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

by Alan Noble

So, the mode that best describes our day-to-day experience is “survival.” Ask an honest parent, student, or employee and they’ll tell you that their goal for the day is to survive—to “get through the day,” or “make it through.” Existence is a thing to be tolerated; time is a burden to be carried. And while there are moments of joy, nobody seems to be actually flourishing—except on Instagram, which only makes us feel worse.

The advances in agriculture that afford us a tremendous variety of food at our table for very little cost also disconnect us from the seasons, the earth, and our neighbors.

Of course, plenty of people still live lives filled with pleasure and fun and even occasionally real joy. But I’d like to suggest that more often than not, our contentment with or optimism about modern life is only sustainable by denying our nature as persons, ignoring the suffering around us, dismissing the consequences of our lifestyles, distracting ourselves from our anxiety, or entertaining misplaced hope that experts will someday soon solve our problems.

Identifying the specific sins of a society has long been the way the church has prophetically challenged culture, from Paul’s critique of worshiping an “unknown god” to Augustine’s criticisms of luxury in Rome to the Reformation. And confronting these evils will require more (but not less) than “opting out” of sin individually. Christians have an obligation to promote a human culture, one that reflects the goodness of creation, the uniqueness of human persons as image bearers, and Christ’s love.

In fact, 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.

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.

If I belong to myself, then I am the only one who can set limits on who I am or what I can do. No one else has the right to define me, to choose my journey in life, or to assure me that I am okay. I belong to myself.

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. But because everyone else is also working frantically to craft and express their own identity, society becomes a space of vicious competition between individuals vying for attention, meaning, and significance, not unlike the contrived drama of reality TV.

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.

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.

Self-medicating is the norm in our society. Because if we don’t medicate, we’re not sure we can get through the day.

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.

An anthropology defined by our belonging to God is diametrically opposed to the contemporary belief that we are autonomous, free, atomistic individuals who find our greatest fulfillment in breaking free from all external norms. Our selves belong to God, and we are joyfully limited and restrained by the obligations, virtues, and love that naturally come from this belonging.

and that belonging is not merely a doctrine, but a reality that touches every aspect of our lives.

the pressure to work longer hours, develop a social media brand, and constantly improve their lifestyle, all while being inundated with warnings about debts, injustices, crime, and health. A life of unending and unrewarded competition and self-improvement through increased efficiency and optimization is overwhelming, depressing, and unsatisfying. This is not what we were made for, and we know it, but rather than confront the problem, we blame ourselves and work harder.

The products we find on the shelf in the market have almost no sense of being made by someone. They appear like manna, miraculously created, sealed, and delivered for our satisfaction. When we finish using the product, we merely throw the plastic container in a bin and it disappears, like magic.

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.

Human life is simply too hard and too miraculous to lack a purpose.

We are more than cogs in a machine because we are capable of acting irrationally.

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.

My point here is that married adults in the West have the relatively common experience of waking up one day and concluding the roles, relationships, obligations, and lifestyles that once defined their identity are no longer fulfilling. And in that moment, a modern person can come to feel that it would be immoral not to follow this new, truer identity—even if it hurts many people around them. Of course, if we really are responsible for discovering and expressing our identity, the moral pressure to be true to yourself regardless of how it affects others makes perfect sense.

But self-knowledge is a byproduct of knowing God; it is not the goal.

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

When your identity requires public recognition and affirmation, you can never really stop expressing yourself. No person is significant enough to permanently ground your identity with their gaze of approval, although we sometimes allow ourselves to think so.

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.

You have probably heard someone make a moral claim based explicitly on the way it makes them feel, and perhaps you thought they were being overly sensitive or emotional. But MacIntyre argues that most of us are operating as emotivists; even when we appeal to “impersonal criteria,” it is a mask to cover our personal preferences. And if we belong to ourselves, all we ever have is our own perspective, whether expressed explicitly or behind a mask of objective standards.

For example, some argue that regardless of questions of human dignity, prostitution should be legalized, because legalization will reduce violence and venereal diseases. As Steven Pinker has argued, “human dignity” is a squishy phrase used to smuggle in all kinds of baseless taboos and prohibitions.29 We can count the number of victims of sexual violence, but we can’t measure the loss in human dignity that occurs when a person sells their body. We can’t even agree that human dignity is a thing, or that prostitution is an affront to that dignity. If we are each responsible for our own moral laws, then we have no right to impose a value like “human dignity” on another person, even if we believe it’s for their own good. But measurable harm is a different matter altogether. Once you can quantitatively demonstrate the harmfulness of a behavior, then you can regulate it.

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.

