It’s been a while. Since my last post, I have spent a couple of weeks in Pennsylvania and Michigan, catching up with family and old friends. In that time, I continued to think about identity. What does it mean to be Christian? To be Reformed? To be Christian Reformed? To be, in any true sense, human? 

In my last post, I walked a little way down a path to faith that goes through doubt, partly in the company of young Sikh writer, Manvir Singh. Such faith, I suggested, is inherently sturdier and stronger than a faith that has not been tested. In this somewhat delayed second post in this short series on finding our true moral and theological identity, I begin with a narrative suggested to me that claims that what is presently happening in the CRC is a restoration of old ways, a return to what has been called “sincerity.” I will argue, quite to the contrary, that what is happening in the CRC is not about “sincerity” but about a different sort of identity, one based in contemporary culture.

For the near future, I plan a third post based on the brilliant discussion of theological and moral identity developed by the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Galatians.

. . . . . . . . . .

Some time ago in a conversation about what’s happened recently in the Christian Reformed Church, someone suggested to me that perhaps some categories proposed in a recent book would be helpful. The book—I’ve mentioned it before—bears the underwhelming title, You and Your Profile: Identity after Authenticity (Columbia University Press, 2021). It’s written by Hans-Georg Moeller, whose interests include Daoism and social systems theory, and journalist Paul D’Ambrosio. 

The categories my interlocuter had in mind are sincerity and authenticity, borrowed (loosely) by Moeller and D’Ambrosio from Lionel Trilling and Charles Taylor—more on that below. In the book, these categories are used to explain changes in our culture. As Moeller and D’Ambrosio have it, once—not long ago—society was based on sincerity. One’s role in society—and with it, one’s identity—was dictated by the culture. You were a wife or a husband, a cobbler or a baker, a father or a mother. These things were given to you; you did not choose them. Your responsibility was to engage these roles sincerely: to own them.

But then recently—how recently depends on who is doing the analysis—society, and with it identity, made a profound shift: many roles in society that once were assigned by birth and station were now open to one’s choosing. One could choose whether to marry and whom. One could choose to be a cobbler or a baker or something entirely other. One could choose where to live and who to count as friends. In this brave new world what counted was no longer sincerity but authenticity: to be, finally, one’s own self.

It’s a version of this narrative that was proposed to me as an explanation for what is going on in the CRC. Once, the story goes, the culture of the CRC was a sincerity culture. People knew their roles and played them with sincerity. No one much questioned theology or tradition. If one was CRC, church was simply what one did. And one did it in the way of traditional Reformed churches.

But then, in this telling of the story, came the Boomers and the Sixties, and suddenly people, even people in the CRC, began to question everything. The church began to lose its moorings in the confessions, in the old ways of thinking and the old ways of doing things. Instead of sincerity, they looked for authenticity: being true to oneself.

But now, the narrative goes, the CRC and a newer generation of leaders have snatched the denomination back. They have gone back to a culture of sincerity, and we Boomers have been left wondering what happened.

But is this really the story? In this way of telling the story, using categories adopted by Moeller and D’Ambrosio, there is a curious elision. What has been elided is what in fact the Moeller and D’Ambrosio book is all about. The title of the book, as you recall, is You and Your Profile: Identity after Authenticity. The authors borrow the terms first used by Lionel Trilling in his Charles Eliot Norton lectures of 1970: sincerity and authenticity. They do so without seeming to have entirely understood what Trilling was saying (see Trilling’s, Sincerity and Authenticity, Harvard University Press, 1971). They borrow these terms, but they add to them a third, a rather ugly, coinage: “profilicity.” It’s profilicity that the book is about, as the title suggests.

The argument of the book is that the emphasis on authenticity of a generation ago has become passé, superseded by a new form of identity. Key to this form of identity is what the authors call “second-order observation.” Second-order observation is seeing oneself or anyone or anything else through the eyes of others. What matters is how others see you. And by others, they mean not one’s immediate personal contacts, one’s family and friends, but what they call the “general peer.” The general peer is what one thinks others are thinking.

