Podcast: Why Is Our Culture So Obsessed with Identity? (Brian Rosner)

May 30, 2022 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Who Am I, and How Do I Know?

In today's episode, Brian Rosner talks about how our cultural obsession with identity impacts us as Christians and how we should think about that through the lens of the Bible.

How to Find Yourself

How to Find Yourself

Brian S. Rosner

This book challenges the popular idea that expressive individualism—looking inward—is the sole basis of one’s identity. Brian Rosner provides an approach to identity formation that looks outward to others and upward to God, which leads to a more stable and satisfying sense of self.

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Check out other Crossway Podcasts including the new podcast Blessed: Conversations on the Book of Revelation with Nancy Guthrie.

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:45 - Are We Obsessed with Identity?

Matt Tully
Brian, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Brian Rosner
Thanks, Matt. It’s great to be with you.

Matt Tully
I think it’s fair to say, and my sense is that most people listening will have some sense of this, that our culture seems pretty obsessed with this topic of identity. Do you think that’s true? Do you resonate with that?

Brian Rosner
Absolutely. Once you tune into it, you see it everywhere. The advice to be true to yourself, or to be yourself, is on everyone’s lips. You’ll see it from people in the media, President Trump several years ago at his first commencement at Liberty University—that’s how he closed his speech. It’s kind of Oprah writ large. It also comes through in some movies. I love the Matt Damon movies. A number of them are about inscrutable characters really asking, Who am I? The Bourne Identity is the most obvious one, but there are some others. There’s a show on Netflix at the moment called “Inventing Anna,” which is all about an inscrutable character. Even after eight episodes, you’re still wondering, Who is this Anna person?

Matt Tully
You mentioned The Bourne Identity. I think some people might hear that and think, That’s just a fun action movie about a guy who has amnesia, and then he’s fighting people. Would you say that a movie like that, and maybe other movies that you’ve mentioned, are they tapping into something that you think is bigger than just an interesting premise for a movie?

Brian Rosner
Absolutely. For example, the terms “personal identity” and “identity formation” have only been used, with any kind of currency, in the last fifty years in literature. You can do a search of all that with what’s called an engram search. They pop up mid-twentieth century and just take off from there on. I think even in philosophical literature, discussions of ethical quandaries all comes down to personal autonomy. It’s not just an individual advice; it’s part of a worldview in a package, almost a narrative identity. It’s tied up with what’s called “expressive individualism.” A number of things go with that. It’s not just that you look inside to find yourself, but the highest goal in life becomes your personal happiness. All moral judgments are simply expressions of feeling your personal preference. The key to the good life is really to exclude all external authority and pursue your own dreams. The quest for self-expression is to be celebrated. Certain aspects of a personal identity become paramount—things like your gender, your ethnicity, your sexuality. But it’s not just those things. It’s the story that people tap into about finding meaning in life and what drives their lives. The great irony in our day, of course, is it’s never been more important to know who you are, but on the other hand, it’s actually never been more difficult. All sorts of people are wondering, Who am I? Just last week in Australia, the most famous Australian cricketer, Shane Warne, died at fifty-two of a heart attack. There’s great mourning in Australia. He’s kind of the Babe Ruth, if you like, of Australian cricket. There were dozens of obituaries in the media. One line that really grabbed me was when one of his friends said, “Shane said to me once, ‘Even though I’ve got everything and I’ve been so successful, I don’t really know who I am.’” I think that really sums up the identity angst, if you like, of our age. There’s this weird obsession with personal identity, but on the other hand, it’s quite difficult to nail down exactly who you are. There’s a great pressure to invent yourself, which can lead to all sorts of confusion and anxiety.

04:48 - Is This a New Obsession?

Matt Tully
You mentioned a few different tenets of expressive individualism, and I want to explore some of those in a minute. One question that someone might have in hearing you explain what that looks like and the kinds of questions that people are wrestling with today is, Is that really new? Is this a new thing? For myself growing up (I’m in my mid-thirties), this was sort of what just feels pretty normal—these kinds of questions, angstyness, and encouragement to be true to yourself. That feels so normal to me. Is there something new about this from a historical perspective? Or, is this more of the same that we’ve always seen?

