People Don’t Know Who They Are
If you have time to read only one book this year on the roots of today’s cultural chaos, you might want to pick up a copy of Carl Trueman’s Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution. A church historian and professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College, Trueman examines the philosophical, technological, and historical forces that drive identity politics and the confusion we feel about what it means to be human.
Lights will go on as you read about the influence of figures like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrick Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud and their ideas regarding the human condition, ideas that for most of history would have been dismissed as lunacy. If the book sounds like difficult reading, it’s not, because Trueman does a masterful job of writing for readers who may have little background in history or philosophy.
Trueman explains two rivers of thought that have transformed the way we conceive of the modern self. The first is called expressive individualism, the belief that my authentic self can only be actualized if I act in concert with my innermost feelings. No longer tied to family, faith, or the place in which I live, identity has become fluid rather than fixed. Nobody, not even God, can tell me who I am. I, and I alone, discover and define myself.
The second river of thought, courtesy, at least to some degree, of Sigmund Freud and another psychoanalyst by the name of William Reich, places sexual desire at the center of human identity. Hence the vital importance of identifying one’s sexual orientation, as in straight, gay, lesbian, trans, or whatever. Should anyone impugn my identity by failing to affirm it, they are guilty, not just of disagreeing with a certain set of behaviors, but of rejecting my innermost self. That helps explain the outrage directed at whoever might disagree with the trans lobby, which can never settle for mere tolerance but must have complete affirmation.
It may be no surprise that a male (Sigmund Freud) invented the idea that sexual pleasure constitutes the highest form of human happiness. But at the end of the day all the sexual pleasure in the world will never tell you who you are. Neither will it make you happy, good, or emotionally whole. How can sexual appetite answer questions about the meaning of life? What if Freud had fixated on the act of eating as the summit of all human happiness? Would our identities then be formed around becoming a gourmand or glutton? Would we develop surgical techniques to make our stomachs even larger than they are?
Or consider the idea that gender trumps biology. Remember that gender identity—the inner sense of one’s sexuality regardless of one’s biological sex--is a recent invention dependent for its widening influence on technological developments like puberty blockers and sex change surgery. How could an unproven theory dependent upon material innovation possibly answer existential questions?
Follow these identity narratives to their last bitter page and you will be left with a sense of meaninglessness, insecurity, and a crumbling sense of yourself and your place in the world.
Trueman’s book is illuminating. One surprising side-effect of reading it has been that it has increased my compassion for those caught up in the current confusion—especially people whose sexual and political beliefs and behaviors seem most outrageous and demanding. It has made me think of them as ships tossed about on impossibly high seas. That’s how powerful the forces are that are pushing our culture toward disintegration.
It also makes me think of the Scripture from Isaiah that says, “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way.”(53:6)
That surely described me as a college student caught up in the countercultural revolution that erupted in the 1960s. Longing for significance but not knowing where or to whom I belonged or what my reason for existing was, I embraced half truths that degraded my sense of who I was and why I existed. I see a similar kind of alienation now on the faces of many young people who are desperately trying to figure themselves out by embracing notions that place sexual desire at the very center of who they are.
The other surprising benefit of understanding the forces at play has been a rising sense of exhilaration in the face of our cultural decline. Why? Because human beings are hardwired for story. We can’t live well without a narrative by which to explain the world and our place in it. Shallow and flimsily constructed narratives like the ones that are trending now, will never provide satisfactory answers about the meaning of life and our place in it. Such narratives are likely to blow up as people try to live by them. In the fallout, many will find a better story to believe in. At least that is my hope, and my prayer.
Now think of the narrative that we live by as Christians. It begins in the first pages of the Bible, which tell us who we are—men and women of equal worth--created by a loving God. Creatures who are a mixture of flesh and spirit, an amalgam of dust and divine breath. Beings who exist for the supreme privilege of imaging God. These startling truths had to be told to us in the first book of the Bible because sin had rendered us senseless and forgetful. Post Eden, we no longer knew who we’d been created to be.
The most startling part of this narrative occurred when God became a human being. As the Christmas hymn says, “Long lay the world in sin and error pining, till he appeared and the soul felt its worth.”1 Now more than ever, human beings need to feel their worth. They need to know that they cannot be reduced to the strength of their sexual desires or the color of their skin. They need to know they are loved and worth fighting for. Worth dying for by God himself, in the person of Jesus Christ.
Often the most powerful telling of this great story comes through embodiment. Some of us have embodied the Jesus story in our own dramatic conversion to Christianity. Jesus drew us out of pits so deep that his light shines all the more brightly on our transfigured faces. But regardless of one’s conversion experience, we are all called to become little retellings of the Jesus story. As that happens, the sweetness and power of the Gospel will leak out of us and into the dying world.
But there is a counter witness that opposes the spread of the Jesus story right now. It’s one the media loves to tell—about a country rife with church scandals, corrupt leaders, and shallow Christianity. Our witness is also compromised by an unholy enmeshment of flag and cross that equates faith with patriotism and rightwing politics. It is further degraded by the harsh judgments of those among us who hate not just the sin but also the sinner. For these and more failings may God forgive us. May he purify, transform, and revive us.
Sinners though we are, we need to remember that we are also God’s beloved children. When we repent, he picks us up in his arms, forgives and heals us. Our witness will be strengthened to the degree that we understand this, to the degree that we have confidence that our magnificent identity as children of God can never be taken from us. As the renowned theologian and civil rights leader Howard Thurman once remarked, “The awareness of being a child of God tends to stabilize the ego and results in a new courage, fearlessness, and power. I have seen it happen again and again.”2
Despite our personal failings and the failings of the church, this is not the time to retreat. Neither is it the time to become fearful or depressed, as though God himself must be shocked by our cultural waywardness and mystified about what to do. Instead, this is the time for hope to rise, for courage and faith to enable us to tell the Story once again. Why? Because the cultural moment is ripe for the Gospel, the only narrative that is beautiful and powerful enough to tell us who we really are.
“O Holy Night,” Adolphe Adam
Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976), 39.
This is so good! I love what you are doing. So insightful and relevant!
Thanks Ann! Probably will not read it but thank you just the same! Agree with what you shared! Kris