The model for this is Facebook. In posting something on Facebook, one does so with an eye to how it will play with those who may view one’s post, whether positively or negatively. You are looking for clicks, reactions. In this way, you create a Facebook identity, a “profile.” Or, rather, in the Moeller and D’Ambrosio way of talking, you “curate” a profile. And not only for Facebook, but in other parts of life. Moeller and D’Ambrosio give as an example, a woman who is a post-doc fellow, a late-night club DJ, a girlfriend, and a soccer player. For each of these, she “curates” a different identity profile.

Crucial to the idea of profilicity is that these are not masks hiding a central identity—what one authentically is. They are not fragments of what one really is. They each in their own way constitute an identity. One is what one plays. There is no center, no me apart from what I project to the world.

Even from this quick and inadequate sketch of what Moeller and D’Ambrosion have in mind by profilicity, there is much that seems spot on for the world in which we live. The patent example is Donald Trump. Trump always seems to be playing to what he thinks others see of him. What matters to him is not whether something is true, as in the allegation of immigrants eating cats, but how it plays. Is there behind the profile an authentic Donald Trump? The answer appears to be no. And does the audience care if there is not? Not really. What they are buying is the profile. As long as Trump leans fully into the role, it matters little to audience that he is playing a role. The profile is all that matters.

The same could be said of TV preachers. Or Tik Tok personalities. Or perhaps the present CRC. What has puzzled me recently is how the current crop of CRC leaders seem to be or claim to be all in. Notably, they define “being CRC” as signing on to the church confessions “without reservation.” 

This is not sincerity. Here Moeller and D’Ambrosio have entirely misread Trilling and, with that, misread the development of Western culture. In the first sentence of Sincerity and Authenticity, Trilling says, “Now and then it is possible to observe the moral life in the process of revising itself. . ..” He has in mind the development of the idea of sincerity in Western culture. The quest for sincerity arose, Trilling argues, because people began to question traditional roles and traditional beliefs. “Sincerity,” he says, “refers primarily to a congruence between avowal and actual feeling.” Sincerity is the attempt to bring together what one says (“avowal”) with what one actually thinks and feels. A sincerity culture is one in which people struggle to keep together what they are required to think and do by the roles assigned to them and what they actually think and wish to do. Sincerity, in other words, always includes an element of doubt. Being sincere is the grace to keep one’s commitments in the face of reservations.

Nor is it—the claim that one affirms what one affirms without reservation—authenticity, of course. Questions of authenticity arise because so much of what we are and do is utterly conventional—what everyone else does. Trilling quotes the 18^th century thinker Edward Young: “Born Originals, how comes it to pass that we die Copies?” This is the question of authenticity: is there in me anything that counts as me apart from the society in which I live? Do I have a soul? Is there a Clay Libolt? Authenticity is living with doubts about oneself.

Thus, the way of thinking about what it means to be CRC among those who have taken over the denomination is not a return to an older sincerity culture, as was suggested to me. It’s something new entirely, and closer to what Moeller and D’Ambrosio call “profilicity” than to either sincerity or authenticity. In the sort of identity created in a profilicity culture there is no dissonance between the role one plays and who one is. One simply is who one styles oneself to be, and if one is someone else in another context or another time, it doesn’t matter. The profile one presents is everything. You are for that moment all in.

This seems to be the idea of faith that is found among the Young, Restless, Reformed people that I have met. They have adopted a theological profile—in this case, a profile based on 17^th-early 20^th century Calvinism—and having adopted it, they live and think fully into it. What matters is no longer whether the theological profile is true. They claim to have moved beyond those sorts of questions. What matters is living out the theological profile they have adopted—without reservation.

The stance in life that Trilling describes by “sincerity” is precisely the opposite. It’s having the grace to do what one is required to do sincerely, that is, faithfully, in the face of doubts and uncertainties. Reading Trilling, I was struck with the thought that it’s precisely sincerity that the most recent synod has tried to rule out. In the CRC before 2024, office holders were permitted a range of honest disagreement with the standards of the church as long as they served with the required sincerity of purpose. It’s the opportunity to so serve which has now been taken away.

In its place, we are given a form of faith that looks more to me like Moeller’s and D’Ambrosio’s prolilicity than by what they mean by either sincerity or authenticity. Such a faith is all surface and little depth. It will not, I think, stand the test of time. 

Clay