The Cult of Identity
On the most prominent cult in the religious landscape of post-Christian paganism
As I wrote previously, I am attempting to provide religious description of contemporary culture, and I am using Paul Tillich’s definition of religion and his understanding of religion and culture. Tillich defines religion as “ultimate concern,” what we believe is most basic and final and that gives everything else meaning. He suggests that religion and culture relate like soul and body, which means that every culture is religious, so that we can look at a culture and ask, “What does this community believe concerns them ultimately?”
Additionally, relying on Robert Jenson, I said that Christianity’s doctrine of creation is a secularizing force: by asserting that the world is not even slightly divine, Christianity established the worldliness of the world, i.e., it establishes the secular. But if the culture is now post-Christian, then it is also “post-secular,” which means more than just the return of religion; it signifies the end of the worldliness of the world. That is, the world as a differentiated thing from what is ultimate. According to the Christian faith, the meaning of the world is not found in the world, but in God; for post-Christian paganism, the meaning of the world is located in the world.
Within the domain of this new religion there are many cults, and each of them retain Christian characteristics even as they move away from Christian assumptions. The most powerful today is the cult of identity.
Each of us are called upon to confess that we know and affirm the significance of identity. Most of us now make this confession without being prompted, but it was not always so. Twelve years ago, when I was just starting graduate school, certain professors encouraged us to acknowledge our “social location”; colleagues would preface contributions to class discussions by saying things like, “As an educated white woman from economic privilege…” I felt slight discomfort, sensing that there was something duplicitous about the notion that claims had merit, or lacked merit, because of who made them. What about the merit of the ideas themselves, which are based on sound premises, valid inferences, and faithful and fearless attention to evidence? Sometimes someone, usually a confused man, would raise this objection, and always get the same response: that all knowledge comes from a vantage point, that there is no vantage point from nowhere, that we all have biases, and—most importantly—that he was only asking the question because he was a man and was threatened by the prospect of losing privilege.
Whether or not we are familiar with the phrase, we have all been educated in and disciplined by “standpoint epistemology,” which is the idea that where a person stands socially either limits or expands what a person can know. Obviously, there is something right about this: people have both blind spots and insights because of life experience, and humble awareness of the limitations of one’s perspective is required of anyone who doesn’t want to be an idiot.
But what began as standpoint epistemology and identity politics—a phrase first used at the end of the 1970s to describe coalition building among interest groups like the disabled or women—has taken on a religious quality.
In order to be useful to identity politics, standpoint epistemology always had to undermine itself. My individual experience is unique; even though I am a man, a heterosexual, a father, a non-white person, an American, I remain a person with my own limitations and insights. Other men, other heterosexuals, other dads, other black people, and other Americans don’t necessarily see things as I see them, even when we might benefit from the same kinds of public policies or cultural attitudes. But if I were, for example, to make the fact of my maleness into the basis for a political coalition, and if I were to speak about the “male perspective” on a public matter, then I would have to ignore my own lived experience—that is, my own unique standpoint!—and would have to adopt the abstract perspective of “a man,” which can only be meaningful as a set of generalizations. In other words, when identity politics evolves from an interest-based coalition into a defined way of seeing the world, then a person’s individual identity—identity as a question of who I am—is supplanted by social identity markers—identity as a question of what I am—and necessarily becomes a definition of being in the world. And the logic is applied to others also: “It doesn’t matter that you grew up poor: you are a white man with white male privileged.”
When this shift happens, and people adopt an abstract identity to understand themselves and others, and when standpoint epistemology is stretched into saying that people can only know what is available to their abstract identity—“Men shouldn’t have opinions about issues that affect women,” “White people can’t ever understand the experiences of black folks,” “Straight, cisgender people can be allies but don’t have a say in what affects queer folks,” etc.—social knowledge is reduced to self-knowledge, but the self is absorbed into a socially abstract “identity”: victim, aggressor, oppressor, oppressed, marginal, centered, and so on.
I am not saying that some generalizations about social identities are false; of course there is some truth to them, otherwise they wouldn’t work. Rather, I am saying that identity has taken on new significance, especially in people’s individual self-understanding. Social identity has come to supplant personal identity, and often enough this shift is self-inflicted. When a person is expected to speak up or to self-censor, or to state their pronouns, or otherwise to announce that they are permitted or prohibited to engage in certain discourse, that person is being asked to forgo their individual identity as a unique person and to take up the social role of a predetermined “identity” and to take their place in a social narrative where those “identities,” rather than concrete persons or communities, are the actors.
