“THE fact of being who or what a person is” is how the dictionary defines the word “identity”. A passport, or a driving licence, is taken as a valid proof of identity. But identity has come to mean much more than that. It is a loaded word, carrying an inner sense of who and what I am which can stand quite apart from the obvious facts about me (height, weight, date of birth), or my relationships with others (mother, spouse, children), or what I do (occupation). In particular, the word is being used widely today in discussions about gender and sexual orientation.

In such discussions, the “inner sense” of who I am usually trumps the outer sense, with the suspicion that the outer sense is somehow artificial, perhaps an accident of nature, or something artificially imposed by others. The inner sense, on the other hand, is my true self. So, for example, I may be born looking female, but if, inwardly, I believe I am a man, this is who I really am. “Identity” is conceived, today, as something akin to “soul”: a permanent and lasting part of the self which transcends both appearance and the relationships into which the self is born.

This inner identity requires the validation and affirmation of others and, it is assumed in some Christian circles, of God. It was a theologian who once alerted me to the problem of the notion of “having” a soul. “We don’t have souls,” he said. “We are souls.” And souls do not come pre-packaged: they change through time. This world, from a Christian point of view, is not a boudoir for self-contemplation, but a harsh valley of soul-making. If having an identity apart from what is observable by others is like having a soul, the notion is subject to the same critique. “Identity” is not something I possess exactly, yet, “By the grace of God, I am whatever I am” (I Corinthians 15.10).

Lent recalls Jesus’s being “cast out” by the Spirit into the wilderness — not to be simply affirmed in his baptismal call, but to have his identity radically questioned, tempted by Satan. What Jesus discovers in the wilderness, it seems to me, is that identity is not something that he owns, but a vocation. It is in following God’s call that we discover who we are. I remember the Archbishop of Canterbury saying something like this when he discovered the identity of his biological father (News, Comment, 15 April 2016). “It is our choices . . . that show what we truly are,” as Dumbledore said to Harry Potter.

I worry about the way in which “identity” has become such an obsession in today’s society. In rightly trying to protect people who have a struggle with self-acceptance, we sometimes deny them the chance to grow up. Orientation is a better word than identity. It at least suggests that we are going somewhere.