Modern Individualism and the Recovery of Identity, Freedom, and Dignity in the Church: Part II
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Podcast
Speaker 2
Here's something that should stop you cold. The words dignity, freedom and identity are everywhere right now. On social media, in therapy offices, in church sermons. And yet, according to theologian Alan Snodgrass, they've kept the words while quietly gutting everything that gave them meaning. Today we're digging into Snodgrass's article Modern Individualism and the Recovery of Identity, Freedom, and Dignity. Specifically, what modern individualism actually is and why it falls short, how it has reshaped the church in ways most people haven't noticed, and what a biblical theological alternative looks like in practice. By the end of this episode, you'll have a sharper lens for spotting where our cultural assumptions about selfhood come from, and whether they can actually hold the weight we're putting on them. I've got someone here who has been deep in this material and I want to start with the most basic question. What is Snodgrass actually diagnosing?
Speaker 3
So the diagnosis starts with something really ordinary. Snodgrass opens by pointing out that in everyday conversations, church life, business, personal relationships, people freely use language like human dignity, personal value, individual rights. But they do so, he says, with little to no reference to humanity's creation in the image of God. And that gap between the language and the foundation is exactly what he's trying to expose.
Speaker 2
So it's not that people are saying wrong things, it's that the words have been.
Speaker 3
Tethered. Exactly. And Snodgrass has a precise way of putting it. He says modern individualism preserves aspects of biblical truth while separating them from their foundation in God. So you get the vocabulary of Christianity without the theology underneath it. It's like using the word N without having a compass. The word still sounds directional, but it's pointing nowhere.
Speaker 2
That's a striking image. So where does this come from? Like, how did we get to a place where the self became the center of everything?
Speaker 3
Well, Snodgrass traces it to what he calls the default lens of modern culture, the idea that identity is something we construct, that freedom means freedom from external authority, and that fulfillment equals personal satisfaction. And if you want to find the philosophical headwaters of that, you go back to the Enlightenment. Snodgrass's other writing on his site points directly to Rene Descartes. I think, therefore, I am as the moment that placed the individual at the center of existence.
Speaker 2
Right, and that cartesian move making the thinking self the starting point of all knowledge. That's not just a philosophy class idea, it actually became the operating system of Western culture.
Speaker 3
Completely. And what Snodgrass is related writing describes is how that snowballed into a cultural presupposition, where personal thoughts and perceptions become the only reliable truths. So you get this self-reliant relativism where subjective experience is the measure of everything. Wikipedia's entry on individualism actually frames it similarly. Individualism as the moral stance that the individual's interests and self-realization take precedence over any external authority, whether that's the state, a community, or and this is the theological crux, God.
Speaker 2
And that's where it gets really interesting for Snodgrass, because he's not just making a philosophical argument, he's making a specifically theological one about what happens when the church absorbs this framework.
Speaker 3
Right and that's where two scholars he. Calls. His primary conversation partners come in David Wells and Nathan Hatch. They're doing very different kinds of historical and theological work, but together they paint a picture of how American Christianity got reshaped from the inside.
Speaker 2
So walk me through what each of them is.
Speaker 3
Arguing so, Nathan Hatch's argument, as Snodgrass presents it, is historical. Hatch shows how American Christianity was reshaped by populist democratic impulses, the idea that individual religious experience and personal choice should be elevated above tradition. Or institutional authority. So from very early on in American religious history, there's this democratizing pressure that says your personal encounter with God matters more than what the church has always taught.
Speaker 2
Which sounds almost noble on the surface. Like who could argue with personal experience? And that's.
Speaker 3
Exactly the trap, because David Wells picks up where Hatch leaves off and shows what that impulse looks like when it fully matures. Wells writes that Christianity became increasingly reduced simply to private internal therapeutic experience, and that. Doctrinal form atrophied and then crumbled. That's that's a pretty devastating diagnosis.
Speaker 4
Atrophied and crumbled. That's not gentle language. It's not. And Wells goes further. He describes what he calls the new evangelicalism, where faith gets treated as a product tailored to consumer desires, where authority shifts from Scripture to the self, and where relevance is prized over truth. Churches, he says, adapt their product to a spiritual market that believes it can have spiritual comfort with very little truth.
Speaker 3
OK.
Speaker 2
That line spiritual comfort with very little truth that hits differently because you can see that everywhere. The self-help spirituality, the God wants you to be happy messaging the whole therapeutic turn in church culture.