Brian Rosner
I think there is something that’s new that’s happened. It’s partly in response to what’s perceived to be the conformity of the 1950s—all the kids sitting in rows, learning rote at school. There’s a kind of oppression of people’s individuality. I think there are definitely benefits to what we call expressive individualism. One is the idea of personal exploration and self-reflection. Obviously, those are good things. Some groups in society being marginalized—that’s something we must notice and do something about. Those groups are seeking recognition and affirmation—all sorts of groups. Francis Fukuyama has a book on identity in which he tries to explain the politics of our day in those terms. Then, authenticity, of course, as a moral ideal is perfectly good. You want to be true to yourself and you want to be comfortable in your own skin. But there does seem to be a rise in an obsession with personal identity. In part, I think that’s difficult to notice because it’s part of our culture. Some things about you are simply assumed in our culture. Things like your attitude toward work, authority, holidays, leisure, parenting, problem solving—all of those things are below the surface. They’re just something that you take for granted. If you visit another culture, they are the things you notice and they seem so different when you come back to your own culture. Sometimes you experience what’s called reverse culture shock. I think personal identity and how you become you—identity formation—is really at the bottom of that iceberg of cultural assumption. It’s something that goes unexamined. We all just take it for granted. But it is quite new. It’s something that Carl Trueman, for example, has explored in his book. Carl looks at the intellectual roots of expressive individualism. My book is attempting to look at the fruit—What’s it actually producing?—and, to extend the metaphor with sort of a dad joke, somewhere else to plant yourself.

07:53 - The Buffered Self and the Porous Self

Matt Tully
I think you make a good point with that picture of an iceberg where how we view ourselves, how we think about our identities, is part of our culture. It’s influenced by our culture, but it’s so low on the iceberg—it’s so deep—that we often don’t think of it when we think of our culture and the impact that it has on us. You note in your book that sociologists refer to this view of self—this expressive individualistic self—as the “buffered self.” Unpack that term for us. I think most of us when we think of buffering we think of Netflix. What are they getting at?

Brian Rosner
The alternative to the buffered self, for sociologists, is the “porous self.” Think of the edges of something being porous, permeated—you can move through it. The buffered self believes that to find yourself you have to exclude all external authorities. I don’t know if you have this phenomenon in the US, but something called a “gap year” in Australian culture typifies this. You’ve finished high school, you want to move away from family and all of those connections that are stifling you, and you want to go out and find yourself and find your identity in isolation. Most cultures throughout human history, and the majority of the world today (traditional cultures in the majority world), have what’s called the porous self. You find yourself—or you’re found, so to speak—by moving out into your responsibilities in society by taking on the roles that have been set for you. One sociologist, and I love this analogy, put it this way, that in our day finding yourself is like an ocean. You can go in any direction you like with every wind of change. Whereas, up until quite recently, even in Western culture, you found yourself in a river. You were taken along in a certain direction. That might sound stifling and limiting, but the reality is it was another way to be yourself that for centuries has been adopted by most cultures around the world and has proven quite successful you could argue.

Matt Tully
I think one response to that could be that that approach to the self and all of us finding our place in society was successful for a small group of people within those cultures—those who were at the top, so to speak, of the pyramid. But for many, many people—maybe most people—that view of the world and view of the individual in the world led to a lot of oppression and a lot of marginalization. This new era of self-determination has been what has ushered in a level of freedom and independence for people who otherwise would have been, to some extent, even oppressed. How would you respond to that as you think about these topics?

Brian Rosner
That raises the question of where else to look to find yourself. What you’ve really tapped into there is this idea that you are your story. All of us tap into our stories. The story is that which makes you as a baby, you now, and you when you’re older and die the same person. The story typically has a beginning, a middle, and an end, to go back to high school English lessons. The beginning of our story is often before our lives. Even though expressive individualism tells us that you can live your own story, you’ll be the hero in your own story, everything will come together if you live your dream—those kind of ideas, which are inculcated in high school and beyond, and probably even earlier—there’s a sense in which we partake in shared stories. We’re social beings. Our identities are formed in connection with other people. We know ourselves by being known by others and by participating in shared stories. An example of that would be a national story. The national story, speaking of my own country, determines a lot about my character. When I watch a sporting contest, I always go for the underdog, the team that is unlikely to win—unless it’s my own team, of course. The reason for that is it goes back to the convict settlement in Australia to the Gallipoli Campaign in the first World War that we, believe it or not, commemorate even though it was a terrible loss. There’s this egalitarian nature, mateship that sets the Australian character. Stories have defining events in the past, a struggle in the present, and some kind of hope for the future. The story that you just described is sometimes thought of as the social justice narrative identity. It has a lot of legitimacy. You can see why Christians in particular are attracted to it. It says that discrimination and prejudice are really at the heart of what’s wrong with the world, and there are defining events in the past—both good and bad. The terrible murder of George Floyd would be an example of such an event. Then, there’s a struggle in the present, and we divide the world into, as you began to describe it, the people who are oppressed, those who are oppressing them, and those who are on the side of the oppressed—sometimes called “the woke,” but I prefer to avoid that term because it’s so much a culture war term and so divisive. I think that story makes sense except it really misses a couple of things, and it fails to look up. Looking up is also central to personal identity. Obviously, as a Christian believer I would say that, but I do think there are things about every human being that are the same. There are yearnings within the human heart and the soul which cannot be satisfied by things on earth, which eventually has us look up. Pascal called them reasons of the heart. C. S. Lewis talked about them in similar terms. The problem with stories that don’t look up is that they’re really dead ends. The social justice narrative identity, without looking up, gives us an unrealistic view of the human nature. It confines human evil to one group, when the truth is, if you want to put it that way, the original diverse and inclusive industry is human evil. All of us are capable of self-interest and of pride and greed and lust and all those things that destroy our community and world. Christians need to tap into the injustice of the world, but it’s one of the traps with the social justice narrative identity because you can end up just going along with it and it can be divisive in and of itself, and it can lead to a sense of entitlement. In the end, it’s a dead-end story.

