The Graduation Speech You Won’t Hear This Year

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Countercultural Advice

In today’s episode, Kevin DeYoung argues that the last thing that God wants us to do is be true to ourselves, at least when it comes to our natural selves.

Do Not Be True to Yourself

Matt Tully
Kevin, thank you so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

Kevin DeYoung
Great to be with you.

Matt Tully
When it comes to the issue of personal identity, how would you summarize the world’s message about that today?

Kevin DeYoung
Oh, there are so many unhelpful messages that the world gives us. One of the most prevalent—hence, the title of this book—is to be true to yourself. In fact, when I was just looking on Amazon to see if the book was there, I found a book by that very title—Be True to Yourself. So it’s very common, and it has almost become a cliche in graduation speeches or in fortune cookie sort of advice. I think the world’s sense is if you could just get deep inside yourself and get in touch with the real you—the bad parts of you, that’s not the real you. There’s a real you. And in fact, what the world wants to do is shape you into its mold, which is a biblical idea. The world does that, but they think the world wants you to have all these rules and if you could just find the real person deep inside of you—the authentic self. As Carl Truman’s says, expressive individualism is writ large across our culture so much that people don’t even realize that they’ve imbibed that through a thousand different songs and TV shows and movies.

Matt Tully
I want to get to that issue of authenticity, which has such purchase in our culture today, in just a minute. Before we go there, if this is characteristic of the culture and our worldview today when it comes to identity, what was it like before today? What were the dispositions towards identity that maybe marked a previous era?

Kevin DeYoung
Well, certainly it is not only a different era but different places. Now there is more of a global culture today than ever before, but even most surveys or sociologists will tell you that America is still off the charts in its sense of individualism. Eastern cultures today, though affected by the West, would find that a strange piece of advice. They believe that more important than being true to yourself is being true to your community or being true to your ethnic identity or being true to your class or to your clan. So those ideas are still out there, and I think you could certainly argue that in America there’s always been—I mean, we have a magnet on our fridge that says “Don’t Tread on Me” with the snakes. So there’s always that. We’re liberty people. But that’s not to be confused with this newer kind of self-expression. It’s one thing to say, I shake off the shackles of tyranny. It’s another to say that I find my truest self and purpose and meaning in expression and authenticity, whereas, to your question, I think in previous generations, it’s not that they got everything right, but there would’ve been more of a sense of you have some obligation to your family. You have an obligation to your community and you have an obligation to the expectations of people around you. I’ve watched my share of Jane Austin movies—

Matt Tully
Big confession.

Kevin DeYoung
Yes, I know. Or if you read any of those period pieces, you know that part of the push and pull is always that there are social societal expectations about things you should and shouldn’t do rubbing against who you want to be or how you want to express yourself. So that was certainly more dominant in previous era. And one of the things we’ll probably talk about is there actually are those expectations in our day, but they just push in a different sort of direction.

Matt Tully
For many, they would view that phrase Be true to yourself as something of a noble expression and a noble prizing of authenticity and of honesty with regard to who they are. They would see that in contrast to maybe a fakery that so often characterizes our lives. So isn’t authenticity a good thing? Why isn’t that good advice for someone trying to navigate this world?

Kevin DeYoung
It can be a good thing. You’re absolutely right. People hear (especially younger generations) authenticity, but it depends on what’s the opposite of authenticity. So they hear hypocrisy or, is fakery a word? We’ll just say it’s a word.

Matt Tully
It is now.

Kevin DeYoung
It is now. Phoniness—that’s the opposite. You’re pretending to be what you’re not. but hypocrisy is putting forth the face of virtue when it’s not your real character. People confuse that with doing the right thing when you don’t feel like it. That’s not hypocrisy. That’s called maturity; being an adult. So to be in touch with your deepest desires requires, at times, sublimating those desires; putting to death those desires. So authenticity can be good or bad. If the opposite is that I lie and I deceive myself and others, good. But that’s often not what it means, because to get in touch with who we are and what we feel and what we think requires, as Christians, not automatic approbation, but at times mortification and finding the authentic self. Oh, wow! That’s what I’m really like? But I shouldn’t be that way. And in fact, Christ came to help me put that to death and be a different sort of person.

Matt Tully
So Christians are definitely supportive of identifying and understanding our authentic selves, but it doesn’t mean that we celebrate that as the best version of ourselves.

Kevin DeYoung
Yeah. I’m a pastor in the PCA, and a few years ago I worked with some others on the Sexuality Study Committee. One of the lines we had in there, because identity is a big issue, so one of the lines that we had in there that I really like was “We name our sins, but we’re not named by them.” Meaning, yes, we are honest before God, and appropriately with others—authenticity doesn’t mean you have to announce all of your sins to everyone—but before God and appropriately before others, we name those sins. We aren’t trying to hide who we are and what we do, yet we’re not named by them. Meaning, though our life is that we are always sinners in need of a Savior, it’s not that we affix to our identity as Christians certain sin struggles. We are sinners, yes, but we are born again. We have union with Christ. We are made in his image. So to find our authentic self is not to be identified with simply getting in touch with our expressive individualism in our own desires.

Authenticity and Conformity

Matt Tully
Over the last few years, we’ve all seen countless stories of deconversion, of deconstruction around us. And it seems like one of the common elements in that is this feeling of a personal testimony. It almost feels like a conversion testimony like we’re used to in the church. It’s a testimony, and often elements of that are people testifying to the newfound freedom or relief or joy that they’ve experienced because they have finally acknowledged what they always knew to be true, or they’ve finally thrown off the shackles of expectations or conformity that they had on them in the Christian community. And they testify to how this has helped them—helped their mental health, helped their emotional health, and helped their relationships sometimes. What do you make of that from a pastoral perspective as you’re talking to Christians who see that happening and maybe also feel some of those same things? How do we make sense of those feelings that come from this embrace of authenticity?

