As I wrote below, to find success in our culture is not to find one’s place in the group, but to transcend it. I was reading a recent Touchstone article (‘Unmarried, Still Children” by Joan Frawley Desmond) and the author quotes Jeffrey Arnett’s recent work Emerging Adulthood, where Arnett says that those in their late teens and twenties define adulthood as “accepting responsibility for the consequences of your actions,” and choosing “personal beliefs and values independently of parents or other influences.”
Even the old Lutheran Hiedelberg Catechism, while emphasizing strongly individual salvation and individual justification says,
Question 54. What believest thou concerning the “holy catholic church” of Christ?
Answer: That the Son of God from the beginning to the end of the world, gathers, defends, and preserves to himself by his Spirit and word, out of the whole human race, a church chosen to everlasting life, agreeing in true faith; and that I am and forever shall remain, a living member thereof.