I don’t know how convincing I was. But I do know that almost every conversation in that seminar was essentially about two things: desire and identity. These two ideas were so closely related that they were often referred to synonymously. Desire is identity, and identity is desire. To be fair, I don’t know whether anyone ever said this explicitly. But it was the orbit of the conversations. This conflation of desire and identity has only become more apparent in popular culture in the twenty-plus years since I was in grad school.
Sexual Desire and Personal Identity in Our Culture
I don’t think graduate seminars and academic papers are too influential on the public, at least not directly. Culture is most widely shaped by our video shorts and Netflix series, our media posts and linked articles, our young-adult novels and long-form podcasts. In a word, it’s in the way that our culture tells its story. Stories are how young people are being catechized to think about themselves. Stories of what we long to be, the bad things that oppose it, and our courage to overcome those bad things. And one of the main plotlines that our culture follows is this dual theme of identity and desire.
My intention is not to explore the competing LGBTQ narratives of identity, which get pretty complex with their distinctions between biological sex, gender identity, and gender roles. Then comes the accumulating list of possible gender identities and sexual attractions. Some focus on sexual desire, others on gender perception. Some insist on the male/female binary; others insist on gender fluidity. My intention is not to delineate those stories. Rather, my intention is to show a single theme that is consistently displayed in the contemporary social imagination: Personal desires indicate identity. Affirming one’s identity, then, means living consistently with those desires.
This is the main story, told in countless ways. The hero triumphs in living out her true identity by first recognizing and then following her desires. But there are bad guys who oppose such heroes. The two main sources of opposition in this story are an internal nonaffirming sense of shame and an external nonaffirming collection of voices in society. The hero must overcome these bad guys to live authentically. This is a process of learning how to silence the internal and the external nonaffirming voices.
Such a story usually has a few “canon events.” It often begins with a sense of estrangement from oneself—that inner sense that something is wrong with her because of these desires. If she carries around this shame too long, she becomes depressed and even suicidal. Eventually, she learns that instead of continuing the pain of denying these desires, she could embrace them. To embrace her desires is actually to embrace her true identity. She is discovering her true self. Thus, the hero overcomes the first bad guy—the internal nonaffirming voice.
This prepares the hero to take on the second oppositional force: other people who would deny her identity. These are the external nonaffirming voices. So she does the next act of courage: the coming-out event. This is where she publicly affirms her identity to others. This is the pathway to living in a way that is authentic to her desires and finally enjoying peace with herself (or whatever prefix is chosen to go before self).
This story arc is powerful. And it is precious to the people who map this arc onto their own experience. This is why disagreements on sexual issues are often so heated—they are seen as disagreements about personal identity, which is sacred territory in our culture. This is why any nonaffirming word is seen as violence against personal identity. This is why you see so many misgendering meltdown videos online and so many school boards making policies that encourage children to express themselves sexually without the “danger” of parental nonaffirmation. This story is precious to people.

Stopping the cycle of self-hatred requires the humility to give over to God your dreams for yourself. This is one of the best exchanges we could ever take, since by doing it we gain clearer eyes to see Jesus’ love for us, which is far more powerful than our self-hatred could ever be.

They were the Greek gods of autumn. Green fields were their domain, and each fall we found ourselves drawn to those fields to see them play. They were the junior high soccer team in a small Christian school without the budget for football. But no one was thinking of that. These were the deities of our small world.

Soccer season was tough for doughy boys who like books. They didn’t measure up well to the lean warriors whose skill was so prized in our community. I was as aware of this as anyone, and it filled me with dissatisfaction. One evening this dissatisfaction boiled over, and I indulged in something I never had done before. I spoke out loud a thought that had been in my head plenty of times before. And I did it in front of my mother.
“I hate myself.”
You have to know something about my mother. She uses her words like a nesting hen uses her wings, always gently and for the care of her own. When I looked up, though, she was not looking at me. Her face had a strange steel in it. When she finally spoke, her voice had steel too.
“You have no right.”
I had awoken a deep offense in her. I’d expected pity. What I got was far better.
The Experience of Self-Hatred
We were made to perceive ourselves as God perceives us. Self-hatred means something has gone wrong with our perception of ourselves.
This post is part of a series that attempts to show how Scripture gives a framework for addressing different ways our hearts respond to the world that aren’t mentioned in their specifics. The introductory post laid out our guiding principle: God designed people to respond from the heart to the unique situations in which He has placed them. So the question this post addresses is, How should we understand self-hatred as an expression of the heart?

Self-hatred is your heart’s attempt to condemn the person you are in preference for who you wish you were.

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Disappointment can be refined for good use. If our present reality teaches us to lament and to seek, we are well on our way through this long, steady disappointment. And in the unbroken world that awaits us, we will solidly arrive at disappointment’s end.

Life is one long, steady disappointment.
This dawns on most people by their thirties. Childhood is all potentiality. The teenage years are all angst—but even angst betrays some hope, since it is only quiet outrage that things could be better. A person can still carry into his twenties the illusion that the world will soon blossom. Not until his thirties does a person realize that much of what’s coming won’t be better than what has come. The forties, fifties, and on often only reinforce Alexander Pope’s infamous beatitude, “Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.” To live is to be disappointed.
So cheer up. Oddly enough, disappointment can be an indicator you are seeing the world correctly. No one enjoys feeling disappointment. In itself, disappointment is akin to the sadness of loss, and ultimately we were not designed for it. But like all emotions, disappointment is a gauge of how a person perceives his life—what he believes about it and wants from it. When you’re living in a broken world, sometimes believing and wanting the right things means you’ll be disappointed.
The Experience of Disappointment
Human beings are capable of disappointment because they are capable of having expectations. We were made to dream of better days. Every Cleveland sports fan knows this. So does every acne-faced teenager, every sleepless parent of a newborn, every young professional clawing for a career, every recent divorcée sitting in a house now quiet. All of us cast in our minds a widescreen projection of a better reality to move around in, free of the most painful parts of the present. We live in a desert but imagine a garden.
Disappointment is what we experience when that garden never blooms. Of course, we know it won’t blossom immediately. But maybe it will incrementally? Maybe in the next phase of life? Maybe around the next bend? All of these maybes are the projectors on the screen of the mind. What they project we could call expectations.
We experience disappointment as a sense of loss when reality fails to meet our expectations. The key words there are reality and expectations, and both of these terms are charged with theological meaning.
A Theology of Disappointment
Reality is the world that surrounds us, a world that existed before any of us first took in a lungful of oxygen. The world is a given component of our experience, the context we are born into and move around in. It is beyond our control, it is outside our determination, and it operates according to laws we had no say in laying down. Reality is, well, reality. And it constantly fails to match the Eden we love to inhabit in our minds.
Reality is the world in which God placed us. It’s easy to overlook the theological significance of Genesis 2:8: “And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.” God made Adam to be an embodied image of Him in a physical location. This world preceded Adam. It was outside his determination yet under his dominion to be the context of his obedience (1:28). Adam could not have simply lived in his head; he had to traffic in a reality outside his head.
Expectations, on the other hand, are a human response to reality; and as responses, we do have a say in them. Expectations are part hope, part prediction of what reality will be. They are part hope in the sense that they are an expectancy of good. No one is disappointed when something bad they were expecting fails to come about; instead, they experience relief. Hope is the anticipation that reality will be characterized by greater joy, greater provision, greater accomplishment, greater peace.
Adam lost his spot in an ideal reality by disobeying God, who sent him and his wife out of Eden and into the ultimate disappointment of a world stalked by death and decay (Gen. 3:8–24). A world that was once generous with fruit became hostile with thorns.
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