A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on October 29, 2023 by Revd Dr Sam Wells.
All Saints. I believe these two words provide what we might call a Christian answer to one of the most profound and pervasive questions of our time. That lies in the word identity, and the conflict over the phrase identity politics. I want to tell you a story going back many centuries about how we got to where we are. Once we’ve digested that story, I’d like to suggest why I believe All Saints provides the clue to how we might respond to this great challenge of our day.
Let’s start in the fourth century BC. In his book the Republic, the philosopher Plato talks about three parts of the human soul: one is reason; the second is desire; but there’s a third part, which is about judgements of worth, like pride, anger and shame. This explains why a person who is well off, and has a rewarding family and social life, can still feel fury at being humiliated, for example if for no good reason a colleague is paid more than them for doing the same work. Ancient societies were hierarchical: they assumed a certain class of people existed to rule, and people accepted a lower status in return for the security and protection the aristocrats gave them. The common people were accustomed to a level of degradation in comparison to the ruling class. No one was thinking about identity, because their social role was determined by their age and gender, and there was no escape, because if they fled to the next village or next country it would be just the same. But economic changes, triggered by the growth of cities and the change in patterns of ownership and production, transformed aristocratic societies into democratic ones, and stratification was replaced by equality. However not everyone was content with equality: it seems part of human nature for many to strive to be better than others – to be recognised and applauded and celebrated.
After Plato, the next significant figure in this story is Martin Luther. Luther could be said to have invented something that’s vital for understanding identity today. Think about the word ‘authentic.’ It assumes that there’s a difference between the inner self that others and even we struggle to perceive, and the outer self that everyone sees. Authenticity names the process by which we come to identify the true character of that inner self, and live into that identity, even if that makes us different in significant ways from the norms of our society. Martin Luther could not find grace through the outer ceremonies of Catholicism. He insisted that grace was found only through the inner discovery of faith. In the process he transformed the world from one in which the individual had to conform to the demands of society to one in which society had to conform to the truth of the individual.
The third and perhaps the crucial figure in this story is the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau rejected the notion of original sin – the idea that envy, greed and hatred were lodged in the human soul. Instead, he argued that the only original quality was pity for others, and the negative urges only arose when individuals encountered society. Society triggered the comparison of one with another, and it was this impulse to comparison that caused sin. Rousseau named something that has become an almost universal assumption since: that there’s such a thing as ‘society,’ which is made up of rules, relationships and customs that inhibit human potential and happiness. Only after Rousseau did people start to think of revolutionising a whole society and starting again, as the French did in 1789.
The fourth and last key figure in this story is the German nineteenth-century philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel agreed with traditional theologians who traced the concept of human dignity back to the fall of Adam and Eve, and located that dignity in the fact that human beings uniquely had a choice. As Augustine put it, after the fall, humankind retained the ability to choose, just lost the ability to make good choices. (Notice how Martin Luther King appealed to the dignity of choice when he looked forward to a day when his children were judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character; in other words, by their moral choices.) Hegel went a step further, and said human beings are not just governed by the impulse of their desires: the choices they make are fundamentally driven by a struggle for recognition. What was awesome for Hegel about the French Revolution was that it proclaimed an equal dignity for all people, and thus universal recognition. This has been the basis for countless revolutions since, from the anti-Apartheid movement to the Arab Spring.
So identity for Plato is about worth, for Luther it’s about grace, for Rousseau it’s about disentangling yourself from society, and for Hegel it’s about recognition. Up to this point it looks like the story’s going in an upward curve from outward conformity to the release of inner freedom. But from this point on, the story gets more complicated – and that’s for one particular reason. The reason is that freedom sounds like it means equal dignity for every person under the same rules. Yet it can also mean free expression of individuality and the creation of one’s own rules. For some, that free expression is an amazing liberation, and has led for example to the recognition of the rights of women, LGBT people, and people with disabilities. For others, the opportunity to identify and define who you are has been overwhelming, leading them to take refuge in collective identity. Hence the rise of nationalism as individual liberty took hold in the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century and again today. Nationalism is driven by the desire of a group that its suppressed identity gains public recognition. It tends to arise when rapid social change undermines familiar forms of community and generates bewildering new forms of collectivity. Nationalism is fuelled by a sense of invisibility: citizens who once regarded themselves as the bedrock of a shared culture now find themselves ignored and despised by a political class that fundamentally doesn’t see them. So populism grows as the reassertion of the identity of the common, collective citizen in the face of the technocratic system.
