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One can introduce the question of Christian identity in a parliamentary mode, by posing a preliminary question or even a motion to reject: isn’t it inappropriate and even harmful to assert that there exists a Christian identity? Is this theme and term too ambivalent to be honest?
This question is raised, for example, by the latest book from Father Benoist de Sinéty, titled: The Cause of Christ. The Gospel against “the Christian identity”. It is a kind of manifesto against the quest, described as obsessive in certain circles, for a recognition or defense of the Catholic community’s identity. In the subtitle of this book, “the Christian identity” is placed in quotation marks: thus it is not the Christian identity as such that is criticized but its invasive thematic hardening.
Regarding the rising number of catechumens, especially young catechumens, some observers speak of an initially identity-driven quest. This judgment oversimplifies a complex phenomenon, but there is indeed, among some people, notably in working-class neighborhoods, a need to assert and belong, a need for cultural and religious identity. Identity-seeking can express a fear of otherness, of the present or of the future. It should not, however, provoke a symmetric fear but rather evangelical listening and dialogue. If identity withdrawal is harmful, if the obsessive search for identity is not healthy, the mere search for an identity is not illegitimate.
In the face of the fear that the quest for identity would express, some express their own fear of this rise in an identity quest. This fear of fear, as paradoxical as the famous “liar’s paradox,” creates a vicious circle, discrediting itself. The authentically Christian response to fear, and to the harshness it brings, cannot be solely the severity of judgments. It is more fruitful to combine the rigor of a contrasted analysis, kindness toward people, measured and nuanced assessments, and above all what Pope Francis and Leo XIV call “the ecology of dialogue.”
During the 2017 presidential primary, Bruno Le Maire, reacting to the debate on the “national identity” stirred during Sarkozy’s presidency, stated that he preferred the theme of “culture” to that of “identity.” Identity would confine us to seeking an immediate and exclusive coincidence with oneself, whereas culture would be part of a logic of openness, encounter, and movement.
The theme of culture, in fact, is no less ambivalent than that of identity. Many today attribute to Christianity only a cultural dimension the same reproaches they level at Christian identity. But if we refer to, in the sequence of Léon XIV’s visit to UNESCO, the extraordinary speech that John Paul II gave there in 1980, on culture as a way for man to inhabit his humanity, we can affirm that the adjusted themes of culture and identity enrich one another.
The dialectic of culture and identity highlights the fundamentally living and evolving character of authentic Christian identity, which cannot be built primarily defensively as a quest for immediate and definitive coincidence with a number of values or references. It is one of the beautiful paradoxes of truly Christian identity that it is stronger the more it remains in dialogue and in motion. As in the gospel, one must follow Jesus and walk with Him to remain in Him.
The philosopher Pierre Manent has often explained that each of us does not have a single identity but a “portfolio of identities”—cultural, familial, intellectual, spiritual. Therefore one cannot speak of identity in the singular unless one acknowledges the underlying complexity of all identity, reinforced by Catholic universality of Christian identity. This theme of complexity, so dear to Edgar Morin, is not a way of dodging the issue but rather a way to gaze in all its beauty at the richness of our “magnificent humanity,” to quote the title of Léon XIV’s first encyclical, and of the magnificent Christian reality.
Undoubtedly, one can approach the question of identity as one takes seriously the holy. There are Christian authors who discredit the sacred and its quest on the pretext that in the biblical and evangelical regime, the search for holiness should inexorably take precedence. Holiness certainly surpasses the sacred but by embracing it, by acknowledging its quest. The Christian life, likewise, in its momentum, in its freedom, in its joy, surpasses the quest for identity but it accepts it peacefully as an authentically human and legitimate starting point.
The Four Senses of a New Testament Name
The name that expresses the identity, in its most immediate sense, of Jesus Christ’s disciples is not a name they chose but a name they received. “It was in Antioch, we read in the Acts of the Apostles, that for the first time the disciples were called Christians” (Acts 11:26). From whom did the disciples receive this name? From those who were perhaps wary of them but also from those who felt drawn to their message and testimony. In Scripture, the passive voice often expresses the work of God Himself: ultimately, it is from God that the disciples receive the name Christian, as a gift and as a responsibility.
The name of Christian obviously unites to Christ but also to the Holy Spirit: the name Christos, in fact, the Greek rendering of the Hebrew Messiah, designates the one who has received in fullness the anointing of the Spirit (cf. Is 11:1-3). It is the communion with the Christ in the Holy Spirit that makes Christian identity, the spiritual configuration with the only-begotten Son who has become “the firstborn among many brothers” (Rom 8:29). It is through a deepening of biblical, theological, and spiritual study that it is possible to move beyond fear or defensiveness—twin realities of Christian identity.
The medieval practice of biblical interpretation, by the scrutiny of the four senses of Scripture, revived by Father Henri de Lubac in his majestic Exégèse Médiévale, can help us implement this deepening. In the literal sense, Christian identity is belonging to Christ, through faith and the sacraments, to recognize in Christ the ultimate reference for one’s life. The spiritual sense allows us to understand that Christian identity cannot be merely external, sociological or militant: it is an inner belonging, the choice to let oneself be transformed from within by the Gospel, to cultivate the evangelical freedom offered by Christ.
