Identity Crisis - The Spiritual Issue For A New Era


Are you feeling divided?

Are you living two lives - an inner one and an outer one? 

Or perhaps a “real” life and a “virtual” one. Maybe several "virtual" ones?

Is there a vast difference between the way the world sees you and the way you see yourself? Or the way you present yourself in certain contexts?

Do you feel like you’re just playing a role, or that you have different roles to play in different aspects of your life, and you can never be yourself?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you may be experiencing the identity confusion that can described by the word “demonic.” Now, stay with me here. In our culture, “demonic” is too often a facile synonym for “evil.” But historically, it has a much deeper and more useful meaning. A “demon” can simply be something from outside ourselves that divides or confuses our lives, and that disrupts the integrity of our personality identity and our relationships.
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One of the core ideas of “Seeds of Confusion” is that current social and political realities are driving people more acutely into such destructive identity confusion. What we feel internally, more and more, does not cohere with what we experience externally. The roles and desires we tend to pursue inside our minds often stand at odds with how others see us and depend upon us. It is, in a word, an increasingly "demonic" state of things - aggravated by the rapid dawn of the Digital Age.

For evidence, one need look no further than the preponderance of dating and interactive pornography sites on the Internet. Once confined to magazines hidden under mattresses, or perhaps a secretive affair in seedy hotel - the impulse to seek sexual gratification in ways that would not be approved of by others once contained enough chance of discovery that there was some some measure of deterrent.

But now that deterrent is gone. With Internet access and private devices in the hands of most members of our society, one’s inner life and one’s outer life can be at complete odds with one another - not just when it comes to sex, but in all ways that we seek entertainment, distraction, and gratification.
Moreover, our rapidly developing virtual technology allows us to shape whole new identities for ourselves. We can literally be whoever we want to be or do whatever want to do, as long as someone has designed and coded that experience for us.

Now don't get me wrong. I think this can be a wonderful development. In addition to endless new entertainment opportunities, virtual technology can be a vehicle for powerful personal liberation, giving those of limited opportunity unprecedented access to many types of activities, education, and relationships that one otherwise would never enjoy.

But nonetheless, the danger for confusion and divided identity remains strong. The questions yet to be answered are many:

 What are the long term effects of all our time spent in virtual worlds? 

 What happens to us psychologically when we develop and live out lives for two or more identities? 

 What happens when the morality and ethics we uphold in our families, religious communities, and workplaces are tossed away as soon as we "log into" one of our virtual lives? 

 Do we run the risk of so dividing ourselves that we are never free to be ourselves, or that we forget altogether who we really are and what we really stand for?

 If we live in many different contexts with many different identities, can we not help but encounter some "demonic" confusion? 

 And what happens when our technology reaches the sophisticated level of "The Matrix," and we are unable to distinguish the real world from the virtual worlds we have created? 

In other words, this new era in history is opening a whole new Pandora’s box of spiritual pitfalls. Discussions of what it means to be human and what it means to be in a human relationship in this new digital landscape will become central to addressing the mass psychological and spiritual fallout that is certainly coming.

Finally, where might God, and a sense of identity as a disciple of Jesus Christ, fit onto all these questions? 
I believe the word “integrity” will be key in discerning the path through these new challenges. The Biblical bookend stories of Babel and Pentecost (from Genesis 11 and Acts 2) can teach us wisdom for the journey. For the next post, I will climb the ancient Tower of Babel and see what it says to our current state of rapidly growing confusion.









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