Article August 19, 1985 Issue

Identity: demographic or God-derived?

People are polled and graphed, tallied and surveyed today as never before. Political and commercial campaigns, the media, researchers and scholars, as well as government planners and policymakers, all depend heavily on the demographics of our society to help them keep pace with the world's pulse.

While demographics can certainly be useful, they are an ultimately unsatisfactory basis for defining and evaluating our identity. There is much more to us than our socioeconomic status, age, education level, family size, ethnic origin, gender, and the other classifications of demography that would define us. And the conflict sometimes unleashed by these distinctions reveals an urgent need to discover a more satisfying and unifying basis from which to define ourselves.

The Bible provides such a basis in the higher view it gives of our unbroken relationship with God as His children, made in His image. Since God is Spirit, as Christ Jesus declared (see John 4:24), man's identity must actually be spiritual. Sociological classifications never define our true spiritual status as the outcome of the infinite Life that is God. Our actual existence is now, and always has been, the immortal, unfettered, and complete offspring of the one divine Mind. The conditions and categories measured by demography don't have any bearing on our true being or our relation to God.

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