In the moral sense, which expands the two previous, Christian identity is not primarily about external claims but about the way of life—self-forgetfulness, self-giving, service to the poorest, fidelity to a truth received and to be continually deepened. Christian identity is not belonging to a party, even if it is “catholic” (cf. Ph 2:3), but about choosing to live according to the Gospel.
The anagogical sense, the eschatological sense, finally helps us understand that Christian identity is not a reality that would be completed at the end of earthly life. For Christians, what is lived in the present time only sketches what is promised for eternal life. As Leo XIV reminded UNESCO: “We are not on the road to nothingness.” There is always a gap between the Kingdom announced and inaugurated and the Kingdom fully accomplished and revealed. Many counterfeit forms of Christianity (such as totalitarianisms claiming a secularized eschatology) or misformations (such as violently supposed confessional ideologies) arise from the confusion between the present time and eschatology. The anagogical sense makes clear that Christian identity is a path.
The Three Paradoxes of Christian Identity
From these four senses of Christian identity, at least three paradoxes emerge that allow us to grasp, in a precise way, this singular mode of being received from Christ, which is not exclusive but diffusive, for one can experience something of Christian identity without being explicitly Christian.
The first paradox to maintain, drawn from the psalm verse: “Love and truth meet” (Psalm 84:11), lies in the conjunction between rootedness and hospitality. Christians should never have to choose, as Christians, between deep fidelity to the gospel with all its demands and the capacity for listening, encounter, dialogue, and service. Even evangelization, in its most missionary sense, is not carried out against the spirit of dialogue, as John Paul II expressed in his beautiful encyclical The Mission of the Redeemer, but within it. There is no greater openness than the heart of Christ: the more one belongs to Christ, the more one participates in the infinite openness of His heart.
Another typical paradoxical conjunction of authentic Christian belonging is the unity of tradition and modernity. Being Christian means being deeply rooted in a living transmission that comes to us from Christ Himself and at the same time living fully in the present time given by God. The Church Fathers have stressed that the supreme novelty in the history of the world is Christ Himself. Saint Irenaeus expresses this in a famous formula, which has become the refrain of the masterful work of Father de Lubac: omnem novitatem attulit semetipsum afferens, “He brought all novelty by giving Himself.”
Since Christ is the true novelty, the unity paradoxically lies in Him between what is given in history, through the Old Testament in particular, and the novelty of the present time, where each era is an occasion to discover more fully how Christ comes to renew all things. When one is rooted in this authentic Christian identity, one does not fear novelty, since every novelty is always already surpassed and assumed by the novelty of Christ Himself. One also should not be seduced to the point of idolizing partial novelties of the present, because every partial novelty must be set in the perspective of the ultimate novelty, that of Christ Himself.
This relationship between tradition and modernity, a relationship sometimes difficult to articulate and implement but always possible to unfold, appears strongly in Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. In light of the Word of God and of Him who is this Word incarnate, the Shepherd of Peter offers the world elements of discernment relevant to the most contemporary and disruptive issues of the digital revolution and artificial intelligence.
Another peaceful polarity of Christian identity comes from the relationship between humanization and divinization. To be Christian is to receive from the revelation of Christ the revelation of man to himself. The “Ecce Homo” of Pontius Pilate during the Passion of Jesus (Jn 19:5) constitutes both a light on the Messiah, the Savior, and a revelation of the mystery of our humanity, which comes to the surface more in fragility than in strength. Hence the Council Vatican II could affirm: “The mystery of man is truly illuminated only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word” (Gaudium et Spes, 22).
Everything in the mystery of Christ helps to decipher our human nature, in its dimension that is both bodily and spiritual, unique and gendered, personal and relational, eternal and temporal. At the same time, man truly comes into himself (the adverb from Vatican II is strong) only if he lets himself be joined by something greater and deeper than himself. The Pope Leo XIV who has sparked a rediscovery of Saint Augustine for over a year bears strong witness to this.
From Resentment to Thanksgiving
Facing the contemporary quest for identities, we must not give in to fear. It is always a poor counselor. “Do not be afraid!”: this is a motto of the Bible and not only of John Paul II’s pontificate! The very work of salvation consists in delivering us from fear: fear of God, fear of ourselves, fear of others. It is today salutary to resist this poisonous fruit of fear known as resentment. Christian identity, in the end, is less a given than a task, namely to move from resentment to thanksgiving.
“Live in thanksgiving!” (Col 3:15): this exhortation of Saint Paul is particularly valuable. There are indeed elements in the contemporary search for identity to interrogate, to purify, to evangelize. But should we not begin by giving thanks for the search for meaning that it expresses? Fear and resentment are but caricatures of lucidity. It is necessary to cultivate a minimum of serene benevolence to welcome the deeper beauty of reality and of people in their depth. Today, more than ever, the counsel of Saint Augustine is precious: non intratur in veritatem nisi per caritatem, “one enters into truth only through charity.”
One nearby idea is formulated, in philosophical terms, by Cynthia Fleury in her book Ci-gît l’amer. Guérir du ressentiment: “One of the fundamental points concerning the character of resentment is the fact of no longer being able to see, losing access to the rightful view of things, losing that capacity for wonder, and more simply for admiration, thus not simply a blindness but a deformation of everything, as if the subject were gouging out his own eyes, as if he were also losing access to his own capacity for generosity.” In the midst of the storms of our liquid society, may we carry on, with the right gaze and the capacity for wonder, the true and peaceful struggle of authentic Christian identity.