October 29, 2026

Today the church is arguing about identity — what constitutes a self, who belongs, and whether the categories we've inherited still hold. Mere Orthodoxy ran a piece arguing that the West has declared war on self-knowledge, and that without it, holiness becomes performance. Masks all the way down. The Gospel Coalition makes a related move with mental illness — your diagnosis is not your identity, they say, and confusing the two has pastoral consequences. That question hasn't gone away — on March 30 several writers were asking whether our minds are even capable of wanting rightly. Now the question sharpens: if you can't locate a stable self, what exactly is being sanctified? The Aquila Report says the answer is the image of Christ — that Christians are still trapped in dust and the escape is a particular kind of conformity. Mere Orthodoxy says you can't get there without honesty about who you actually are first.

Lifeway Research is asking who fits inside the church's vision of family — and finding that single Christians largely don't. That's a structural problem, not a sentimental one. Aaron Renn has a different angle on belonging: mainstream culture's contempt for men is actively driving them toward the manosphere, not away from it. Scorn recruits. Christianity Today is handling polyamory — whether biblical polygamy gives any cover to modern arrangements — and the answer is no, but the pressure to find cover is real and growing. First Things ran a piece on whether evangelicalism itself still coheres as an identity, using Christianity Today's own fractures as the case study. No clean resolution there. What runs through all of it is the same pressure: the categories that once organized Christian life — self, family, church, movement — are being tested from every direction at once, and the church is deciding in real time which ones to defend and which to rethink.