You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

by Alan Noble

When we accept how deeply dysfunctional our world is, contentment isn’t really an option for us. We can still be grateful to God for His love and grace, but we can’t be content with the disorder of our human society.

To the young man struggling with addiction to porn, we offer a thin image of the gospel, self-discipline, and grace (hopefully), but the systemic objectification of bodies, the cultural glorification of sex and romance as a means of existential justification, and the anxieties and inadequacies that often drive porn use go largely unaddressed and even unacknowledged.

But the freedom of sovereign individualism comes at a great price. Once I am liberated from all social, moral, natural, and religious values, I become responsible for the meaning of my own life. With no God to judge or justify me, I have to be my own judge and redeemer. This burden manifests as a desperate need to justify our lives through identity crafting and expression.

This is the fundamental lie of modernity: that we are our own. Until we see this lie for what it is, until we work to uproot it from our culture and replant a conception of human persons as belonging to God and not ourselves, most of our efforts at improving the world will be glorified Band-Aids.

I recommend to you Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos and The Moviegoer, C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and Choruses from “The Rock,” Capitalism and Progress: A Diagnosis of Western Society by Bob Goudzwaard, OK Computer by Radiohead, The Weariness of the Self by Alain Ehrenberg, Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity, Patrick J. Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Wendell Berry, Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, and so on.

Just like the lion, our anxiety stems from living in an environment that was not actually made for us—for humans as we truly are.

We’ve created a society based on the assumption that we are our own and belong to ourselves. But if this anthropology is fundamentally wrong, then we should expect people to suffer from their malformed habitat. And that is precisely what we discover. The difference between us and the lion is that we are more successful at treating our zoochosis and adapting to our environment. We don’t mind pacing back and forth, especially if we can listen to a podcast while we do.

If I am my own and belong to myself, the first and most significant implication is that I am wholly responsible for my life. This is both an exhilarating and terrifying thought. And it’s not just that I am responsible for my personal survival, for food and shelter and so on. I also need a reason to live. I need purpose and direction. I need some way to know when I am failing at life and when I am succeeding, when I am living ethically and when I am not. I must have some way of determining on my deathbed that I lived a good, full life.

But self-knowledge is a byproduct of knowing God; it is not the goal. The goal is to know God and become like him.

We strive to independently define our identity, but we are always dependent upon others for the recognition of that identity.

No one has the right to define me, but in order to have an identity, I need them to see and affirm me.

Everyone is on their own private journey of self-discovery and self-expression, so that at times, modern life feels like billions of people in the same room shouting their own name so that everyone else knows they exist and who they are—which is a fairly accurate description of social media.

The loss of objective morality does not lead to violence, but it does lead to consequentialism.

Even Christians, who ought to believe in an objective moral law revealed by God, tend to rely heavily on data and evidence-based arguments. It just feels natural in our society. And I think it feels natural because Christians, like everyone else, tend to think of themselves as autonomous. And among autonomous individuals, the language of numbers is the surest foundation for morality.

but properly understood, biology merely explains why things are. It can’t tell us how things ought to be.

there is another to whom we belong, and living before Him frees us from the unbearable burden of self-belonging.

While I do not believe that existentialism has had a significant direct influence upon our society, it seems clear that a kind of latent, unacknowledged existentialism is the defining philosophy for our time: we come to feel that our existence is the only thing we can truly know, and to live authentically to that existence means to choose our identity. It’s not that people are reading Sartre and becoming convinced of his arguments. Instead, we naturally adopt our society’s understanding of the human person as we grow up in society, and that understanding leads to a kind of existentialist outlook.

a standard implies an obligation to follow while models are optional.

Here are the two primary frameworks society offers us for trying to meet the demands of universal benevolence. Either we believe that we are good people because we identify and aid those who are most disadvantaged, or we are good people because we act as if people are disadvantaged and deserve our aid. At the heart of both frameworks is the assumption that compassion, desiring the good of others, is something that is merited. And each of us is responsible for judging that merit.

seen. Privacy is hard to maintain, not only because corporations want to use your information to sell you more stuff, but also because society assumes you want to express your identity. Self-expression is the default. Privacy is the anomaly.

we want our experience of loss to mean something beyond our head. We want that feeling of rejection or loneliness or alienation to resonate, to be as big and objective as it feels inside of us.

At their best, local churches remind us that we are not our own but belong to God, and in so doing, they disrupt contemporary understandings of meaning and identity.

It has never been easier to be socially “connected” to people without the necessity of actually connecting with people.

Pornography assumes that we are each our own and belong to ourselves. It’s a tool that promises to give us a kind of personal validation, a sense of identity, a taste of meaningfulness, and a glimpse of intimate belonging. But by its own logic, pornography, like modernity, is an empty promise. Rather than helping us meet our responsibilities and cope with an inhuman world, it exacerbates our condition. Rather than bringing us closer to our humanity, it dehumanizes at every turn, turning our intimacy into instrumentality and leaving us addicted, depressed, exhausted, lonely, and bored—which also happens to be an accurate description of our society in general.

contemporary pornography puts the individual user at the center of the universe.

