In 2015, a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist named Tim Hunt attended a conference in South Korea. During a toast at a luncheon, he made an ill-judged attempt at self-deprecating humor about women in laboratories. Within hours, his remarks had been tweeted, condemned, and amplified worldwide. Within days, he had resigned from his honorary professorship at University College London, from the Royal Society’s awards committee, and from the European Research Council’s science committee. A forty-year career in cell biology, including the Nobel-winning discovery of cyclins, effectively ended over a clumsy joke at lunch.[1]
The speed and totality of the response startled observers. Hunt’s remarks were foolish, the kind of generational gaffe that might once have prompted eyerolls, a rebuke, perhaps a forced apology. Instead, the reaction carried a particular heat. The demand was not simply that he acknowledge error or learn from criticism. The demand was for professional annihilation, social exile, the comprehensive dismantling of his public standing. The language of the denunciations was therapeutic (“harmful,” “unsafe”), but the grammar was religious. Heresy had been identified. The heretic had been cast out. The community had been protected from contamination.
This intensity is the puzzle. Secularization was supposed to cool things down. As religious authority receded, disagreements would become procedural, amenable to compromise, settled by evidence and argument rather than anathema. Pluralism would reign. People would agree to disagree. The opposite has occurred. Moral fervor has intensified. Heresy-hunting is rampant. Excommunication is swift and thorough. The exile isn’t from a church but from professional networks, social circles, and the warmth of public approval.
The explanation isn’t that religion has simply returned, or that “wokeness” is a religion in disguise, though that framing captures something real. The explanation is that the West has not abandoned the sacred. It’s relocated the sacred. The transcendent God who once grounded meaning, morality, and identity has been replaced by the immanent self, which now bears the full weight of those functions. The self has become holy ground. To trespass on it is to commit sacrilege.
I want to name this condition “autosanctity,” from the Greek auto (self) and the Latin sanctitas (holiness, inviolability). Its behavioral expression is “the sanctimony of self”: the righteous certainty that accompanies the defense of one’s identity, and the moral revulsion directed at anyone who questions it. Understanding autosanctity helps explain both the intensity of our cultural conflicts and the exhaustion that pervades contemporary life. We’re tired because the self was never meant to be a god, and we’ve made it one.
Defining Autosanctity
Autosanctity is the cultural condition in which the self has become the primary locus of sacred meaning. The West has relocated the sacred from the transcendent God to the immanent self, which now bears the full weight of grounding meaning, morality, and identity.
“Autosanctity, from the Greek auto (self) and the Latin sanctitas (holiness), names a cultural condition in which the self has become sacred ground. The West has relocated the sacred to the self. The transcendent God who once grounded meaning, morality, and identity has been replaced by the immanent self, which now bears the full weight of those functions. This explains why contemporary cultural conflicts carry such religious intensity: to question someone’s identity is no longer mere disagreement but desecration.”
Autosanctity isn’t narcissism, though narcissism flourishes within it. Narcissism is a personality trait or disorder; autosanctity is a cultural condition with institutional expressions, shared assumptions, and liturgical forms. A humble person can be shaped by autosanctity. A selfish person can resist it. The question isn’t whether individuals are self-absorbed but whether the culture treats the self as the ultimate source and arbiter of meaning.
If autosanctity names the cultural condition, “the sanctimony of self” names its characteristic tone: the righteous certainty that accompanies the defense of one’s identity, and the moral revulsion directed at anyone who questions it. Sanctimony originally described hypocritical or performative holiness. Here, it captures the performative dimension of identity in an age when authenticity must be publicly demonstrated and socially validated to feel real. The sanctimony of self is what autosanctity looks like in practice: the speech, the posture, the readiness to condemn.
Under autosanctity, the self plays a dual role. It’s both the priest who performs the sacred rituals and the god to whom those rituals are directed. The self constructs, expresses, and demands recognition of its identity. The self determines what is true for the self, what is good for the self, and what obligations the self will accept. Any external authority that would impose identity, judge identity, or constrain self-expression becomes suspect, an oppressive force to be resisted.
