A Counter-Cultural Prayer for Seeking Identity: God, Make Me Less Like Myself
CARS OF LOS ANGELES & THE RELIGION OF SELF
“I AM MEE” the license plate on the Toyota Prius in front of me cries out gleefully, breaking the monotony of my long journey home through L.A. afternoon traffic. The license plate seemed rather pleased to know itself. And to help me know it knew it was itself.
Its gleeful exclamation of self-insight now reminds me of another car I’d seen the day before in downtown Los Angeles, its tinted windows adorned in pastel car paint expressing a similar exclamation:
“BASICALLY, I’M ME,” the car’s rear window declared in boisterous pink lettering followed by:
“I’M A B*TCH,
SO…
GET YOUR F*CKING HANDS OFF MY UTERUS.”
How exactly this person’s being a self-acclaimed b*tch (their words, not mine) translated to their self-proclaimed passion for pro-choice ethics, I don’t know. But…who am I to connect someone else’s dots? And who are you? They were being they: which, in this case, meant being loudly angry and irreverent toward their political enemies via pastel pink car paint. They were being how they felt, which in a place like L.A. is equivalent to being themselves. And being oneself is the chief virtue here.
This poses a question: Is being myself the best way to be me?
Take but a short drive in the bustling west coast mecca of Los Angeles and you’ll see most people certainly seem to think the answer to this question is yes. The entire city, from storm drain to skyscraper, is wallpapered in a religion of Self. Like a sacred metropolis temple whose resident god is named, The Authentic You.
Signs. Billboards. Street Murals. License plates. Social feeds. Cars. Clothes. Skin. Every surface proclaims the city’s core doctrine: Self is divine.
Which begs more questions:
Q: How does one live out this doctrine? And what are its core disciplines?
A: Becoming your Authentic Self via the disciplines of self-exploration, self-acceptance, and self-expression. This is how faithful adherents to the Self religion live out their core doctrine.
Q: What’s the ultimate goal, the ultimate vision of this doctrine?
A: Creating personal and social utopia, as defined by unlimited self-liberation. This is the grand vision living in the heart of any person faithfully following the religion of Self.
Total freedom to be totally you.
THE WEST’S OPTIMISTIC, NAÏVE HUMANISM
The central idea forming the bedrock for this religion of Self found so frequently in post-Christian Western settings like L.A. is optimistic humanism — a view owing its roots to Christianity’s belief that humans were created in God’s image and, therefore, are all equally deserving of dignity. Humanism itself isn’t bad; at its core it’s really just a favorable, loving outlook on humanity. We humans are lovely. Humanity is a good thing! And, truly, Christians agree on that. God himself agrees on that.
Humanism’s problem is not its love for humans. In fact, at times Christians can learn (or re-learn) much about what love tangibly looks like in our communities from people who view the world through the lens of Western optimistic humanism. Too often the Church’s love for people has been outmatched by its secular humanist neighbors.
Rather, the problem is what humanism becomes when its love for humans is dislodged from a fully orbed biblical worldview.
When untethered from the teachings of indwelling Sin and Salvation through faith in Christ alone, humanism destabilizes and twists into a new idolatry. It becomes an idolatrous worldview that, in its well-meaning endeavor to love people the way they are and the way they deserve, winds up converting sincere optimism about humanity to dangerous naivete about the human condition. Then, love becomes worship, and people become gods. What happens from there? Post-Christian humanism puts its hope in a new kind of salvation. It replaces humanity’s need to receive the love and rescue of a Savior with, instead, the need to journey inward on a pilgrimage of self-discovery in hopes of finding what we now trust in place of God to save us — my own love for me.
Salvation by self-discovery and self-love. Self, not Christ, is Messiah.
This is what optimistic humanism inevitably becomes when it snips its ties to God and climbs into bed with two other dominant traits in Western culture:
Radical individualism: Life’s ultimate meaning rests within each individual’s personal experience, and each individual is their own best authority to determine what meaning they most want in life.
Therapeutic pluralism: All worldviews (religious and non) are subjective and therefore equal, so individuals should pick the one (or ones) that maximize their good feelings and good experiences in life.
In view of this, it comes as no surprise that the culture in Los Angeles lectures you with every colorful billboard, license plate, and street mural about finding yourself. Self is the goal, the highest good, the path to social utopia. Optimistic humanism assumes the following flow of thought:
Humans are born inherently innocent and truthful. There is no fundamental human problem like Sin. People only become bad through exposure to negative environments and experiences. In other words, bad vibes make bad people, not the other way around. If bad vibes are the chicken and bad people the egg, Western culture thinks the chicken came first.
Therefore, the key to social progress and personal happiness is found in connecting people to their innocent Authentic Selves. To do this, people must untangle themselves from things that stifle self-discovery and repress self-expression. This includes detaching from unwanted life commitments, deconstructing external narratives of right and wrong, and releasing oneself from accountability to any life authority outside themselves, like God and organized religion for example. These things are oppressive. They hinder self-discovery, prevent self-acceptance, and repress self-love.
Your feelings will guide you back to your authentic Self. Because you’re born inherently innocent and truthful, your truest “You” is the person your raw emotions, unfiltered desires, and gut instincts tell you is “You.” Your own vibes are your True North. Freedom is found, therefore, by increasingly surrendering to your Authentic Self, as defined by exploring and obeying your unfiltered feelings.
Finally, self-discovery and self-love are the noblest endeavors because the best gift I can give the world is to be fully and authentically Me.