We can consume the most intimate human experience, taking in image after image after image, amassing a collection of human intimacy so vast and diverse that you come to feel that by rights you should have access to anyone’s body for your own pleasure.

This is the unspoken logic of pornography: this beautiful, unique human is giving themself to me, exposing themself intimately for me, and so I must matter.

The darkest part of the unspoken logic of pornography is the idea that the porn actors are free, consensual, aware, liberated individuals, using their freedom to express themselves, make money, and please others. Because they are their own and belong to themselves, they are free to treat their body, their intimate personhood, as a tool, a commodity, to objectify it and use it instrumentally for personal gain.

porn doesn’t ask users to adopt new or different ideas of choice, consumption, and identity. It’s the very same dynamic of choice we have practiced our entire lives.

One reason society fails to fulfill its promise is that a society premised on the sovereign self has no discernable ends, only an ever expanding and ever demanding number of means.

To be true to yourself is categorically different from being true in an empirical or logical sense because there is no external or objective way to judge or reassure ourselves. How can you ever be sure that you are being true to yourself? How can you ever know if you are being authentic? You are utterly alone in your judgment—sovereign, but alone. And to make matters worse, you cannot trust yourself.

Because we have taught our children that we live in a meritocracy where the winners are responsible for their success and the losers are responsible for their failure, all of life becomes part of the game. At every stage, our children are either improving and developing, working toward an impressive college application and resumé, or they are falling behind.

that almost all our interactions are framed in some way as a competition, often aided by technology

The very presence of metrics invited me to measure myself against my past efforts and those of others.

I have access to metrics on the time I spend on specific apps, how many hours of Netflix I’ve watched, how many steps I’ve taken, how many floors I’ve climbed, how many hours I slept last night, how many tweets I’ve posted, how many likes I’ve received, how my income compares to others, the current value of my home, my credit score, my bank balance, my weight, my unread messages, and so on. Each metric nudges me to compare myself with others and improve. Taken individually, many of these data points are healthy and helpful, but collectively they overwhelm us with the sense that all of life is essentially a competition.

The first murder in the Bible resulted from a competition between two brothers, one of whom didn’t acknowledge they were competing, while the other saw only competition.

A society committed to the belief that we are our own and belong to ourselves will develop into a hypercompetitive society, one in which we all must fight for survival, validation, meaning, attention, and affirmation.

“I am my own,” they say. “I belong to myself. Society is sufficiently ordered for me to achieve my desires, express my identity, and become my true self. And wherever society is disordered, I can involve myself in the grand project of progress, so that if I cannot exactly become my true self, I can at least get closer and closer over time while laying the foundations for others to succeed where I was prevented.”

The resigned recognize and feel the Responsibilities of Self-Belonging just as much as the affirming, but they only recognize them in resignation: “I am only ever my own,” they say. “Although it promises to, society will not provide me with the tools I need to achieve my desires, express my identity, and become my true self. The system is broken. The cards are stacked against me. But I can perhaps still discover moments of pleasure that make life worth living.”

They don’t choose to tap out of life because they think winning is meaningless. They tap out because they are taught that winning means everything and they cannot envision any path to winning.

Rather than failing to accept responsibility, the resigned have reasonably concluded that the best way for them to accept their Responsibilities of Self-Belonging is to find an alternative space to pursue existential justification.

Seen this way, the resigned are actually very self-reliant. They rightly see that their only true obligation is to make their own life meaningful, not to meet some broader cultural norm of success.

Resignation has the greater pull on us because the anthropology that shapes our society presents no actual ends for human existence, no purpose, only an increasing number of means.

If you’re responsible for meaning in your life, you can never cease the labor of creating and sustaining moments of significance.

“Becoming ourselves made us nervous, being ourselves makes us depressed. The anxiety of being oneself hides behind the weariness of the self.”

the more choices you have, the more anxiety you experience.

But what if you had to buy one endlessly replenishing box of cereal that you would eat from for the rest of your life? Or what if you could only change your cereal at a tremendous cost: you lose 75 percent of your friends and you must move 100 miles away. Oh, and everyone you meet will judge you on your choice of cereal. Under these conditions, choosing between options is not a matter of prudence, but an existential burden.

Our lives are our own responsibility, it’s our own fault if we make nothing of ourselves, and the easiest way to make nothing of ourselves is to choose the wrong career. Everything hangs in the balance.

one of the primary causes of suicide is not suffering but disequilibrium. When societal values rapidly change, including economic values, people lose the ability to clearly evaluate their lives.

“Unlimited desires are insatiable by definition and insatiability is rightly considered a sign of morbidity. Being unlimited, they constantly and infinitely surpass the means at their command; they cannot be quenched. Inextinguishable thirst is constantly renewed torture.”