The philosopher Charles Taylor has described our era as an “age of authenticity” in which the highest good is being true to yourself.[2] He has also described the “immanent frame,” the shared assumption that this material world is all there is, that transcendence is unavailable or illusory.[3] Autosanctity names what happens when these two features combine with the ineradicable human need for the sacred. The need for ultimacy doesn’t disappear when God is removed from the frame. It attaches to something else. In our case, it’s attached to the self.
This helps explain why sexuality has become such a fierce battleground, a phenomenon Stephen Alpine has insightfully labeled the “sexular” dimension of contemporary secularism.[4] Sexuality is where self-expression, embodiment, and social recognition converge most intensely. Sexual identity feels profound, essential, and defining. To deny or question someone’s sexual self-understanding is experienced as an attack on their very being. But sexuality is only one theater of autosanctity. The same dynamics appear in consumption choices, political affiliations, dietary practices, career identities, and wellness regimens. Wherever the self is expressed and recognition is sought, autosanctity is at work.
The Liturgies of Autosanctity
Every sacred order develops liturgies: repeated practices that enact and reinforce its vision of reality. Autosanctity is no exception. Its liturgies are so pervasive that they’ve become invisible, part of the background hum of contemporary life.
The most recognizable liturgy is public confession. Individuals share their identities, traumas, struggles, and journeys on social media platforms designed to elicit and reward such disclosure. The architecture of these platforms encourages confessional performance: the prompt “What’s on your mind?” invites introspection; the metrics of likes and shares quantify the reception of one’s testimony; the feed ensures an audience. These aren’t private journals but public altars.
The confessions follow recognizable patterns. There’s the identity testimony: “I’m coming out as…” There’s the trauma testimony: “I’ve never shared this before, but…” There’s the growth testimony: “I used to believe X, but I’ve done the work, and now I understand…” Each form establishes the confessor’s authenticity. Each invites recognition, affirmation, and the solidarity of others who share similar experiences.
Within autosanctity, suffering confers authority. Those who have experienced something possess truths unavailable to those who haven’t. This inverts older epistemologies in which detachment and objectivity were cognitive virtues. Now, proximity to pain is the credential. “As a survivor of…” or “Speaking as someone who has lived…” become epistemic trump cards. The logic makes sense within the framework: if the self is sacred, then the self’s experiences are revelatory. Those who have not had certain experiences must defer to those who have.
Tending the sacred self requires specialists. Therapists, life coaches, wellness practitioners, and self-help authors occupy the cultural space once held by priests and pastors.[5] This isn’t a criticism of therapy as a clinical practice, which addresses genuine suffering with genuine skill. It’s an observation about how therapeutic concepts have migrated far beyond clinical contexts to become the moral vocabulary of everyday life. “Boundaries,” “trauma,” “toxic,” “healing,” “self-care,” “triggers,” and “safe spaces” now function as the primary terms in which ordinary people interpret their experiences and make moral judgments.
The shift can be seen in a simple substitution. Where an earlier generation might have asked, “Is this good?” we now ask, “Is this healthy for me?” The first question assumes external moral standards against which actions can be measured. The second question locates the standard within the self’s psychological experience. Health replaces virtue. The therapeutic practitioner replaces the confessor. The DSM replaces the catechism.
“Where an earlier generation might have asked, ‘Is this good?’ we now ask,’’Is this healthy for me?’ Health replaces virtue. The therapeutic practitioner replaces the confessor. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) replaces the catechism.”
Every sacred order also identifies heretics and administers discipline. Autosanctity is fierce on this point. Those who transgress its core commitments face swift social consequences: public denunciation, professional sanction, relational exile. The charge is rarely framed as “You’re wrong” or “You’ve made an error in reasoning.” The charge is “You’re harmful,” “You’re unsafe,” “You’re denying my existence.” These formulations make perfect sense within the logic of autosanctity. If the self is sacred, then questioning someone’s identity claims isn’t a disagreement but a desecration. It’s violence against the holy.
