Is Identitarianism Compatible with Christianity?
Identitarianism probably could not have arisen before the twenty first century. Only in recent years have large numbers of people needed to rediscover who they are. In the past, people grew up with an identity given to them by their family and homeland. A Swede born in 1800 wouldn't need to think too deeply about their identity. They were Christian, ethnically Swedish, and whatever their biological sex was at birth. All this was inherited from their group and carried from cradle to grave.
Things have changed. Sweden was plunged into chaos with the fading of Christianity, the mass migration of millions of Islamic refugees into Europe, and the triumph of homosexual and transsexual movements. Young Swedes are now told religion doesn't matter, ethnicity is a myth, and sexuality is fluid. Sweden suddenly doesn't know what it is, and the Swedish people don't know who they are. Identity is increasingly lost, and with that loss people no longer have a clear position from which to act. This situation is sometimes referred to as "liquid modernity" because the things we once thought solid and reliable now seem to have melted and become questionable.
Liberal capitalism claims to have solutions to this problem. It tells people to act as individuals and ignore group identity. It tells them they should "discover themselves" and become independent. In practice, this results in loneliness, hedonism, and selfishness. People drift through life without knowing who they are or what they should become. As the Bible explains it, Human beings are remarkably bad at "directing their own steps."
Enter identitarianism. Identitarianism tells people they should discover what group they belong to and use that discovery to direct their lives. In America, identitarianism is primarily focused on racial identity. The Alternative Right and Black Lives Matter movements are two prominent examples of this, and they've discredited identitarianism for many who consider their excesses to be radical and dangerous.
The problem, however, is that dismissing identitarianism doesn't make the underlying problem go away. Modern people are still lonely, isolated, and directionless. They don't know who they are, and many are searching. The result is that whether one wants to call it "identitarianism," or something else, the same kind of movement will inevitably arise. Deracinated people will begin reasserting identity against our atomized materialistic world. The alternative to this reassertion is sitting on a couch watching Netflix until they die.
It's almost pointless, then, to question whether identitarianism is compatible with Christianity because it's an inevitable psychological reaction. However, I don't think that's a very satisfying answer to most people.
Christianity doesn't want people to be individuals without group identity. Christians are expected to belong to the church and remain loyal to it. Christianity claims that God placed each individual within a family, and it expects that we'll love our families and remain loyal to them. Humans are naturally born into ethnic and national groups that possess unique cultural and linguistic characteristics, and this is the result of God dividing human languages at the tower of Babel. Christianity assumes humans are humans, and that we're members of groups that emerged out of God's creation. Sexual identity, male and female, was designed by God as a complimentary binary that would create new life. Similarly, races are just groups of genetically similar people who create civilizations for humans to flourish within.
Why, then, do some Christians reject identitarianism? I think the answer is that many identity groups unite themselves around sin, especially the LGBT community, but I think the deeper answer lies in the history of secular society since WWII.
The post-war world was divided between one group that explicitly rejected God, the communists, and another group that claimed to support religion but was united around liberal capitalism. Naturally, Christians sided with liberal capitalism. Liberal capitalism focuses on individual consumers and their personal freedom, and thus Christians gradually began associating this ideology with Christianity.
The 1960s civil rights movement elevated the idea that racial identity shouldn't matter because it's only a genetic accident, and this idea naturally led to the idea that gender shouldn't matter either because it too is only a genetic accident. The civil rights movement led to the importation of a hundred million non-Christian and non-white immigrants, and the rejection of gender led to feminism and the LGBT movement. American identity, racial identity, and sexual identity were lost, and religious identity quickly eroded too. These events left people without a clear sense of who they were, what they should believe, and how they should act.
Identitarianism, then, is a reaction against the post-war idea that groups don't matter. It argues groups do matter, and that without them we collapse into a postmodern nihilism in which every individual remains trapped in themselves without any permanent identity or existential purpose. We don't simply exist by accident and die alone, we're brought into existence by groups, educated by groups, and should thus act in accordance with the identities we've been given.
Christians shouldn't oppose identitarianism. We shouldn't oppose people's desire to rediscover a sense of shared identity. Instead, we should work to direct the way individuals come to see themselves and the groups they belong to. In practice, this means showing people how all identity originates from and should be directed towards God. Our religious, racial, and sexual identities were given by God, and we should use them to glorify him.