Matt Tully
This connects to one of the tenets of expressive individualism that you listed a few minutes ago, namely, that the world will improve dramatically as the scope of individual freedom grows. Maybe even as an American where we have this emphasis on free speech, along with a history—a story—that really is focused on this idea of democracy and self-determination as a country, that resonates. That idea that the world will dramatically improve as the scope of individual freedom grows, that resonates with us as Americans, and I’m sure with you and others around the world as well. Why would you say that story—without looking up, as you say—is incomplete and it won’t work?

Brian Rosner
I think you’ve mentioned the other big story that many people are living in in Western culture. If some people are committed to a social justice narrative identity and seeking to right the wrongs of the past and to address injustice in the present—all of which are necessary and good things—but without looking up, I have suggested they are incomplete. I think the other big story is enlightenment progress, the kind of secular materialism, that doesn’t look up. The problem there is constraints on personal freedom. The past turning points are things like the age of reason, the Renaissance—read Carl Trueman, basically, for that kind of stuff. The present struggle is progress—through technology, through education—and the future hope is really the triumph of enlightenment and reason. The problem with that story is, again, it has an incomplete view of the human being. Putting your faith in things like progress, education, technology, and science exclusively is to make an idol of them. The Bible’s view of idolatry is that it’s the worship of gods that fail. It’s a substituting of the true and living God for gods that will eventually demean and disappoint you. The kind of security, significance, and satisfaction that all of us seek is not to be found, ultimately, in these gods. Consumerism is an outgrowth of that focus on material progress and personal freedom. It comes down again to recognizing what a human being is. We do need to look within ourselves to find ourselves, but there are three other significant directions that we have to look. We look around to others to be known by others. We know ourselves by being known. We look back and forward to our life stories, which are really shared stories. And then ultimately, we look up, which puts a different complexion on all three directions of looking.

17:49 - The Identity Markers of Gender, Ethnicity, and Sexuality

Matt Tully
You mentioned another thing when you were describing expressive individualism that I wanted to ask about. I think it comes up in just our experience of our culture today. That last point was that certain aspects of a person’s identity such as their gender, ethnicity, or sexuality are of paramount importance. I think as we look around at the conversations that we’re having as a society, those three things—gender, ethnicity or race, and sexuality—are often the locus of the conversation and even disagreement and disunity at times. Why have those identity markers been so prioritized?

Brian Rosner
I think as I said earlier, these are genuinely marginalized groups. These are groups of people who haven’t had the recognition from society that they would like to have. Having said that, the Bible’s take on these things needs to be understood. It doesn’t deny that your age, your ethnicity, your gender, and so on will affect your personal identity. But I think one way of saying this is that these are important to who you are, but they are not all important. To put all your eggs in those baskets is very limiting. It’s just not hard to realize how limiting that is. How much can you really tell about a person from their age or ethnicity? Most of our lives are impacted by all kinds of family histories. I’m a white man. Traditionally, I’m pale, male, and stale, and I would be put in the privileged group. As it turns out, I’ve got a mixed background, in a sense. My father was an Austrian Jew from a highly educated background, but he missed an education entirely. He was a refugee who moved to Australia and became a Christian in late 1949. I grew up in a working class suburb with six people in the house, one bathroom, and a toilet outside. I’m not complaining, because on the other hand the value of education really made such a difference to my progress in life. So, personal identity is a complicated thing, and I think it’s simplistic to think you can tell everything about a person simply by one of those identity markers. You can add other markers to that too, of course. Your age, your material possessions, your class, and all of those kinds of things. They are important to who you are. To deny that would just be naive, but to think they’re the most important thing about you is, I think, mistaken.