All of this, of course, looks fantastic on a billboard. The social optics of statements like “good vibes only” and “just be you” are sparkling clean and sure to boost your likability. On top of that, this worldview also feels great on a minute-by-minute approach to life. It de-stresses daily life because it makes a virtue of simply acting like yourself, however your fluid self happens to be feeling at the time — whether that’s happy-go-lucky, or like a fiery, self-acclaimed B*tch on a pro-choice political warpath.
Embracing and expressing you is your greatest gift to the world.
ON TRUE IDENTITY: THE NATURAL YOU IS NOT THE AUTHENTIC YOU
Christianity teaches something cataclysmically opposite, however. A person’s greatest gift to the world is to die to one’s natural self, Christ teaches, not to embrace and express it.
While certain biblical teachings — like inherent human dignity, for example, and how we’re all beautifully unique, for another — may seem similar on the surface to post-Christian humanism, once you pop open the hood and compare the two worldviews, any perceived similarities instantly reveal themselves to at best be superficial. Though Christianity and post-Christian culture both set people on a journey toward discovering their true Selves, the two worldviews have radically different ideas about how that journey works and where it leads a person.
Ultimately, Christianity teaches that the path to our Authentic Selves is ironically not found by exploring our Natural Selves. This is because Christianity locates authentic human identity in another place. A place outside and above our natural selves. Thus, to find one’s true identity, a person should not journey down their own rabbit hole, so to speak, for the only thing to be found down at the bottom of oneself is disorder and confusion. The sharp and poisoned fragments of a once-good creation now shattered under the corrosive effects of indwelling Sin, and in need of a cure neither you nor I can provide.
This is the biblical doctrine of the sinful Flesh, the tragic burden of fallen humanity. Because of the Fall, the “natural Self” we’re all born with has, from God’s perspective, become extremely unnatural. Our Flesh is irreversibly rogue and untrustworthy, capable only of lying and resisting God. The result, again from God’s perspective, is that your Natural Self is no longer your Authentic Self. As Jeremiah laments, “the human heart is deceitful above all things, beyond cure.” And as Paul mourns, “the Flesh wages war against the Spirit,” leading us to do precisely what we don’t want to do and not do precisely what we wish we would.
Thus, contrary to Western humanism’s belief, the person my raw emotions, unfiltered desires, and gut instincts tell me is Me, is not actually me. This is because my raw emotions, unfiltered desires, and gut instincts all belong to the Old Self — the Flesh — who is an intruder. An irreversibly harmed and harmful creature, both already dead and still dying, bent on taking me down to the grave with it. Not at all, in other words, a wellspring of anything pure or lifegiving like the billboards in Los Angeles suggest.
On the contrary, my true Authentic Self — the lifegiving identity to which God invites me — is found not by journeying inward but by gazing upward.
“Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.” – Colossians 3:1-3
This is the project of resurrection life in Christ’s upside-down Kingdom: to reject what’s natural in favor of something better. Thus, in a way, the more a person follows Christ, the more a stranger to their natural selves they become.
To post-Christian Western culture, of course, this sounds like a nightmare. A recipe for frustration, unfulfillment, and oppression. The greatest fathomable heresy to the religion of Self.
But to those who’ve tasted Christ’s Kingdom, this is actually freedom, to recognize your old self less and less. This is liberty, to become a stranger to oneself. Because as we grow in Christ, we come to see that it was our very selves whom we were slave to all along. Our very selves that were the source of oppression in our lives.
Who was this natural Jon Campbell? This child who’d rather waste hours playing video games than praying? This former addict who’d rather re-surrender to an old pornography addiction than live in perpetual recovery? This insecure soul who needs constant achievement and affirmation to feel the smallest drop of peace? This vain mope who stares at himself in the mirror because he has body image issues? This change-resistant character who’d rather treat my personality type like a prison than a set of circumstances to master? This fearful homebody who’d rather hide in safety and predictability than obey Christ’s leading?
No dear friends, this natural Jon Campbell is not at all who I want to be. Nor is it the version of me Christ beckons me to become. And the days I act most like that natural Me — surrendering to myself and obeying every instinctive thought and inclination that naturally bubbles up in me — ironically are the days I’m least fulfilled and least sure of who I am. They are the days I feel lost at sea. Identity-less. Formless and void, like the universe before it met God.
A COUNTER-CULTURAL PRAYER FOR FINDING IDENTITY
So, back to the initial question — is being myself the best way to be me?
Jesus’s humble yet emphatic answer is, No. A resounding, self-effacing, No.
This is a great paradox, something only a killed-yet-living King who teaches that the path to life is through death could invent. The more like me I am, the less me I become. Following my instinctive feelings and gut desires leads me away from my true, Authentic Self, not towards it.
On the contrary, the days I am most satisfied, the most secure in my own identity, are the days I have acted least like my natural self. The days I have lived the exact opposite of the way Western culture’s religion of Self teaches:
The days I have sacrificed, crucified, and died to myself.
The days I’ve said, “Nah, Netflix. Bump you. I’m gonna pray for an hour instead.”
The days I’ve said, “Shutup, Personality. We’re doing this despite how you feel.”
The days I’ve said, “Hush, Fear. You’re dumb. God is faithful; we’re gonna trust him.”
The days I’ve said, “Pipe down, Natural Jon. You’re not in charge of you.”
This is why, while living in a city wallpapered in a religion of Self, inside a metropolis Temple whose resident god is Me, my most counter-cultural prayer for discovering who I truly am is this:
God,
Make me less like myself.
Help me not be me.
I need to become someone more than I naturally am.
Help me, lead me into the excitement and joy of life lived gazing, not inward, but heavenward.
Make me a stranger to myself,
A pilgrim on a different path,
A citizen, not of my own kingdom,
but of Yours.