After all, if I am completely responsible for my life, then the greatest moral failure would be for me to fail to pursue what I desire most. I owe it to myself to be happy, and I cannot rely on anyone else to provide that happiness. So I can only belong to my wife tentatively.

Leaving home to follow our vision of the good life is an essential part of our modern hero’s journey. In a traditional hero’s journey, the hero returns home after a period of testing and growth so that he can liberate or cure his home. But I don’t think we need to come home anymore. And if we do come home—if we do allow our community or hometown to have some pull on us—it’s only because we choose to let it.

But, if we are not in fact our own, then living “authentically” will not produce human flourishing, and a society that compels us to live “authentically” will only make us increasingly distressed, exhausted, and alienated.

Even though every other purchase you’ve made in life has failed to give you that sense of purpose and fullness, on some level, you still think, Maybe this time it will happen.

The modern person is aware of more suffering and injustice than a person living at any other time in history. That doesn’t mean that there is more suffering. In fact, according to some measures like violence and poverty, there is less suffering and injustice in the world than ever before. But we are exposed to all of it. Every horrific murder, rape, or kidnapping is national news, along with natural disasters, political corruption, famines, civil wars, bigotry, pandemics, and so on.

A problem with universal benevolence is that we are not universal; we are painfully finite. And yet it is not uncommon for people (especially on social media) to insist that you must care about everything.

The philosopher Michael Sandel associates this view with “luck egalitarian” philosophy.2 This conception of justice “bases our obligation to help those in need not on compassion or solidarity but on how they came to be needy in the first place.”

Rather than lead to a more just and compassionate society, we turn suffering into another arena for competition.

Wallace takes a step beyond the luck egalitarianism that Sandel finds so prominent in contemporary society. Instead of establishing when someone merits our compassion or aid, Wallace encourages us to treat them as if they merit it, because it’s technically possible that they do.

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.

The “well done” spoken by a parent to their child does not lose its importance with age. It only grows exponentially as we become more aware of the profound moral complexities of the adult world,

Then the word spoken from the parent, who we now realize is just as morally beleaguered as us, is no longer commensurate with the problem. We can try to reassure one another that we are good people, but it’s merely an analogical reassurance. 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.

So great is this role in society that large portions of our economy are entirely devoted to facilitating our personal quest for identity and self-expression. Hardly any product or service exists that does not intentionally express something about the consumer.

Every time we tell the world something about ourselves, it’s like putting a piece of a puzzle together. We feel a little more confident in our identity. When I announce my love of the band Fugazi on Twitter, I am both expressing something about myself and making that self more solid and definite. I give shape to my life by expressing it. The band Fugazi helps me express myself by giving me a style to identify with, and Twitter helps me know myself by providing a platform to announce my preferences. When you start to think about all the ways our society facilitates self-expression, it’s quite staggering.

There was only so much self-expression you could convey when a photograph required you to hold perfectly still for fifteen minutes. But today the possibilities are endless, and nearly effortless. The average preteen in America has the same basic tools for publicity that only the biggest Hollywood stars had sixty years ago.

Everyone wants to be affirmed. We desire to be looked directly in the eyes by some authority figure (a father, mother, teacher, God) and told that we are accepted and loved. The beauty (efficiency) of social media is that we can quantify affirmation.

our society is designed for humans who must define and express themselves.

Here is the challenge for modern people: we need experiences of meaning that feel like they resonate beyond us, beyond our heads, but we need them to remain optional. They can’t actually demand us to interpret the experience in a specific way.

We want that feeling of rejection or loneliness or alienation to resonate, to be as big and objective as it feels inside of us. Powerful creative works give a sense of reality to the way we interpret the world.

For a non-trivial number of self-identified evangelicals, I suspect church pragmatically fills this function. Membership at a church can provide you with a place to belong in a community, a way of interpreting everything from the daily rhythms of life to politics and global events. It can also help you define yourself. 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 must be said, however, that far too many churches have adopted the contemporary anthropology. They assume that we are our own and provide us with options for meaning and identity like any other community.

The great danger in allowing a community to aid you in discovering meaning is that at some point the community is going to overstep its bounds and try to enforce meaning. Perhaps you attend a church because it “feels like home.” You appreciate that the church community shares many of your own political attitudes. But then one Sunday morning the pastor denounces as sin some behavior that you hold quite dear. You are likely to feel betrayed by the community and leave to find one that actually “feels like home.” Belonging in a community is contingent on fitting with the way you interpret the world. A church (or any other institution or community) can help you with the Responsibilities of Self-Belonging so long as it does not infringe on your self-belonging. But when it does, there is always another community ready to welcome you.