A religious and a secular basis for society. (Part 4)

A religious and a secular basis for society

Part 4: The freedom of faith compared with the shackles of identity

Compare the joyous, love-filled confidence that I have just described through faith in God with the modern ideologies’ reliance on gaining your identity from certain external categories to which you belong. These ideologies assert that your quality and worth and experience in life stem from these categories, categories which are often in conflict with each other, and which gain their supposed power from being in conflict with other categories. In contrast, the Christian, who gains their personal, individual security from the love that God has for them, has no need to rely on belonging to any external category, and is automatically in harmony with every other person who also acknowledges their relationship with God to be central to their life. In the love of God, all are one, and all externals are, well, external; they are only of accidental, contingent importance. For modern secular thinkers, a person is always trapped within their external categories, constrained by them and their supposed qualities and social dynamics. They are also constrained by the idea that the dynamics of their personal situation only works in conflict with those who belong to other categories. In contrast, the believer is free of all shackles to engage with and embrace all people as their equal and as utterly precious, because everyone is loved by God.