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

by Alan Noble

if everyone in America started attending church, I doubt that any of the major issues facing our society would be resolved. We’d probably find ourselves just as unwell and just as burned out. The only real difference is that we’d have an evangelical spin to our counseling and our programs of self-improvement. For you see, Christians in America are carriers of contemporary disease too. Like the rest of western society, the church in the West tends to be good at helping people cope with modern life, but not at undoing the disorder of modern life.

Some of us respond to this competition by rising to the challenge and submitting to the tyranny of self-improvement, which demands constant optimizing, always making healthier choices, always discovering ways to be and do and work better. In chapter three, I will refer to this group as the Affirming because their basic posture toward society is one of affirmation. Others, a group I’ll call the Resigned, accept that they will never be able to successfully compete and turn to the allure of despair, killing time with immersive entertainment until death comes or circumstances change. For both the Affirming and the Resigned, life is marked by unrestrained desire and consumption. Either we desire ever greater heights of self-mastery and excellence, or ever more entertainment and pleasure (or both). The market is happy to aid us in these quests. But unlimited desire and consumption always leave us exhausted and empty. There is always more to buy, always some way to improve, always something else to watch, always something else to try. To cope with our exhaustion and emptiness, we self-medicate. Some drink, some take

The great difficulty is that if we are our own, then our moral horizons cannot be given, only chosen. And that means that the only assurance we can ever have that we are living morally must come from within ourselves. No one can absolve you or pardon you. As we’ll see in the next chapter, the best other people can do is offer their opinion. Similarly, no one has the right or ability to tell you what your life means, why it matters, or what your purpose is. Of course, a lot of people have suggestions. They may even be quite forceful in persuading you to devote your life to the environment or to healthy living or to some god, but these are always mere suggestions. If your life is your own, nobody can decide why your life matters except you. You have to live your truth. Again, this is both exciting and frightening. It means we don’t have to follow in our parents’ footsteps. We don’t have to adopt our community’s values or its vision of the good life. We are free to discover the meaning of our own life—but we’re also burdened to discover it. We can only ignore the question for so long before we break down. At one point or another life will become so difficult and painful that the only way we’ll be able to keep going is by telling ourselves that we have a purpose. We are going somewhere with our life, and that matters.

People haven’t always experienced identity crises as normal. In fact, where modern people suffer from identity crises, earlier societies suffered spiritual crises. The best example of this is Dante’s The Divine Comedy, which famously begins: “Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself / In dark woods, the right road lost.”17 One reason these lines have resonated with readers for centuries is that the poet is describing a common human experience: waking up halfway into life only to discover you are lost. Perhaps you wake up one morning questioning whether your life is worth living. Or you might wake up wondering who you are. Regardless, the image of suddenly discovering that you are off the “right road” and lost in the “dark woods” is a resonate one. But the “right road” meant something different to Dante than it does to us today. Dante has not lost his identity; he is not confused about who he is. He has lost his spiritual vision.

For Dante in the fourteenth century, the question was not “Who am I?” but “Who is God?” and “How can I grow in Christlikeness?” The Divine Comedy describes one man’s efforts to know God, but it is also the poet’s way of describing the spiritual journey that everyone must take. In the process of knowing God, Dante learns more and more about himself, about his sins, and the ways God has blessed him. But self-knowledge is a byproduct of knowing God; it is not the goal. The goal is to know God and become like him.

On one hand there is the pull of autonomy: “I am my own; only I can define myself; it doesn’t matter how other people see me, only how I see myself.” But on the other hand, there is the pull for recognition that is inherently a part of identity: “People must acknowledge me for who I am and see me how I desire to be seen.” A teenager listens to music that reflects and expresses her personality to other people, even though the lyrics are explicitly about rejecting the judgments and opinions of other people. A middle-aged man wears a shirt that reads, “Only God can judge me,” but clearly wants you to judge him based on his shirt. We strive to independently define our identity, but we are always dependent upon others for the recognition of that identity.

The real thing can only come from a source of moral judgment, from someone who defines the horizon of moral action. And if we are our own, we ourselves are that source of moral judgment.

being seen is such a basic desire for modern people that you’d have to work very hard not to be 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.

It should seem odd to us that managers can openly admit to treating their employees humanely primarily to increase profits (especially because it raises the question of what they’ll do when humane policies decrease profits), but we’ve become so deeply committed to technique that none of this phases us. Actually, knowing that family leave will increase our productivity and, therefore, benefit the company may ease our conscience about using the benefit. We don’t need to feel guilty about using paid family leave if we know it will benefit our employer in the long run!

When the rest of the world feels like a tooth-and-nail fight for supremacy, when it feels like everyone is always jockeying for position or fame or power or attention, low-stakes competitions can help us cope by giving us small fields of victory. Think of it this way. If you are crippled with anxiety over the prospect of having to find a good and meaningful job, playing Fortnite lets you exercise your competitiveness without actually risking much—except your time. The same could be said for fantasy football and a million different mindless mobile games. Then there is also the highly competitive nature of social media with very public records of the popularity of individuals and their posts. Again, all of these things are “tiny and meaningless and—sad-making,” but they help us get through the day by diverting us from higher-stakes competitions. In the end, the man who self-medicates through counseling, antidepressants, exercise, and shopping therapy is just as desperate to cope as the man who self-medicates through Fortnite and the NFL and marijuana. The only difference is that one form of self-medication is socially acceptable and the other is stigmatized.