Speaker 3
Exactly. And Wells has this almost darkly funny line that Snodgrass quotes. When the consumer is sovereign, the product, in this case God himself, must be subservient. So God gets demoted. He becomes something the market shapes, rather than the one who defines the market.
Speaker 2
Wait, God as a product that. US to compete for market share. That's a genuinely unsettling image.
Speaker 3
It is. And the results, Nodgrass says, is a church culture where identity gets defined by spiritual preferences and experiences rather than by union with Christ and the objective realities of the gospel. So you end up with people who have a very strong sense of their spiritual self, their preferences, their experiences, their personal journey, but no grounding in anything outside themselves. And that's the core problem. Snodgrass is naming not that people are asking the wrong questions, but that the framework they're using to. Answer them can't actually bear the weight precisely. His thesis is direct. Modern individualism, as reflected in contemporary evangelical practice and American religious history, cannot provide a coherent account of identity, freedom, purpose, and dignity. It just doesn't have the resources to do it. So let's stress test that a little because someone listening might push back and say, look, individualism has also produced a lot of good things. Human rights movements, personal autonomy, the ability to question oppressive institutions. It's not grass throwing all of that out.
Speaker 4
That's a fair and important pushback, and I think the honest answer is that Snodgrass isn't rejecting the value of the individual, he's rejecting the idea that the individual is the source and measure of their own value. There's a real difference there. The philosophical critique of individualism from scholars like Writing in Philosophy and Social Values makes a similar point, that individualism is reductionist because it treats the individual as an isolated entity separated from their environment, and that fails to account for. The social contexts and collective behavior.
Speaker 3
So the problem isn't valuing the individual, it's the isolation, the idea that the self is self-sufficient and self defining.
Speaker 4
Right. And that's where the biblical framework Snodgrass is recovering becomes really interesting because it actually has a much richer account of the individual than individualism does. It starts with the imago dei, the image of God. Genesis 127 says God created human beings in his own image. And what that means according to the biblical tradition is that. Human dignity, worth and identity are not self generated. They're given. They're grounded in something outside the self.
Speaker 3
And that's a fundamentally different starting point than I think therefore I am.
Speaker 4
Completely different. Descartes starts with the thinking self as the foundation of all certainty. The biblical framework starts with a creator who speaks identity into existence. And the implication is that your dignity isn't contingent on your performance, your preferences, or your self-perception. It's prior to all of that.
Speaker 3
Which is actually more stable, not less. Because if your identity is self constructed, it can be self deconstructed, but if it's given by God, it's not up for renegotiation.
Speaker 4
That's a really sharp way to put it, and Snodgrass would add that the fall complicates this. Genesis 3 introduces a distortion of the image of God in humanity, leading to what the biblical tradition describes as alienation from God, from self, from others, and from creation. Romans 323 captures it. All have. And fall short of the glory of God. So the image is real, but it's damaged and.
Speaker 3
That's where the identity crisis actually comes from. Not from external oppression or social pressure, but from this deeper fracture.
Speaker 4
Exactly, and the New Testament's answer to that fracture is restoration through Christ. 2nd Corinthians 517 If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come. So identity isn't just recovered, it's renewed and it's renewed. Not by self improvement or self-discovery, but by union with Christ.
Speaker 3
So Snodgrass's alternative isn't just a theological correction, it's a whole different anthropology, a different account of what a human being is.
Speaker 4
That's exactly right. He calls it a covenantal, biblical theological apologetic, and the word covenantal is doing a lot of work there. It means that identity is relational. It's not just you and God in isolation. It's you embedded in a covenant relationship with God and with. Community of believers.
Speaker 3
And that communal dimension is something modern individualism almost structurally can't account for.
Speaker 4
Right. And there's a really interesting parallel here from the Biblical Counseling Coalition. Theologian Kevin Vanhooser is quoted there saying that the human creature is neither an autonomous individual nor an anonymous unit that has been assimilated into some collectivity, but rather a particular person who achieves a concrete identity in relation to others. Human being is inherently social. That's a third way. Not hyper individualism, not collectivism, but personhood in relationship.
Speaker 3
And that maps onto what Paul says in First Corinthians. You are the body of Christ and each of you is a member of it. Individual, yes, but never isolated. Exactly.
Speaker 4
And that's the ecclesiological payoff of Snodgrass's argument. The church isn't just a gathering of individuals who happen to share spiritual preferences. It's a community constituted by a shared identity in Christ. And that shared identity is what makes genuine community possible in the first place.
