Summary of Chapter 5: "Pop-Culture Memories of Wholeness"

When it comes to the influence of the Christian faith, a great forgetting has occurred (similar to movie Memento in case you've seen it). The average citizen of the West is almost totally unaware of the extent to which Christianity has shaped his or her worldview. So many have forgotten the ways in which the biblical imagination has shaped our arts; our concepts of justice, equality, and human rights; our ideas of personhood, of goodness, and morality. So much of what we value as a culture is born out of Christianity; yet average people are unaware of the mountain upon which they stand. This could not be more true of our concepts of identity.

Just think of all the movies you have watched. Think of the way the woman screams when she is confronted by the killer in the horror movie. Think of the hardened cop who bends the rules to bring crooks to justice. Recall the way the seductress dances, the way the devilishly hip criminal delivers his lines, the way the quarterback celebrates his touchdown. All of these memories provide a sort of storehouse of instructions of how to act. With no set identity given to us anymore, we delve into that storehouse to know which way to act, which way to be, which identities or roles to perform. Our culture offers us disposable identities - for example, the sexy identity, the cool identity, the glamorous identity. Yet when we look behind these identities, we find elements that point us back to a true sense of self. Listen closely enough, and you will hear echoes of wholeness, forgotten shadows of our true selves.

On one hand, these social selves, i.e. sexy, cool and glamorous, take us away from our true selves. They move us toward parody and the perversion of our humanity. Yet when we dig deep enough behind the clichés and performances, we find tiny grains of truth, memories of wholeness. To move forward effectively toward our true selves in our culture today, we must examine these social selves and their power to influence our behaviour both negatively and positively.

The next chapter will examine some of the identities commonly acted out in today's youth and young (and also not-so-young) adult culture.

Source: Mark Sayers (2010), The Vertical Self, p.54-56