This explains the puzzle of intolerance within a supposedly tolerant framework. Autosanctity is tolerant of diverse identities, the more identities, the more occasions for sacred self-expression. But it’s fiercely intolerant of challenges to the framework itself. You may be anything you wish. You may not question whether someone else’s self-understanding is accurate, healthy, or grounded in reality. That question is blasphemy.
Consent and the Minimalist Ethics of Autosanctity
When the self becomes sovereign, ethics faces a problem. Sovereign selves will come into conflict. Their self-expressions will collide. Some principle is needed to adjudicate. But the principle can’t come from outside the selves, because external authority is precisely what autosanctity has rejected. The solution has been consent. The only legitimate constraint on one sacred self is the agreement of other sacred selves.
Consent-based ethics has genuine achievements to its credit. It names coercion clearly. It identifies assault and exploitation. It insists that persons may not be used against their will. These are real moral gains, and cultures that lacked robust consent norms permitted terrible abuses. The problem isn’t that consent matters. The problem is that consent has become the sole criterion, the only moral concept with any remaining purchase.
This creates strange gaps in moral reasoning. Autosanct culture can be exquisitely sensitive to subtle forms of coercion, power imbalance, and manufactured consent. The discourse around sexual ethics, for instance, has developed sophisticated analyses of how intoxication, authority differentials, or social pressure can compromise consent. This attentiveness is often valuable. But the same culture struggles to articulate why a fully consensual arrangement might still be degrading, exploitative, or corrosive to human flourishing. If both parties agree, what grounds remain for critique?
The category of “bad for you” has become almost unspeakable. To suggest that someone’s freely chosen path is self-destructive sounds paternalistic, judgmental, and a violation of their sacred autonomy. The only recognized harm is harm to which one did not consent. Self-harm, by definition, is consented to and, therefore, immune from moral evaluation by others. At most, one might gently inquire whether the person has really thought it through, whether they’re aware of the consequences, and whether they might benefit from talking to someone. But the possibility that an external standard might reveal the choice as genuinely wrong, regardless of consent, has been foreclosed.
This explains a peculiar asymmetry in contemporary moral attention. Microaggressions, subtle slights, and inadvertent offenses generate intense concern because they’re experienced as violations of the sacred self without its consent. Meanwhile, consensual arrangements that older moral traditions would have recognized as degrading pass without comment. The disparity isn’t hypocrisy. It’s the logical outworking of a framework in which consent is the only remaining moral criterion.
Autosanctity Across the Political and Ideological Spectrum
Autosanctity isn’t the property of one political tribe. It manifests across the spectrum, though in different registers and with different emphases. Recognizing this is essential to understanding the phenomenon accurately, and to avoiding the temptation to use the concept as a weapon against one’s political opponents.
Progressive autosanctity centers on identity and recognition. The sacred self here is often the marginalized self, the self that has been denied recognition by oppressive structures and dominant groups. The demand is that institutions, cultures, and individuals validate identities that have historically been suppressed, mocked, or rendered invisible. The multiplication of identity categories reflects this logic: if the self is sacred, its particularities deserve ever-finer articulation. To subsume distinct identities under generic labels is a form of erasure.
“The culture wars are, in part, a conflict between rival autosanctities, each accusing the other of violating what is holy. The temperature keeps rising because both sides are burning the same fuel.”
The language of safety has expanded dramatically within this framework. Physical safety was the original referent, but the concept now encompasses psychological safety, emotional safety, and freedom from discomfort or distress. This expansion makes sense if the self is sacred and inviolable: anything that wounds the self, including words and ideas, constitutes a kind of violence. Safetyism, as Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt have called it, is the institutional expression of progressive autosanctity.[6]
Conservative autosanctity centers on liberty and choice. The sacred self here is the autonomous self, the self that won’t be told what to do by government, experts, or collective pressure. Individual choice, whether in markets, consumption, lifestyle, or belief, is treated as inviolable. Resistance to external claims becomes a matter of principle, regardless of whether those claims might be reasonable or beneficial.
