The Imago D.E.I.

It’s a core tenet of the Christian Faith that mankind is imago Dei. We are made in the image of God. From the beginning, Scripture lays out the Imago Dei in terms of mankind’s role as stewards over God’s creation. Our imaging of God is shown in dominion and care, to which we were appointed and which we are required to enact. And in contemplating what God has appointed mankind to do, much Christian thought has also explored the way mankind has been fittingly created so that we can accomplish this mandate from our Maker.

So the Imago Dei is a matter of what man has been divinely designated to do in the world and how he has been divinely designed to perform his duties. Mankind’s purpose and his essence go hand-in-hand. This is understood to have implications for what it means to be male and female, to be cultivators and custodians of the environment, to be fruitful fillers of the earth, and to be the builders and maintainers of civilization. We are fitly fashioned to be God’s stewards over God’s world, exercising dominion and hospitality. We are called to continue forming and filling the world as a reflection of the way God formed and filled the creation in the beginning.

Both the First Adam and the Last Adam are the Image of God (Gen. 1:26-27; Col. 1:15). And there’s much that could be said about how being images of God and being sons of God are linked (Gen. 5:3; Luke 3:38). But suffice it to say that one description of life’s purpose is that God is conforming all his beloved believers to the image of his Beloved Son (Rom. 8:29). At present, what that looks like is an image that “we see in a mirror dimly” (1 Cor. 13:12). But the Day will come—a Day that the creation yearns to see—when the sons of God will be revealed openly in all their consummate glory (Rom. 8:19).

“For Now We See Through a Mirror Hideously”

In the present cultural moment, the reigning errors we see are not only heresies against Christian orthodoxy but heresies against creationistic reality itself. Mankind’s rebellion against our Maker has run very deep. In a world where increasing technological innovation has muted the constraints of nature, fallen man is busy de-naturing his own divine design further. The meaning of the Imago Dei is being attacked. But because we live in a post-Christian context, the wicked irony is that the attack upon the Imago Dei is often done in the name of the Imago Dei or in the name of the cultural fruit that it has borne in generations past.

When all manner of perversion is defended and championed with enthusiastic appeals to “universal human dignity and worth,” you can be confident that the doctrine of the Imago Dei is being distorted and weaponized against the reality of the Imago Dei. Perceptive and pithy wordsmiths have been quick to call this monstrous distortion and weaponization of Christian teaching “the Imago D.E.I.” in reference to the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” policies and initiatives that are the enforcement arm of this macabre militance.

If our view of the Imago Dei perfected in the Son of God is like something we now see in a dark glass surface (a dim but accurate glimpse), then the Imago D.E.I. is like something we now see in a funhouse mirror (a distorted and inverted monstrosity).

A Delusional Dreamworld Envisioned

The motto and proof-text for the post-Christian vision of the Imago D.E.I. is Galatians 3:28:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

The distortion and misapplication of the teaching in this passage perfectly mirrors the distortion and misapplication insidiously at work in the Imago D.E.I. In short, the Apostle Paul is teaching the universal equality of access to the person and benefits of Christ by all believers—an access provided by God that is not limited by the otherwise very real social structures and relationships that define everyday life. These structures and relationships are rooted in the design and operation of the world that our Creator has established.

But to the champion of the Imago D.E.I., this passage is the justification for the complete dismantling of those social structures and relationships as any kind of fitting limitation on and direction for reality. It’s a hideous commitment to radical egalitarianism. It’s an assault on God’s intention that there should be legitimate differences and particularity in the lives of human beings. It would regard all humans as interchangeable and destroy all human excellence in the process.

The goal of this post-Christian radical egalitarianism is an eschatology (a vision and goal of a future to be sought) that is both perverted and overrealized. It’s a perversion of what the true Christian eschatology is. And it’s an overrealization of that eschatology trying to fully bring about the consummated future in the here-and-now. The Christian vision of the world to come is marked in part by imagery that shows the passing away of certain everyday social arrangements, for instance, “neither marrying nor giving in marriage” (Matt. 22:30). Sometimes this is because shadows are giving way to reality. For instance, earthly marriages point to and give way to the finished reality of the Lamb and his Bride.

But in this disfigured vision of the world to come and what ought to be, the passing away of everyday social arrangements in human history is recklessly reduced to the mere doing away of all particularities and inequalities. This becomes the overarching value and moral compass. It’s a distortion where liberty to be the best of what God meant each individual to be becomes freedom from all constraints, even and especially constraints on what our sinful impulses tell us we could be or must be.

In truth, the glorious future imagined by the foolish faithful adherents of the Imago D.E.I. and which they seek to bring about on earth looks much less like a heavenly paradise and much more like a hellish wasteland.

Opened Eyes That See Clearly Once More

The Imago D.E.I. takes many forms, and it wears the Christian virtues that it has stolen like the skins of trophy animals slain by a poacher.

Radical environmentalist and anti-natalist outlooks, lifestyles, and policy proposals (that amount to nihilistic and misanthropic death-wishes toward mankind) are attacks on our common calling as sowers of the field and the womb inherent in the Imago Dei. Claims of not wanting a child to grow up in an imagined future dystopian wasteland as reasons to not have children are a perversion of compassion that is devoid of hope. And claims that it’s “doing my part” to lower the carbon footprint and save the planet are akin to a pharisaical public display of almsgiving and prayer.

Egalitarian tendencies and approaches to human sexuality, both overt and subtle, in both our conduct and existence as sexed beings, are attacks upon our distinct and differentiated callings as males and females in forming and filling the world inherent in the Imago Dei. It’s not merely the most egregious outworkings and celebration of the Alphabet Soup of sexual “diversity” that must be affirmed, “because, tsk tsk, we must remember that they too are made in God’s image and have dignity and worth” (even though the very things they’re living out are affronts to the meaning and implications of the Image of God). It’s also the waves of feminism that’ve eroded male spaces and male social norms and have pathologized virile masculinity. It’s every subversion of male and female, whether in the marriage bed, or the restroom, or the pulpit, or the workspace, and so forth.

Warping Christian Teaching

Yet other subversive forms this distorted image takes are the depersonalizing of people groups and power structures. Proper Christian teachings about “love of the stranger” and “love your neighbor as yourself” become bludgeons that harm our actual neighbors in the name of the misguided and unaccountable enabling of strangers to undermine a culture. Proper Christian teachings about honoring authorities (whether mother and father or the king) and “the last shall be first and the first last” give way to notions that Christians in authority can never exercise real authority but must be “servant leaders” (which is to say doormats—those allowed to lead as those they lead see fit). 

Worse, Christian teachings about the right exercise of authority by civil rulers give way to caricatures like “Christ rejected power” and the abdication of political influence and responsibility in the name of being a faithful and humble witness to the world. In truth, it’s just foolish masochism disguised as wise martyrdom.

Entire books could be written to explore and expose the extensive repertoire of mockingly hideous distortions that are expressive of the Imago D.E.I. masquerading as the Imago Dei (as well as the damage brought about by this deception). Nonetheless, each Christian must learn to discern, expose, and reject every subversive form this disfigured image takes and every deceitful and destructive claim it makes over us and over reality. 

May Christ, who is our wisdom and knowledge from God, give us the eyes to see clearly.