\u201cHow did we get here?\u201d As a pastor, I often hear this exacerbated lament from people observing cultural conversations and political polarization. It is a valid question. Largely, this question is focused on the dialogue around identity. Identarian politics and practices, such as separating people based on race, gender, sex, or (less often) class, did not happen overnight. The seeds of our modern conception of identity – and political organizing around this conception \u2013 were planted by numerous influential thinkers from Derrick Bell to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Understanding the pathogenesis of these ideas (answering \u201cHow did we get here?\u201d) is vital for Church leaders pastoring in this contentious cultural moment.<\/p>\n
For this post, our guides for exploring the terrain of our identity conversation are Yascha Mounk, author of The Identity Trap<\/em>, and Carl Trueman, author of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self<\/em>. In this blog, I will attempt to concisely overlay the maps provided by Mounk and Trueman.<\/p>\n Map One: Mounk\u2019s Identity Trap<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Yascha Mounk\u2019s The Identity Trap<\/em> covers the key ideas that together become the identity synthesis. The identity synthesis is, as defined by Mounk, a convergence of the ideas \u201con a broad variety of intellectual traditions and is centrally concerned with the role identity categories like race, gender, and sexual orientation play in the world.\u201d[1]<\/a> These ideas, originally sequestered in the halls of academia, are now the center of cultural conversations concerning these identity categories. This, as Mounk displayed, is a result of social network platforms like Tumblr, the embracing of the identity synthesis<\/em> from legacy media, and the rage ignited due to the rise of far-right nationalism and the election of Donald Trump.[2]<\/a> Mounk continues by highlighting concerns he has with the identity synthesis, which he calls a trap that allures well-intentioned people.[3]<\/a> He concludes with an invitation to his readers to see through the allure, to speak freely, and be unafraid to challenge the ideas of the identity synthesis.<\/p>\n A key concern Mounk highlights is the logical conclusion of the identity synthesis. In the identity synthesis, people are separated into different groups based on their identity. These groups splinter off with numerous other groups of intersectional identities based on the ideas of Kimberle\u00e9 Crenshaw\u2019s intersectionality<\/em>. Cross-identity group empathizing of experience is impossible. Mounk writes,<\/p>\n It is, I argue, a mistake to give up on the hope that members of different ethnic groups can come to have genuine empathy for each other; to put forms of cultural influence between members of different groups under a general pall of suspicion; to underestimate the dangerous consequences that stem from giving up on a genuine culture of free speech; to embrace calls for a supposedly progressive form of separatism that undermines efforts at genuine integration; and to make race-sensitive public policies the government’s default mode of operation.[4]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The separation of people into groups is the antithesis of Dr. King\u2019s vision. But it is the telos of Derrick Bell\u2019s theory on race, later dubbed Critical Race Theory, in which, due to a history of systemic racism, “a neutral perspective does not, and cannot, exist.\u201d[5]<\/a> Mounk quotes legal theorist Charles Lawrence with this summary: \u201cWe must learn to trust our own senses, feelings, and experiences and give them authority, even (or especially) in the face of dominant accounts of social reality that claim universality.\u201d[6]<\/a><\/p>\n Innumerable identity-based groups (where the essence of one\u2019s \u201cself,\u201d whether that be one\u2019s race, gender, or a confluence of identity intersections, is the most important thing about oneself) with an impossibility to understand one another\u2019s lived experience is what we are left with. This is, as Mounk argues, not conducive to a liberal democracy. This does not mean we pretend to ignore the injustices in history (and in the present) to marginalized people groups. But we must not give up learning from one another and the human ability to step into the shoes of another.<\/p>\n Map Two: Trueman\u2019s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Carl R. Trueman\u2019s begins his robust work on how we arrived at where we are in our conversation on identity with highlighting the fact that the statement \u201cI am a woman trapped in a man\u2019s body\u201d is one his grandfather would find incoherent gibberish\u201d and yet nowadays people hardly bat an eye.[7]<\/a> Indebted to Charles Taylor, Trueman\u2019s book explores how our understanding of \u201cself\u201d became located in an inner-feelings, how identity became \u201csexualized,\u201d and then how it became politicized.[8]<\/a> Trueman\u2019s book is more expansive in scope than Mounk\u2019s. However, Mounk focuses on a crucial thinker Trueman hardly mentions: Michel Foucault.<\/p>\n Map Convergence<\/strong><\/p>\n A thorough convergence of these two maps is impossible in this limited space. But here is how Mounk and Trueman help us navigate this conversation. Mounk brilliantly exposes the logical inconsistency of the identity synthesis with the underpinning of postmodernism \u2013 specifically with Foucault and the rejection of grand narratives, which, in and of itself, is a grand narrative.[9]<\/a> However, where Mounk takes his readers \u2013 toward a return to a liberal vision \u2013 Trueman goes further. Liberal values that Mounk holds to high esteem are sourced in the Christian tradition.[10]<\/a> In the words of Trueman,<\/p>\n Yet it is here, in the idea of the equal dignity of all human beings, that one of the problems with the modern political project becomes clear. The idea that all human beings are of equal worth is rooted in the idea that all human beings are made in the image of God. The problem with expressive individualism is not its emphasis on the dignity or the individual value of every human being. That is what undergirded the fight against slavery in the nineteenth century and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Rather, it is the fact that expressive individualism has detached these concepts of individual dignity and value from any kind of grounding in a sacred order.[11]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n [1]<\/a> Yascha Mounk, The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time<\/em> (New York: Penguin Press, 2023), 9.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Ibid., 80-81, 96.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Ibid., 16.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Ibid., 225.<\/p>\n [5]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n [6]<\/a> Ibd.<\/p>\n [7]<\/a> Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution<\/em> (Crossway, 2020), 19.<\/p>\n [8]<\/a> Ibid., 22, 26-28.<\/p>\n [9]<\/a> Mounk, The Identity Trap<\/em>, 37.<\/p>\n