The rhetoric of “freedom” and “rights” dominates this formation, but the underlying grammar is autosanct. The self is the ultimate authority. Any imposition on the self is suspect. “Don’t tread on me” functions as a theological statement: the self is sacred ground, and trespassers will be met with righteous fury. This explains the intensity of resistance to public health measures, collective obligations, or appeals to expertise. The issue isn’t usually the specific policy but the affront to sovereign selfhood that any external demand represents.
What unites these formations is more fundamental than what divides them. Both assume that the self is ultimate. Both treat external authority with suspicion. Both generate intense moral energy in defense of their vision of sacred selfhood. The culture wars are, in part, a conflict between rival autosanctities, each accusing the other of violating what is holy. The progressive sees the conservative as denying recognition to sacred identities. The conservative sees the progressive as imposing constraints on sacred autonomy. Neither sees that they share the same deep grammar.
This mutual blindness explains why dialogue across the divide is so difficult. Each side can perceive the other’s autosanctity with clarity while remaining oblivious to its own. Each experiences the other as desecrating the sacred and responds with the fury appropriate to blasphemy. Compromise feels like betrayal, because the sacred can’t be negotiated. The temperature keeps rising because both sides are burning the same fuel.
The Exhaustion of the Sacred Self
The deepest problem with autosanctity isn’t that it produces cultural conflict, though it does. The deepest problem is that the self can’t bear the weight that has been placed upon it. The self was not designed for ultimacy. When it’s forced to be its own ground, its own meaning, its own justification, it cracks under the pressure.[7]
Consider the burden of infinite choice. In an autosanct culture, every decision becomes existentially freighted. What you eat, what you wear, what you watch, whom you befriend, how you spend your time: each choice expresses and constructs the sacred self. There’s no neutral ground, no realm of mere preference or habit. Everything signifies. Everything is identity. The self is always on stage, always performing, always subject to evaluation.
“There’s no sabbath for the autosanct self. Construction never ceases. Identity is never complete, never secure, never safe from challenge or obsolescence.”
Authenticity, under these conditions, isn’t something one simply possesses. It must be achieved and displayed. The authentic self isn’t the self that exists quietly, unobserved. The authentic self requires an audience, recognition, and validation. Social media provides this audience, but the provision is double-edged. The metrics of engagement become measures of authentic success. The self that isn’t seen, liked, shared, and affirmed begins to doubt its own reality.
There’s no sabbath for the autosanct self. Construction never ceases. Identity is never complete, never secure, never safe from challenge or obsolescence. The self must be continually maintained, updated, and defended. Rest would mean stagnation. Silence would mean invisibility. The self can’t simply be; it must perpetually become.
The mental health crisis among young people isn’t incidental to this condition. Rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm have risen dramatically, particularly among adolescents and young adults. Multiple factors contribute, but autosanctity is among them. When the self bears ultimate weight, when identity must be constructed rather than received, when recognition is the oxygen of existence, and when that recognition is mediated through platforms designed to maximize engagement through emotional provocation, psychological fragility follows. The autosanct self is a self that can’t rest, and rest is essential to health.
The irony of self-care is instructive. The term emerged to name practices of attending to one’s own well-being: rest, nourishment, boundaries, withdrawal from excessive demands. But self-care has become another obligation, another domain of performance, another way the self must labor on its own behalf. The exhausted self is told to care for itself, which requires energy the exhausted self doesn’t have, which produces guilt and shame for failing at self-care, which deepens the exhaustion. The solution has become part of the problem.
Consumer capitalism thrives in this environment. The sacred self requires expression, and expression requires stuff: products, services, experiences, aesthetics. The market offers an infinite number of options for self-construction. You can curate your identity through what you buy, display, and consume. But the relief is temporary. The self’s hunger for validation is bottomless, and every purchase eventually proves insufficient. The market profits from the cycle: generate the felt need for self-expression, provide temporary satisfaction, allow dissatisfaction to build, offer new products to address the dissatisfaction, repeat.
The self that must be everything to itself ends up with nothing solid to stand on. The ground keeps shifting because the self keeps shifting. Identity becomes liquid, anxious, perpetually under construction. The freedom that was promised, freedom from all external constraints, turns out to be a new kind of bondage: bondage to the endless task of self-creation.
