The Deeply Formed Leader: The Dehumanization of America
Dallas Willard once said that modern culture has “lost the soul.” We are often taught, implicitly, that human beings are reducible to their brains, nothing more than gray matter firing off ideas and opinions. But when we no longer see people as embodied souls made in the image of God, something devastating happens: we stop loving them.
In America today, we are quick to label, dismiss, and cancel. We collapse the glory of a human life into a single position they hold, a vote they cast, or a mistake they have made.
People cease to be complex and magnificent creatures, to borrow Willard’s language, and instead become simple and sinful caricatures. This is dehumanization. It strips away the beauty, mystery, and sacredness of a person until all that is left is an opinion to fight against.
The Christian vision is profoundly different. Augustine once wrote, “The human being is a vast abyss.” C.S. Lewis echoed this in The Weight of Glory, reminding us that there are no ordinary people and that every person you meet is an immortal being, a soul of immeasurable worth. When we lose sight of this, when people become problems to fix or enemies to defeat, we exchange the kingdom vision of Christ for the reductionism of our age.
The irony is that reducing people to “just ideas” not only diminishes them, it diminishes us.
We become less human ourselves when we no longer treat others as whole, embodied souls. If the soul is what integrates mind, body, will, and relationships, as Willard describes, then seeing others only in fragments will always lead us to love in fragments.
The call, then, is to recover vision. To look again at the people in front of us—neighbors, spouses, coworkers, even opponents—and remember: this is a person made in the image of God, an eternal soul destined for glory. As long as we insist on treating them as ideas or categories, we will fail to love as Jesus loved. When we recover the depth and complexity of each human soul, we open ourselves to the possibility of real love, real relationship, and real transformation.
Dehumanization is the curse of our age. Seeing the soul is the beginning of love.
This sermon had been burning in my heart! As we navigate a divisive and complex time, how do we maintain the unity of the Spirit?
Dr. Swoboda is head over my doctoral program and anything he writes I’m going to read. He’s a brilliant thinker and teacher. In a world that is moving faster and faster, how do we practice the slow and intentional way of following Jesus. Amazon Link