The Gospel, Gender and Sexuality – Part 2: What is My True Identity?

‘Identity’ talk is everywhere: your sense of identity, my unique identity, her identity crisis, his identity journey, our collective identity. We hear about sexual and gender identities as well as racial, professional and a host of others. But when we talk about ‘identity’, what are we talking about exactly?

What does ‘identity’ mean?

It’s useful to think about identity in terms of each person’s ‘life story’. Where have you come from and where are you going? What remains constant about you, even as you develop through different life stages? And, looking around, who do you belong (and not belong) with? Your identity is the enduring story of you.

Why is my identity important?

Now, if someone asked you to answer these questions about your life story on the spot, you may well struggle. Your identity is like the frame of your house — it isn’t always obvious unless you deliberately tap the walls to trace it out. But whether you know your story consciously or subconsciously, it is profoundly important because it shapes how you think and feel about yourself, and the choices you make every day.

As a socially wired being, your identity is also shaped by your relationships. Rather than knowing yourself in isolation, you ‘wake up’ to your identity over time as you interact with others. That understanding then shapes the way you see others and desire to be seen by them.

But why is everyone talking about identity?

Personal identity has become a much more prominent topic in recent years. People have always had identities — but now we are much more conscious of identity. Why is that?

 Let’s return to the house frame analogy. During house hunting stints, I have come across several DIY (Do-It-Yourself) home renovations. Owners have altered the pre-existing house frame to line up with their own, often idiosyncratic, desires.

Our cultural moment is one of DIY identity. That is, we don’t see ourselves as receiving our identity — we discover and create it ourselves. In fact, when we encounter fixed identity expectations, we are encouraged to cast these aside and look inwards, crafting our DIY, ‘authentic’ selves from our chosen values, passions, preferences and strengths. That ‘making something of ourselves’ requires a lot of thought and attention.

For example, one young Canadian Muslim woman describes growing up with two identities: ‘…who my family wanted me to be and the version of myself that I was dying to be’. Shedding her hijab (head covering) and releasing her flowing, curly hair was a potent symbol of her true self breaking free. She embraced her ‘tomboy’ nature as well as her desire for western-style feminine appeal. She describes shedding others’ expectations as a struggle, but one well worth it, ‘… especially when you discover the confidence and power you didn’t even know you had’.[1]

Notice two things about her search for identity. Embracing her own version of herself feels essential to her self-confidence and impact in the world. Flourishing requires embracing her own way of self-understanding. At the same time, notice how much her self-definition is, paradoxically, shaped by the stories around her. She associates her true self with the style and secular beliefs of her peers. If she had lived in another culture or time, she may well have chosen to emphasise other desires: a drive for power, motherly urges or warrior instincts.

In fact, rather than ‘your story’, a better way to define ‘identity’ is ‘the story you inhabit.’ We are so relationally wired, we inevitably know ourselves according to the stories we absorb. One especially pervasive ‘identity’ story in recent decades is sexuality.  

For centuries, sex was not considered in terms of identity but moral (for marriage and procreation) or immoral acts. In the nineteenth century, however, developing psychological thinking saw sexual desire as a foundational drive, a category for defining and understanding much more about a person than simply their sexual acts. The language of ‘sexuality’ and ‘sexual orientation’, which are embedded in our contemporary language, both reflect and perpetuate this idea. A person’s sexual orientation, whether straight, gay, bisexual etc is understood to shape and inhabit their tastes, values, sense of belonging — it is integral to their life story.

What’s more, the concept of ‘gender identity’ shows that identity has become so dependent on our psychological feelings and self-definition, it can be detached from our physical body. A person’s gender is no longer defined by their biological sex but by their subjective sense of being masculine, feminine, both or neither. Huge developments in biotechnology have also helped people attempt to shape their bodies according to their feelings. Perhaps this is the ultimate DIY identity project?

What is my true identity?

There are so many stories we can inhabit, but do any come close to revealing the real ‘me’? Which stories lead me to my authentic self?

My house hunting convinced me that DIY, non-council approved renovations are not a good idea. They may have seemed like the right idea at the time but, in the end, they looked awkward, wearying to maintain and risky to live in.

To find our true identity, we first need to admit our own attempts at self-definition will fail us. Our true identities have been exquisitely crafted by God, the master builder. Pushing his design aside and striving to live within our own restructured self-understanding may seem liberating at first — but it is ultimately awkward, wearying, desperately risky and damaging to ourselves and others. We only find our true ‘self’ when Jesus unshackles us from our DIY ‘self’ and our self-made stories to inhabit his infinitely better story of redemption (Matthew 10:38-39).

In fact, when Jesus washes, sanctifies and justifies us by his Spirit (I Cor 6:9-11), he doesn’t just give us a new set of aspirations — he overturns our most treasured identity categories. He names us according to authentic creation and redemption categories rather than false, subjective ones. While our experiences and feelings still profoundly shape us, they cannot budge our bedrock identity: we are God’s redeemed, adopted children in Christ.

Our sexual desires can powerfully influence us, and our sexual sins can feel so deeply baked into our identity. However, they do not define those Christ has made new to the core (2 Corinthians 5:17). The Bible nowhere describes or approves a defining role for sexual desire (sinful or not) in our ‘makeup’ as people or communities. That means we have no reason to view ourselves or others through lenses such as ‘straight’ or ‘gay’ with all their descriptive and prescriptive potency. As one young man discovered when he encountered Jesus in the Bible, his knowledge of himself as ‘gay’ was false. Instead, he realised his identity and worth came from what Jesus had done for him through his death and resurrection: ‘I am a forgiven sinner, beloved son of God the Father, and even Jesus himself was not ashamed to call me his brother’.[2] Having met Jesus, his identity began to shape his sexuality rather than the other way around.

In fact, inhabiting Jesus’ story shapes and gives meaning to all the details of our stories. God has crafted us as embodied people, carefully planted in specific communities, times and places (Acts 17:17). While our ethnicities, histories, roles and strengths are not at the very heart of our identity, they are like the rooms of our house, the highly personal spaces in which we live out our core identity — as enjoyable or arduous as the living might be. All Christians share that core identity in Christ yet, in his goodness, God has woven fascinating variety into the details of individual stories.

Our God-given, embodied (‘built-in’) gender is an especially important aspect of our identity. Our maleness or femaleness is integral to our rich web of relationships, shaping our most basic and intimate personal relations as daughters and sons, wives and husbands, mothers and fathers (Genesis 2).

In Christ, we don’t need to strive to create, maintain and assert our own fragile, DIY identities.  We receive our true identities as we inhabit his gospel story, knowing the solid safety of his love for us. The better we know him, the more we sing in tune with our true identity.

[1] https://lusbrands.com/blogs/news/khadija

[2] What Some of You Were – Jack