There are two more steps in the story. One is the transformation of the political left. The left used to be the traditional advocate of the collective interest of the working class and the economically exploited. But in the last generation the left has become more associated with offering recognition to and upholding the dignity of specific identity groups – groups that in many cases don’t just want equality, but want to change the culture in order to achieve the recognition they seek. Which is why we find the paradox that many of the voters whose economic interests would put them on the left have instead gravitated towards the right in search of validation and recognition of the dignity of lives that see identity in the mass and the imagined normal, rather than the distinctive and the different. This is how the politics of populism and the culture wars works.
The final step in the story is a curious return to Luther and Rousseau. Luther was aware of an interior self and believed it could only be dignified by faith in Christ. In contemporary secular societies, people still have that inner unease, yet are less likely to seek faith in God as the balm for it. Our society’s answer has been to trust in Rousseau’s conviction of humankind’s inner goodness, and his confidence that our inner selves are sources of limitless potential, and human happiness depends on its release. This assertion has led to what’s been called the ‘triumph of the therapeutic,’ by which everything comes to be evaluated by whether it affirms an individual’s self-esteem. Once you decide that self-esteem is the by-product of public recognition, you land up with a notion of identity that has changed from the establishment of legal equality to a culture of compulsory indiscriminate affirmation. There becomes no legitimate way to adjudicate when the needs, wants and rights of different identities conflict. Which is where we are now.
Into this bewildering story, the two words All Saints speak beautiful, transformative truth. All Saints is a festival that celebrates how God has created each one of us for a purpose, a purpose we cannot fulfil without each other, how God loves us all equally, yet loves each one of us as if we were the only one. All Saints rests on the notion of the communion of saints, which tells us we’re part of a story that’s simultaneously taking place now, in the mundane and the limited, and forever, in the full companionship of God. All Saints transforms our notion of identity by turning our attention from ourselves to God, from who we uniquely are to what God is creatively making us, from where we specifically are coming from to where we are collectively going, from where we are restless to where we find our rest in God, from our exhausting and endless quest to define our identity, to inhabiting the identity we are given as a child of God.
All Saints does make a distinction between the equality of all God’s people and the particularity of some. Without being elitist, All Saints reflects the recognition that there are some individuals in whose lives God lifts the veil between essence and existence, forever and now, heaven and earth so that those lives are windows from time into eternity. That’s why we call them saints – because in them we see holiness and thus more fully imagine and anticipate everlasting life with God. But meanwhile All Saints retains its democratic character by appreciating that there are some moments in almost every life where God lifts the veil between earth and heaven, and where in the miracle of birth or the tenderness of death, in the wonder of companionship or the gift of forgiveness, in the discovery of love or the embrace of restoration, in the glimpse of beauty or the kindness of a stranger, every single one of us can be a saint too.
We’ve all known the desire to let our true self sing. Many of us have feared that society would not recognise or affirm the self that sang. I suspect all of us have sometimes felt overwhelmed by the cacophony of identities competing for recognition and affirmation. Hear the good news of All Saints. Identity is fundamentally not a discovery to be defended but a gift to be received. Identity is in the end not about recognition by society but embrace by God. Identity is ultimately a story not about our assertion of what we are but about God’s invitation to what we may become. Identity is not about the isolation of establishing there is no one else on earth like me but the solidarity of believing there is a place for each one of us at the heavenly banquet.
All Saints gives us something the quest for identity never can. It replaces individuality with communion; solitariness with relationship; static identification with dynamic transformation; endless self-obsession with eternal belonging. If you’re lost in a sea of identity politics, give thanks for All Saints: because All Saints turns identity into togetherness and politics into praise.
For many of the ideas above and more on identity see Francis Fukuyama, Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition (London: Profile 2018).
