Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 01:1 (Spring 2019)
Article: Introducing "Eikon"
Author: Denny R. Burk

Eikon 1:1 (Spring 2019) p. 5

Introducing Eikon

Denny R. Burk

The hallmark of late modern Western culture is that it has forgotten itself. It is largely post-Christian and has not retained God in its knowledge. Failure to see God as He is means that man fails to see himself as he is. There is light all around, but often he fails to see it. Indeed, he doesn’t want to see it, for to see would mean giving the Creator His due. And this, he is largely unwilling to do.

The cultural consequences of this can hardly be overstated. We are now in a situation in which we don’t know ourselves. We don’t know ourselves as we ought because we don’t know God as we ought. For this reason, many Westerners believe that human identity and meaning are self-determined, not God-determined. This idea is not anything new, but it is the ideological air that we breathe. It is so prevalent in our culture that we hardly notice that it is there forming us and shaping our understanding of ourselves and of what it means to be a human being.

Sociologists have given a name to this mindset. It is called expressive individualism. In his book The Fractured Republic, Yuval Levin describes what expressive individualism looks like in the modern world. He writes:

The ethic of our age has been aptly called expressive individualism. That term suggests not only a desire to pursue one’s own path but also a yearning for fulfillment through the definition and articulation of one’s own identity. It is a drive both to be more like whatever you already are and also to live in society by fully asserting who you are. The capacity of individuals to define the terms of their own existence by defining their personal identities is increasingly equated with liberty and with the meaning of some of our basic rights, and it is given pride of place in our self-understanding.1

The philosophy of expressive individualism was given unique expression in Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion for the 1992 decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Justice Kennedy put it this way:

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

At the heart of this philosophy is the notion that the purpose of life is to discover one’s deepest self, to express that to the world, and then to forge that identity in ways that may contradict what family, friends, tradition, or religious authorities might say.2 Your identity— indeed even the meaning of life itself—is determined and expressed by you, the individual...