Speaker 3
OK, I want to push on something here because Snodgrass is writing specifically about the evangelical church in America, but this feels like it has implications way beyond the church. Like the identity crisis he's describing people not knowing who they are, constructing and deconstructing selves. That's a pretty widespread cultural phenomenon.
Speaker 4
It absolutely is, and I think that's part of what makes Snodgrass's argument interesting, even for people who aren't coming from a faith background. The philosophical critique of individualism that is reduction. That it can't account for social contexts, That it fosters alienation. Those are concerns that show up across the political and philosophical spectrum. Soros paper in Philosophy and Social Values makes the point that the Western conception of individuals as isolated entities fails to account for the role of collective identity and responsibility.
Speaker 3
So the secular critique and the theological critique are actually converging on a similar problem, just from different directions.
Speaker 4
They are. Where they diverge is on the solution, the secular critique. Tends to point toward community, social structures, collective responsibility. Snodgrass's argument is that those things are real goods, but they're not sufficient because without a transcendent grounding, they're still ultimately self referential. The community becomes the new self, and you've just scaled up the problem.
Speaker 3
That's a genuinely interesting tension. Like communitarianism as just individualism at a group.
Speaker 4
Level, which is why Snodgrass insists on the covenantal framework, because it anchors identity not in the self, not in the community, but in God's revelation. And redemption in Christ. Those are objective realities that exist outside of and prior to any human construction.
Speaker 3
And that's the apologetic move he's making, not just saying the Bible says so, but arguing that the biblical framework actually provides what modern individualism promises but can't deliver.
Speaker 4
Exactly. He's saying you want coherent identity, you want genuine freedom, you want real dignity. Modern individualism gestures at those things but can't ground them. The covenantal framework actually delivers them. Because they're rooted in something that doesn't shift with cultural trends or personal preferences.
Speaker 3
And there's something almost counterintuitive about that, because the cultural assumption is that submitting to an external authority, whether that's God or scripture or tradition, is a constraint on freedom. But Snodgrass is arguing the opposite.
Speaker 4
Right. And this is where the definition of freedom becomes really important. Modern individualism defines freedom as freedom from external authority, the absence of constraint. But Snodgrass's framework defines freedom. It's freedom for something, freedom to be what you were created to be. And that kind of freedom actually requires A telos, a purpose, a direction. Without that, you don't have freedom, you just have drift.
Speaker 3
Freedom as drift. That's a really precise way to name what a lot of people are experiencing, right?
Speaker 4
Now and Snodgrass's other writing on his site makes a related point that the questions people ask about identity and purpose. Point beyond themselves and cannot finally be answered by the assumptions of modern individualism. There's a built in inadequacy. The framework generates the questions but can't answer them.
Speaker 3
Which is maybe why the identity conversation in our culture feels so exhausting and so unresolved. We keep asking, who am I? And the only tool we've been given is look inside yourself. But what if looking inside yourself just gives you more questions?
Speaker 4
That's precisely Snodgrass's point, and it connects to something the Biblical Counseling Coalition piece by Jimin Moon observes that the secular world has come up with concepts like identity crisis to describe. Phenomenon. But it never succeeded in providing A satisfying answer to this fundamental ontological search for who we are. The diagnosis is there, the cure isn't.
Speaker 3
So the secular world can name the problem but not solve it. And Snodgrass is arguing that the church has the solution but has been too busy absorbing the problem to offer it.
Speaker 4
That's a sharp summary. And it's what makes his argument feel urgent rather than just academic. Because if Wells is right that the church has already absorbed the ethos of modern individualism and consumerism, hollowing out doctrinal depth and seriousness, then the church isn't positioned to offer an alternative. It's just offering a spiritualized version of the same thing.
Speaker 3
Spiritual comfort with very little truth. We're back to that line.
Speaker 4
We keep coming back to it because it's so precise, and I think it's worth sitting with what that actually looks like in practice. A church culture where sermons. Are designed to make people feel good about themselves. Where doctrine is treated as divisive or irrelevant, where the measure of a good service is whether people left feeling uplifted, That's not a caricature, that's a real and widespread pattern.
Speaker 3
And the irony is that it's done in the name of relevance, of meeting people where they are.