The Christian Diagnosis
Christianity offers a particular diagnosis of why autosanctity fails. The self, in the Christian account, is a creature. It did not make itself. It doesn’t sustain itself. It isn’t its own ground or goal. The self is designed to receive its identity from beyond itself: from God, from community, from the givenness of embodied existence, from the call to love and serve. When the self tries to be its own foundation, it’s attempting something for which it was not made.
This reframing transforms the meaning of limitation. Autosanctity experiences limits as obstacles to authentic self-expression. The body’s constraints, the obligations one did not choose, the expectations of others, the moral law: all appear as impositions on the sovereign self. Christianity sees these differently. Embodiment isn’t a prison but a gift, the condition of creaturehood that makes love and action possible. Unchosen obligations aren’t oppressions but the very fabric of a life embedded in relationships. Limitation isn’t the enemy of flourishing, but its context.
There is, in this vision, a liberation that comes from being told who you are. Autosanctity assumes that any external claim on identity is violence. But what if certain external claims are relief? What if the exhausted self, weary of construction, longs to hear a word from beyond itself? “You’re my beloved.” “You’re forgiven.” “You’re called.” These aren’t impositions but gifts. They provide what the self can’t provide for itself: a ground that doesn’t shift, a worth that doesn’t depend on performance, an identity that’s received rather than achieved.
Human dignity, in the Christian account, doesn’t rest on the self’s capacity for expression or choice.[8] It rests on bearing the image of God. This is a more stable foundation. The infant who can’t yet express anything, the person with profound cognitive disability who can’t construct an identity, the dying person who has lost the capacity for self-determination: all possess dignity, because dignity isn’t an achievement of the self but a gift from beyond the self. Autosanctity struggles to secure this kind of dignity. If worth depends on authentic self-expression, what worth belongs to those who can’t perform authenticity?
But the Christian diagnosis must be self-implicating. Christians have practiced their own versions of autosanctity, and any critique that fails to acknowledge this is merely a weapon wielded against outsiders. The sacralization of political alignment, in which partisan identity becomes functionally ultimate. The treatment of cultural preferences as doctrinal essentials, in which particular styles of worship, dress, or social organization become markers of authentic faith. The tribal identities that divide the church, in which being a certain kind of Christian matters more than being united to Christ. These are autosanctities, and they flourish within communities that would reject the label.
The gospel isn’t a tribal possession. It’s a word that addresses all human beings in their common creaturehood, their common brokenness, and their common need. When Christians use theological language to sanctify their own preferences, or when they adopt the culture-war posture of defending their sacred selves against threatening outsiders, they’ve surrendered to the very dynamic they claim to diagnose. The log in one’s own eye remains the first order of business.
Possibilities for Repair
If autosanctity names a genuine cultural pathology, what would healing look like? The question is easier to pose than to answer. Autosanctity isn’t a policy problem with a policy solution. It’s a spiritual condition, a disordered orientation of the soul, and its remedy lies at that same depth.
The beginning of repair is the recovery of givenness. The self isn’t infinitely plastic. It arrives in a body with particular capacities and constraints. It’s born into a family, a community, a history it did not choose. It inhabits a world with structures and limits that precede its preferences. Learning to receive these givens as gifts, rather than experiencing them as impositions on authentic self-expression, is the first movement away from autosanctity. The self that can say “I did not make myself, and I’m glad” has taken a step toward freedom.
Communities of mutual obligation offer an alternative to the isolated, performing self. These are relationships in which members are bound to one another, not merely affirmed by one another. Obligations are unchosen. Belonging isn’t conditional on self-expression. The community has a life and purpose beyond the aggregation of individual identities. Such communities are increasingly rare. They require patience, sacrifice, and the willingness to be shaped by something beyond one’s preferences. They’re also the context in which selves can rest, can be known rather than seen, can fail and be forgiven rather than canceled.