20:36 - Is Expressive Individualism Beneficial for Christianity?

Matt Tully
When it comes to Christians and how we think about these topics as believers who trust the Bible, who do believe in the gospel and believe in God as our Creator, are there facets to this inward-facing approach to identity that have been corrective for Christians? In other words, have there been any benefits to this emphasis that maybe Christians should embrace?

Brian Rosner
The expressive individualist mindset has raised, as we’ve discussed, certain aspects of injustice in society. There are things we should take notice of. I actually think the main benefits of expressive individualism—inclusion, authenticity, self-reflection—are there in the Christian faith. My advice to pastors, evangelists, and so on would be to play on the expressive individualist board. We need to say to people, Yes, you need to be authentic. You need to be true to yourself, but true to your new self in Christ. One of the wonderful things about the Bible is it seems to address contemporary issues in ways that are incredibly true and helpful that we haven’t even noticed before. There is a wealth of material in the Bible about personal identity that hasn’t been important—in Western culture at least—for hundreds of years, and now it’s coming to the fore. I’m not the only person to have noticed this. It’s incredibly beneficial. My own story was one of an identity crisis of sorts in the mid-nineties. Then I turned back to the Bible and found the theme of being known by God of great comfort and giving me a stable and satisfying sense of self.

Matt Tully
You say that the Bible does speak a lot about identity, and it does. I’m sure all of us are thinking about different passages that speak to who we are as people, as humans, as Christians. And yet it seems like the ringing emphasis in the Bible is that our identity is given to us; it’s determined by ultimately God. That does feel like it’s very much out of sync with the dominant secular voices in our cultures today. Do you think that, from an apologetic standpoint, that in some ways it’s harder for us to be proclaiming this biblical worldview and message because people are so predisposed to want to be able to create their own identities and they’re resistant to this externally imposed identity from God?

Brian Rosner
As faithful Christians have attempted to do throughout the ages, we need to contextualize how we present the gospel. It’s the same message, but there are different ways of expressing it. There are all sorts of passages that are good at exposing the dead end stories to which people subscribe, and a better story. We need to be presenting and embodying a better story around which to form your identity. One passage, for example, would be Colossians 3 where Paul says this remarkable thing: “You died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life appears, you will appear with him in glory.” So you have right there in a nutshell the life story—the narrative identity—of the people of God. The defining moment for us as Christians is not something that happened in our lifetime; it’s the fact that we died with Christ to self-interest. The defining destiny for the Christian is also tied up with the Lord Jesus. To say that our identity is a gift is not the last thing to say, because Colossians 3 then goes on to say you’ve got to put on this new identity. You’ve got to live it. Living the gospel and behaving in ways consistent with that identity. Being true to yourself, if you like, is really the task of the Christian life. Sanctification is all about knowing who you are in Christ and behaving accordingly—dressing accordingly, to use the language of Colossians 3. Taking off the old clothes of self-deceit and deception and the like and putting on the new clothes, which is summed up in the word love.

Matt Tully
Is this message, this vision of the Bible’s view of identity, a message that Christians need to hear afresh? Is there a widespread understanding of this in the church, or do you see more Christians being influenced by a secular form of expressive individualism and kind of needing to recapture a biblical vision?

Brian Rosner
My main response is one of despair, to be honest. I don’t think I have an answer that’s easily expressed, and it’s just silly for me to pretend that I know the answer. I think people need to be self-reflective about where their true allegiance lies. So many Christians, I find, are so rusted onto one political viewpoint or another that it seems like they’re worshiping Caesar rather than the Lord Jesus. That’s just one thing to say. I think getting back to what we talked about earlier, we need to present the gospel in ways that meet the felt and real needs that people have. The idea of belonging to yourself sounds great, but in the end it’s not. Paul puts it beautifully: “You are not your own” (I Cor. 6:19). That sounds really dangerous. If I don’t belong to myself, what’s it going to be like? But then he goes on to say, “you were bought with a price” (1 Cor. 6:20). We were loved with an everlasting love. That’s the real way to find and be yourself, in relationship with someone who knows and loves you truly. The Lord Jesus says “The one who seeks to find themselves will lose themselves; the one who will lose themselves for my sake will find themselves” (Matt. 10:39). Tim Keller has a lovely little book called The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness.

Matt Tully
That’s a great book.

