Just Say “No!” to Identity Politics
Are you a conservative or a liberal? Are you — will your family be — Protestant or Roman Catholic? Are you for or against free trade, immigration, and the foreign policy question of the day?
Attending to the rhetoric of American politics, a reasonable person could easily conclude that these not only are legitimate but essential questions that determine our identity and destiny. “He’s not a real conservative.” “She’s not a real progressive.” “He’s a liberal!”
And the same is often true in the Church. “Unless you’re Catholic, you’re not fully Christian.” “If you are for this, then you’re not a real Christian.”
Our “either this or that” questions have made us much more efficient in sorting the sheep from the goats so God won’t have to worry with such judgments when time is fulfilled.
There is much that can and should be said about these categories and our insistence that folks fit into them. The categories themselves are worthy of critique. We assume we all know what conservatives and liberals are, but it turns out that the definitions our inquisitors presuppose are often problematic. We assume it’s a simple matter to determine who’s in and out of God’s full embrace, but it turns out that God defies our efforts to determine the boundaries of God’s love.
Much can and should be said, but these are problems for another day.
Today, I simply urge you to resist the questions. Don’t answer them. Don’t feel diminished just because you can’t sort yourself into one of the offered boxes. Don’t feel guilty just because you simultaneously embrace both mutually exclusive options. Don’t answer, for the premise underlying the questions themselves is false. Don’t answer because you know the most essential thing is to live in the knowledge that checkboxes don’t determine your identity.
We’ve become so accustomed to checkboxes and radio buttons that we’ve forgotten that they are technologies. Yes/No. On/Off. True/False. By toggling the right switches, we can capture the attributes of a thing. Ask the right questions, click the right buttons, and we can reduce a thing to its essence. The either/or question is a technology by which we reduce things to binaries like “friend or foe” so we can efficiently group, sum, and average them.
Either/or choices enable us to process things efficiently by reducing them to their bare essentials. In much of life, our binary shortcuts work just fine. As anyone who’s ever played the game “Twenty Questions” knows, we can reduce many things to a recognizable form with a series of Yes/No questions.
Yet there are some things that can’t be captured with our either/or questions. Our digital technology can capture that golden sunset that led to our first kiss, but it can’t capture either the awe of the moment or the love it illuminated. “Twenty questions” can generate a good description of the golden retriever whose tail wags before us, but it can’t capture Marley in all her Marley-ness. She’s irreducible.
Think of someone you love. Can you describe her using the technology of checkboxes? Can you capture her essence with the right Yes/No questions such that another could know her in the same way and with the same depth as you, but without having to invest in a lifetime of knowing her?
A human can be described statistically, but one’s personhood — whether that of a fellow communicative mammal like Marley, of your beloved, or of God — defies description through reduction. That’s the false premise underlying the urgent questions of our identity politics. “Who are you? Are you an authentic conservative? A real progressive? Are you a true believer? Sort yourself into these boxes and I’ll tell you who you are.”
Identity politics arise from a false view of the world. Binaries cannot sufficiently describe you. Or much of the world, for that matter.
More importantly, such questions, no matter how urgently asked, do not determine your identity. For your identity is not earned by your “Yes/No” to such questions, but freely given by God’s “Yes!” to you through Jesus the Messiah. Your identity eternally is “God’s beloved.” God’s already spoken the decisive Word on you. So live without fear.
For, as the Apostle Paul noted, “I’m convinced that nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord: not death or life, not angels or rulers, not present things or future things, not powers or height or depth, or any other thing that is created” (Romans 8:38–39)
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