Practices that decenter the self are therapeutic in the oldest sense. Worship directs attention toward God. Service directs attention toward the neighbor. Manual labor directs attention toward the task. Silence interrupts the internal monologue of self-construction. Attentiveness to the natural world reminds the self of its smallness and its participation in something vast and given. These aren’t techniques for self-improvement, which would only reinforce autosanctity. They’re ways of loosening the self’s grip on itself, of allowing the self to forget itself in devotion to something beyond itself.
A different account of freedom is possible. Autosanctity defines freedom as the absence of external constraint: freedom from. But there’s another meaning of freedom: freedom for. Freedom as the capacity to love, to give oneself, to be bound in relationships of mutual care. This freedom isn’t diminished by commitment but constituted by it. The person who can make and keep promises, who can sacrifice for others, who can subordinate immediate desire to long-term faithfulness, is more free, not less. Autosanctity can’t see this, because it can only see constraint as loss. But the self that’s freed from the tyranny of its own impulses is a self that has found a larger life.
These aren’t solutions in the programmatic sense. They’re gestures toward another way of being, another possibility for human life. They require communities that embody them, traditions that transmit them, and the strange grace that enables people to step off the treadmill of self-construction. They can’t be implemented by policy or technique. They can only be lived, imperfectly, by those who have glimpsed an alternative and are drawn toward it.
The Self That Rests
The self that makes itself a god will eventually discover the misery of its divinity. The burden is too heavy. The temple is too small. The worshiper and the worshiped are the same, and this identity is exhausting.
The invitation that stands against autosanctity is the invitation to be held. The self doesn’t have to hold itself together. It can be received, known, and named from beyond itself. It can rest in an identity it did not construct. It can lay down the terrible freedom of self-creation and take up the lighter burden of creaturehood.
This isn’t a strategy. It’s closer to a collapse, a giving up, a letting go. But the collapse is into arms that are waiting. Giving up is the beginning of receiving. The letting go is how one discovers that one was held all along.
The sacred self is weary. It’s been performing for so long. The audience is never satisfied. The construction is never complete. Perhaps there’s another way. Maybe the self that learns to say “I’m not my own” will find, at last, the rest it could never give itself.
“The self that learns to say ‘I’m not my own’ will find, at last, the rest it could never give itself.”
Bibliography
Haidt, Jonathan, and Greg Lukianoff. The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. New York: Penguin, 2018.
Holland, Tom. Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. New York: Basic, 2019.
McAlpine, Stephen. “A Sexular Age.” stephenmcalpine.com, July 11, 2015. https://stephenmcalpine.com/a-sexular-age/.
McAlpine, Stephen. Being the Bad Guys: How to Live for Jesus in a World That Says You Shouldn’t. London: The Good Book Company, 2021.
Rieff, Philip. The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.
Smith, James K.A. How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014.
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Twenge, Jean M. iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood. New York: Atria, 2017.
References
[1] Louise Mensch wrote extensively about Tim Hunt on her blog Unfashionista/louisemensch.wordpress.com. See also Jonathan Foreman’s account here: https://www.commentary.org/articles/jonathan-foreman/the-timothy-hunt-witch-hunt/
[2] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 473–504. Taylor’s concept of the “age of authenticity” describes a cultural condition in which the highest good is being true to oneself and one’s particular way of being human.
[3] Taylor, A Secular Age, 539–93. The “immanent frame” refers to the constructed social space that frames our lives entirely within a natural order, without reference to transcendence.
[4] Stephen McAlpine, “A Sexular Age,” stephenmcalpine.com, July 11, 2015. McAlpine coined the term “sexularism” to describe secularism’s particular focus on sexual ethics as a primary battleground.
[5] The concept of therapeutic culture as a successor to religious culture is developed in Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).
[6] Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (New York: Penguin, 2018), 23–34. Lukianoff and Haidt coined the term “safetyism” to describe the culture of prioritizing emotional safety over other practical and moral concerns.
[7] The observation that human flourishing has become its own end, rather than a means to a greater goal such as the glory of God, is developed in James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 20–22.
[8] The argument that contemporary Western moral categories remain parasitic on Christian foundations, even in their secular expressions, is developed in Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (New York: Basic, 2019).