Brian Rosner
It’s just a tiny book and I don’t think many people know about it. I’m glad to hear you do, Matt. I think that comes to the heart of Christian faith. It’s a great paradox, that people who focus so intently on finding themselves will lose themselves, and the people who lose themselves in the service of Jesus Christ and others will eventually find themselves. It’s a wonderful irony.

30:06 - Finding Our Identity

Matt Tully
What does it look like for a Christian to pursue identifying ourselves first and foremost in Christ and what he has said about us a redeemed, regenerated people and yet not denigrate the other identity markers that factor into who we are and how we are relating to other people in this world? How do we hold both of those together rather than going so extreme in either direction?

Brian Rosner
As I said earlier, it’s not that these other identity markers are unimportant. I’m a father, I’m a friend, I’m a son. Being in Christ, living the life story of Jesus Christ, will affect the type of father, son, and friend I will be. It does end up coloring who I am. It’s not like we lose our particularity and our individuality by finding ourselves in Christ. On the contrary, we find our true selves. That’s what Jesus said. There are, obviously, very important things about me that should be explored—finding my talents, my gifts, my likes, and so on. But to think that once I’ve found them that I should just celebrate them and not deal with some of them which are not helpful is naive at best.

31:32 - Mistakes Pastors Make When Engaging Issues of Identity in the Church

Matt Tully
What are the biggest mistakes that you’re seeing pastors make when they try to engage with these issues of identity in the church?

Brian Rosner
I was tempted in my first write of the book to make one of those mistakes, and that is to just be a cranky old man—to complain about younger generations, to say that they’re snowflakes, that they’re not all exceptional and that they’re just ordinary. That’s a big mistake. We need to try and live in the shoes of different generations. Pastors need the help of younger people, of women, of other people who are not exactly like them to understand where they’re coming from. This is one of the remarkable things about the New Testament. The New Testament is incredibly contextualized. When you look at Paul’s letters, his letters are quite different. He writes to Corinth about spirituality and wisdom, but he doesn’t talk about those things very much anywhere else. He writes to the church in Ephesus about power and authority, and again, that’s not the emphasis in many of his letters. The reason is they were the things that people were struggling with. John Stott said it very simply decades ago, that the Christian minister needs to exegete both the Bible and his (or her) culture, and to see their culture as being addressed by the Bible—sometimes affirming it, sometimes critiquing it, sometimes replacing it.

33:07 - Practical Advice

Matt Tully
Very practically, speaking to the Christian listening right now who is maybe thinking to him or herself, I can sense the ways that my view of myself has been so influenced by this cultural air that we’re breathing all together, and I want to have a distinctly Christian view of myself and let that inform all these things that I’m doing and saying in my relationships. What would be a practical thing that person could do that you think would help to reset their thinking—rewire their brain, so to speak—along those lines?

Brian Rosner
There are some good books they could read that would be a start. The other thing to do, and this sounds just as simplistic, is to go to church, read the Bible, pray, and try and live the Christian life. It’s as basic as that. If you think about the Lord’s Prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, which is said by tens of millions of people around the world frequently, is actually a critique of expressive individualism. “Our Father in heaven”—it already admits our social selves by praying with that plural pronoun. “Your will be done”—not mine. “Give us this day our daily bread”—rather than trying to gather all the possessions I can to live the dream, help me to be content with what I have. So, I think that those simple things would be as far as I can go in a few moments with the advice. The other thing to say is I need the help, as you do, of ministers who are good at culture, who understand the culture, who are the age and demographic of the people we are speaking with. We shouldn’t pretend that we have all the answers. My expiration of the topic of personal identity came from, as I mentioned, a crisis of identity of my own, and in part from being confused and confronted by our culture’s take on identity. Whenever you write a book, it’s a ruse to say it’s a single-authored book. This is the kind of book I’ve been working on for twenty-five years, and it’s one of the luxuries of being a professor or lecturer in a Bible college. You can think about the same thing forever and ever—you can chew on the same bone. So, talking to other people, being honest about our struggles, asking the tough questions of each other. Why do I need the latest iPhone? Why do I need a holiday house if I can afford such a thing? Why do I need a new car? That’s part of the consumerist thing. What are my expectations in life? The reality is that human history says that every life is marked by hardship, struggle, disappointment. To think that I’m going to live the dream, which is the message coming from every direction in our society, is just so unhelpful. I think Christians need each other, and we need to take full use of the resources available to us by God’s grace.

Matt Tully
Brian, thank you so much for taking the time today to talk to us about this air that we are all breathing but nevertheless can resist in our own thinking. We really appreciate it.

Brian Rosner
Thanks, Matt. It’s a pleasure.

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