But wait, how is what I’ve described religious?
To answer this question, I’ll draw from the Greek Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas and his book Being as Communion, which is one of the most important theological books of the last century. Zizioulas argues something that is hard for us to understand: that prior to the development of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, the Greco-Roman (i.e., western) understanding of “person” was fundamentally different than our own.
According to Greek thought, whether bent towards Plato or Aristotle, the experience of human individuality was fleeting because it violated the nature of being human. The world was understood governed by necessity, and human life was no exception. Necessity guaranteed the harmony of the cosmic order. Human freedom, which wants to escape necessity, is always a tragic rebellion to be punished by the gods. This is the theme of Greek tragedy: the person wishes to be a free individual, which means escaping the dictates of necessity, but that wish cannot be fulfilled. The individual is a reality only for the theater—and a tragic reality at that. So it is no accident that the Greek words for “person” (prosopon) and “mask” (prosopeion) are so intimately related. Zizioulas writes, “In the ancient Greek world for someone to be a person means that he has something added to his being; the ‘person’ is not his true [nature].”
The ancient Roman understanding of the person is strikingly similar to the Greek understanding. The Romans saw necessity and harmony in the social order, and so personhood was understood as the role one was granted within society. Zizioulas: “In this situation freedom and the unexpected are again alien to the concept of person. Freedom is exercised by the group, or ultimately by the state, the organized totality of human relationships, which also defines its boundaries.” This meant that the individual person received their identity from the group: “…identity, that vital component of the concept of man, that which makes one man differ from another, which makes him who he is… is guaranteed and provided by the state or by some organized whole.”
Christianity transformed these two mutually reinforcing understandings of the human person. According to Christianity, because the world does not have to exist, but exists as a freely chosen gift of God, who is himself personal and free—insights that were perfected in the doctrine of the Trinity—the true order and harmony of the universe is freedom. And because God created human beings for freedom, humans are freed to be individuals in communion—true persons by nature, whose freedom and individual identities do not threatened the created order or society.
To Christian faith, human freedom is not tragic, but is the goal of human life, which is achieved in communion with God and other human creatures. In Christian community, and therefore in a Christianized culture, individuals were meant to be freed from the bounds of their socially determined identities, such that there “is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female” (Galatians 3:28). The Christian understanding of personhood, which is possible because of the Christian doctrine of creation—that God is not the world, and that God made the world freely—places freedom at the center of human life, which means that it also places morality at the center human life. Human identity and relationship are inherently moral concepts, demanding the free moral responsibilities of persons and communities.
It’s no surprise, then, that Christian ethical instincts are so deeply ingrained in our culture. The intuitive knowledge that freedom is more than a human desire, but a human right that is inherent in human nature; the conviction that the powerful are answerable to those with less power, and that the strong exist to serve the weak and vulnerable; that none are meant to be outcasts, and rather that all are meant for communion—all of these moral assumptions that our culture takes for granted are an inheritance of this Christianized notion of personhood.
In my view, the culture moving away from Christianity has had at least two results that are related to the matter of identity.
First, I think that what we are seeing is a return to pagan notions of what it is to be a person. Instead of the ancient Greek notion of a harmonious cosmos governed by necessity, we have a de-Christianized notion of history: progress. The world our culture believes it inhabits is one that is moving with inevitability towards justice—justice understood as the victory of the weak over the strong, the “centering” of those who were excluded, the empowering of those who were oppressed. In other words, the “identities” of our current culture, which are not individual but collective, are the agents of this history, who must operate within the bounds that historical necessity dictates if they are to avoid the tragedy of being “on the wrong side of history.”
Second, and ironically, we see “expressive individualism,” which is the belief that the individual is the most basic reality, and that the individual has no natural or moral obligations. The coincidence of social identity and expressive individualism seems strange and contradictory. But upon reflection, it becomes clear: radical individualism is the abandonment of the moral definition of personhood. But that means that radical individualism returns to a pagan understanding of personhood, where freedom is defined as what necessity and society permit. Today’s free individual who has thrown off the strictures of the Christian past has in fact only traded them in for subservience to the cult of identity.