those who would manipulate these practices to produce a feeling of unity, the Church is called to act in these ways as an overflow of the unity God has already worked in us. The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the church at Ephesus, emphasizes that unity among disciples is an ontological reality. Christ “has made us one” (2:14). Jews and Gentiles alike have been reconciled to God “in one body through the cross” (2:16). We are “fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” (2:19).

This mysterious union is not something we strive to achieve over time, a pinnacle of theological consensus and hours of social media debates. This reality is as true in Acts 2 with a few hundred disciples as it is in 2024 will millions of believers across thousands of nations and denominations and expressions of faith. In the same letter to the Ephesians the Apostle Paul explains how we should live out our unity, urging the church to be “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (4:3). “Put off your old man”, he says, the one given to divisiveness and greed and selfishness (4:22), and “put on your new man”, the one God is building to image himself in righteousness and holiness (4:24).

Our unity in Christ is not a lever of influence we wield to change ourselves or others; it is the foundation upon which we rest. If we see our unity rightly and live out of its truth, the Gospel’s influence will be evident in every other area we have covered in this series: choosing not to expect reciprocation, understanding when to leverage likability, following the Good Shepherd over social proof, modeling our authority after Jesus, allowing him to turn scarcity into surplus, and committing to change when conviction calls for it.

My thesis stands: Christians should be influencers; we should be those who submit themselves to the influence of Jesus, those born of water and the Spirit.

In pursuit of Beauty,

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