Selfie Nation
The fastest growing religion in America and the West is also the oldest: self-worship.
The fastest growing religion in the Western world isn’t Christianity, Islam, or political religions like progressivism.
It is the religion of self-worship.
We all have read of situations when people have fallen off a cliff, off a building, off a train, were hit by a car or some other disaster befell them – as they tried to take a selfie of themselves! I know I have wondered, as you probably have, what it takes to be so self-absorbed. I have personally witnessed people at the natural wonders of our country fidgeting to get in position for the perfect shot - not of the Grand Canyon - but of themselves.
From self-possessed social media accounts with millions of followers to truly dangerous subjects that have deadly consequences (like abortion), from children to young adults are being seduced by the idea they are all gods of themselves.
In their 2017 book Good Faith: Being a Christian When Society Thinks You’re Irrelevant and Extreme, in my opinion before the online Cult of Self exploded, authors David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons found that:
84 percent of Americans believe that “enjoying yourself is the highest goal of life.”
86 percent believe that to enjoy yourself you must “pursue the things you desire most.”
1 percent affirm this statement: “To find yourself, look within yourself.”
Combine that with a survey by the Harris pollsters of 3,000 kids in the US, UK, and China, asking what they wanted to be when they grew up the study presented them with five options: vlogger/YouTuber, teacher, professional athlete, musician, and astronaut. The survey found that American kids would rather be YouTubers than astronauts when they grow up, and in China, the trend is reversed — more kids are interested in going to space than becoming social media influencers.
Of course, the religion of self-worship is far older than any other, humans have always been in love with themselves. The second verse of the first chapter of Ecclesiastes says: “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”
Thaddeus Williams, a professor of theology and former law professor of law at Trinity College, cites these six “sacred commandments” of this ancient and still-trending world religion:
Your mind is the source and standard of truth, so no matter what, trust yourself.
Your emotions are authoritative, so never question (or let anyone else question) your feelings.
You are sovereign, so flex your omnipotence and bend the universe around your dreams and desires.
You are supreme, so always act according to your chief end, to glorify and enjoy yourself forever.
You are the summum bonum—the standard of goodness—so don’t let anyone oppress you with the antiquated notion of being a sinner who needs grace.
You are the Creator, so use that limitless creative power to craft your identity and purpose.
If it were only one person, we would consider this to be simple narcissism and selfishness, but when this coalesces into social mores, it leads to trouble.
This idea of being so self-contained has created a generation of lonely and depressed people. It also limits people to what they personally know, since their self-worship and emotional reasoning crowds out any bit of information that contradicts with what they want to believe.
I see this in the left’s defense of abortion. There is absolutely no argument that the fertilization of a human egg by a spermatozoa will result in a human fetus, and if that fetus is allowed to survive through its gestational period, it will result in the birth of a human person – and yet there are a large number of people who have convinced themselves that this isn’t true and that growing human is little more than a tumor – because they want it to be, not because it is.
Karl Marx and other collectivist “thinkers” combined man’s desire to be his own god when they proposed that history is worthless, the reality is only how the individual perceives it to be, and there is no such thing as objective truth. When combined with the worship of self, these tenets create a toxic soup of emotional reasoning that is limited to the feelings of the person. There is no room for God, no room for logic or reason, and no room for any consistent moral code distilled from the process of trial and error over thousands of years of human civilization.
Such self-worship does seem isolating since it is based entirely on the emotions of one person - exhibited today in the ideas of “my truth” and “my lived experiences” - but in yet another contradictory twist, the combination of this self-worship and collectivist ideologies like Marxism results the idea that everybody must never be allowed to disagree with me, that they must be forced to believe as I believe. If I believe abortion and “gender affirming” surgery is “healthcare”, no one is allowed to disagree, regardless of information to the contrary.
None of this is rooted in logic, it is merely a mechanism of self-protection, a bulwark against the exposure of ignorance and the hurt feelings that inevitably follow. Gods must not be questioned, for if they are, they are proven not to be gods.
The first question and answer of the Shorter Westminster Catechism are well known: “What is the chief end of man? To glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.”
Today, the answer has been inverted: “the chief end of man is to glorify and enjoy himself forever.”
The difference between humans and animals is that humans aspire to more than just to survive. We believe in ethics and moral codes that prevent a return to the basic savagery of the natural world. Self-worship strips those aspirations and replaces them with simple self-aggrandizement and narcissism.
And that puts our civilization on the brink.
Americans today see "the pursuit of happiness," as penned in the Declaration of Independence, as the indulgence of self-desire. The founding fathers saw it as the pursuit of the knowledge of the Divine and developing a relationship with Him. For them, the "pursuit of happiness," was seeking to live a moral life, not to fulfill every carnal desire or selfish whim. We have certainly departed far from what our founding fathers understood and instituted (not to mention, what God reveals about Himself and our nature and purpose).
Think about the 1960s across the world. "If it feels good, do it!"