On Thursday in anticipation of our imminent move to small town Wyoming, my wife and I needed to do a bit of shopping and so we went to Tyson’s Corner Center, a huge shopping mall here in Northern Virginia. The mall’s tagline is “Where the Stores Are,” but as I wandered through looking at the people around me, “Where the Zombies Are,” strikes me as more apt.

I was nearly run over by quite a few people staring at their smart phones rather than watching where they were going. I saw parents with children in tow staring at smart phones. Couples walked together as both stared at smart phones. Sales people on break had their noses to smart phones. Sales people on duty sneaked peeks at smart phones. And mea culpa, I responded with Pavlovian regularity to the pings going off in my pocket as well.

Rather than living in the here and now, we all seem to prefer living in the timeless, placeless and ultimately phony world of the Internet. Not that the here and now at the mall was too enticing.

I guess people were buying stuff as they lumbered from store to store, but no one appeared happy about it. Both buyers and sellers went through the ritual of exchanging plastic for goods with grim resignation. Boredom hung over the sea of commerce.

And why are William-Sonoma employees all wearing gay pride buttons on their aprons? Is it just a function of a corporate headquarters in San Francisco or do they think it will drive sales? Do the employees in their other stores — Pottery Barn, West Elm and others — have similar buttons? Are the sales people wearing the buttons because they support gay rights or are they simply doing as they’re told, going through the motions in good zombie fashion?

One last question: Does William-Sonoma sell anything I can’t purchase elsewhere? That’s easy: No.

When Mark Dice asked random people in San Diego about the Fourth of July, most talked about partying, fireworks and gathering with friends and family. When asked what country we won our independence from, few knew the answer. As he pushed the envelope by saying we won independence from China and that John Wilkes Booth and Jessie Ventura were Founding Fathers, it raised no red flags. There would, however, be plenty of partying, alcohol, drugs and fireworks to celebrate whatever it was.

Zombies in the mall, gay pride at William-Sonoma and Americans with no clue about even the rudiments of our history are in large measure the result of our extreme individualism. People wandering shopping malls staring into handheld screens even when they are accompanied by actual humans, bored consumerism, approval of any and almost every choice and historical ignorance are just what we’d expect if there is no collective cultural imagination and no meaningful community between atomized individual.

As Yuval Levin writes in The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism, “Individualism involves the corrosion of people’s sense of themselves as defined by a variety of strong affiliations and unchosen bonds and replacement by a sense that all connections are matters of individual choice and preference. It breaks up clusters of people into more isolated individuals held together by more casual affinities and more utilitarian relationships — each best understood in relation to the needs and wants of the individual.”

Does individualism plus affluence plus choice plus partying make people happy? Does it lead to human flourishing? Does it satisfy? Of course not as an hour people watching at the mall or a conversation in the office or across the back fence will make clear.

Yet our neighbors — and I suspect too many in the Church — are stuck in the rut of an individualistic worldview with its melancholy results. Human flourishing is the result of vibrant communities and we won’t establish without a change of worldview or, better yet, a revolution in worldview.

In 1818 as he look back at the War for Independence (from England in case someone is still flummoxed), Founding Father and our second president John Adams wrote, “The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations … This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution.” That is, it began with a changed worldview.

Given the zombies at the mall, at universities, at offices and throughout our neighborhood, we require nothing less today. And if that doesn’t start in the minds and hearts of Christians, I fear it will not start at all.