Speaker 4
Right. And Snodgrass isn't against meeting people where they are. But he's arguing that meeting people where they are has to mean engaging their actual questions with actual truth, not just validating their existing assumptions. The Covenantal framework. Does engage people where they are. It takes the questions of identity and dignity seriously, but it refuses to answer them on individualism's terms.
Speaker 3
So it's not a retreat from culture, it's a more rigorous engagement with it.
Speaker 4
Exactly. And that's what makes it apologetic in the classical sense. It's not just preaching to the choir. It's making an argument that the biblical framework is more coherent, more adequate, more humanizing than the alternative. Not just for Christians, but for anyone asking the questions that modern individualism raises and can't answer.
Speaker 3
Let me ask you something that I think a lot of people would wonder. Is there a risk that this kind of argument becomes its own form of authoritarianism? Like, stop constructing your identity and submit to the one God has given you? That can sound pretty coercive.
Speaker 4
That's a real and legitimate concern, and I think Snodgrass would acknowledge it. The history of religion includes plenty of examples where appeals to divine authority were used to suppress rather than liberate, but the covenantal framework he's describing is specifically grounded in a God who is described. In scripture as loving and just, not arbitrary or coercive, the identity given in Christ as Second Corinthians 517 frames it is described as liberation, a new creation, not a new cage.
Speaker 3
So the argument is that the authority being submitted to is not oppressive, but generative. It's the authority of a creator who made you and knows what you're for, right?
Speaker 4
And Snodgrass's other writing makes this point through the lens of meaning, that God's objective revelation in Christ establishes the foundation for true knowledge, enabling us to interpret rather than originate meaning. The difference is between being given a map and being told to invent the territory. 1 is constraining in a helpful way. The other is exhausting and ultimately impossible.
Speaker 3
Inventing the territory, that's a really good image for what modern individualism asks of people, not just to find yourself. But to make yourself from scratch with no reference points.
Speaker 4
And the cultural evidence that this is exhausting is pretty hard to ignore. The identity conversation in our culture is not producing more settled, secure, flourishing people. It's producing more anxiety, more fragmentation, more confusion. Which is exactly what Snodgrass would predict. Because the framework can't deliver what it promises.
Speaker 3
So when you step back from everything we've covered, the diagnosis, the historical argument, the theological. Alternative What's the thing that most needs to land for?
Speaker 4
People, I think it's this. The language of dignity, freedom, and identity isn't neutral. It comes from somewhere. And when modern culture uses that language, even in church, without the theological foundation that gave it meaning, it's not just incomplete, it's incoherent. You can't sustain a real account of human dignity without a real account of what a human being is. And Snodgrass's argument is that the only account that actually holds is the one. Rooted in creation, fall, and redemption.
Speaker 3
And the practical implications for someone sitting in a church or sitting outside one is ask harder questions. Don't settle for spiritual comfort with very little truth. Demand the foundation, not just the vocabulary.
Speaker 4
Exactly. And I'd add, take the communal dimension seriously, because one of the things modern individualism does is make faith a private internal matter. But the biblical framework insists that identity in Christ is not only individual but communal. You are a member of a body. That's not optional. It's constitutive of what it means to be a Christian.
Speaker 3
Here's what this really comes down to. Snodgrass is making a case that the crisis of identity we're living through isn't primarily A psychological crisis or a political crisis. It's a theological one. We've inherited A framework that puts the self at the center, borrowed the language of a tradition that puts God at the center, and then wondered why nothing quite holds together.
Speaker 4
And the recovery he's pointing toward isn't nostalgia. It's not go back to the way things were. It's a re anchoring, taking the real questions of identity, freedom and dignity seriously enough to follow them all the way down to their actual foundation, which in his argument is God's revelation, creation and redemption in Christ.
Speaker 3
Which means the work isn't just intellectual, it's formational. It's about what you actually build your.
Speaker 2
Life on right?
Speaker 4
And that's why Snodgrass frames this as an apologetic not just a theological argument for insiders, but a case made to a culture that is genuinely searching. The questions are real. The hunger for identity, freedom and dignity is real. His argument is that the biblical framework is the only one that can actually feed.
Speaker 2
It. So here's the provocation to leave you with. We started by noting that the words dignity, freedom and identity are everywhere, and Snodgrass's argument is that we've kept the words while losing the meaning. The question worth sitting with is what are you actually building your sense of self on? Is it something you constructed, something the culture handed you, or something that was given before you had the chance to choose? Because according to Snodgrass, the answer to that question shapes everything else.
Thanks.