Kevin DeYoung
Wasn’t there a tweet recently responding to Tim Keller? Tim Keller was saying the most important thing you can do is read your Bible every year. And someone said that’s the language of spiritual abuse.

Matt Tully Yeah.

Kevin DeYoung
So, the elasticity of our labels can be stunning. As a pastor, I think of that, and it’s multi-layered. People are complex. People feel things and do things for complex reasons. And yes, we’ve all heard those stories. If that was someone in my church, I’d want to try to unpack and ask, What happened? Because one, it could be possible there were really harmful, hurtful things done to someone, and maybe there’s genuine confusion. They mistook that for Christianity, and that’s not authentic Christianity. Maybe there are people in their lives that sinned against them and need to repent. So you have that sort of layer, but that’s not the only layer. It’s also possible that we misread our own experiences. This was Paul Tripp, Ted Tripp, or both of them, or David Powlison who said we don’t just experience life; we’re always interpreting our experiences. We’re always putting a grid on how we’re living and what this means—a grid of meaning upon this. So I think often with the deconstruction stories, it’s people looking back in a way they would’ve never described what was happening to them at the time. In fact, people that they were quite close to, or churches that they thought were really life-giving, or times in their life where they had great joy, now look back through this lens to understand, Ah! Now I want to see this in a different category. And so you have to say, Well, why is that? Is that a better paradigm for understanding life? Is it possible that if you think you misinterpreted your experiences then, is it possible that you’re misinterpreting your experience now? To your point, it is a very evangelical way of talking. We’re all trained in that evangelical mode of personal testimony. So it’s not a surprise that people deconstructing have their same kind of testimony, and it actually does point to one of the perhaps the weaknesses of some of the evangelical tradition. That is that we can put too much emphasis upon those stories. Tell me your story. “You asked me how I know he lives, because he lives within my heart.” Well, that’s good. We want him to live within your heart, but better is that the tomb is empty. It’s a better reason. So if we’ve been trained that it’s my personal testimony that indicates what God is like and my relationship with him, then it’s not a surprise that on the other end that personal testimony becomes operative, whether it’s really grounded in fundamental realities or not.

Matt Tully
Something you mentioned a little while ago was just the way that our culture can have certain expectations that it does impose upon us, even though it often decries expectations and decries conformity. There’s this paradoxical push towards conformity when it comes to accepting and even celebrating certain things in our culture today. I wonder if you could unpack that a little bit. What’s going on there where we say we hate conformity, and yet there is this growing sense of conformity?

Kevin DeYoung
And their famous cartoon with everyone raising their fish, shouting, Resist conformity! or something, as they’re all saying it together.

Matt Tully
It sounds like a good Far Side cartoon or something.

Kevin DeYoung
Yeah. Something like that. I think this is part of human nature, or at least fallen human nature, that has existed at all times and will continue to exist. There is an American kind of spin to it, that we want, on the one hand, to stand out, but we want to stand out relative to certain people. That may be relative to our parents or to our church or to owning the libs or to conservatives. So this can happen to any of us, that we are subtly defining ourselves solely in opposition to someone else. So that’s the kind of resistance of conformity, but as you said, it so often goes hand in hand with an absolute lockstep conformity. I use in the book the illustration from a famous author in her graduation speech about the greatest source of evil that bedevils us is marching to somebody else’s drumbeat. We need to listen to the timpani hammering in our own hearts. It’s marching in lockstep with somebody else’s drumming that is the cause of homophobia and sexism and all these things. What an absolutely conformist list of phobias and evils that, when speaking to this university audience, everyone would’ve nodded their head. Of course! We know those things are wrong Those things are evil. So no one was in danger of marching actually to their own timpani. They were very much in lockstep. This is the best of both worlds: all of your peers around you can affirm what you’re doing, and at the same time, you have a feeling of heroism for being brave and courageous. If you can do both, and we’re all drawn to doing both those things, I don’t have any social consequences with my immediate class or school or peer group, and yet I can resist conformity and be heroic and courageous because a lot of people who I never actually meet and never interact with, I’m sticking it to them. That’s going to have a real appeal.

Desires Do Not Equal Identity

Matt Tully
What’s the connection between our identities and our desires? That’s something that you kind of draw out in the book that I thought was really fascinating.

Kevin DeYoung
They’re not identical, but we often are what we desire. One of the things that Christianity tries to do, and, to be fair, it’s not just Christianity, but I would say even the Western philosophical tradition has tried to say human mastery is to have control over your desires. So much of what’s in our cultural air, and it’s not presented so much as a syllogism as it’s just out there, is do what you feel. You are what you feel. You have desires. In fact, if somebody tries to stop you from acting upon those desires, they’re not just wrong, but they’re hateful. They’re denying your whole personhood. That really is a new concept. I wouldn’t say it’s new because nothing is new under the sun, but throughout Western history, philosophy and theology has said we have higher desires and lower desires, or we have higher faculties and lower faculties. We have affections, in the language of philosophy or theology. Our emotions of the will—affections—have to do with our inclinations. They have to do with voluntary choice, where passions were something that sweep over you. They render you passive. They come upon you. And so from Aristotle all the way down, it was said your reasoning faculties have to try to have mastery over those passions, that the person who just allows himself to be swept over by sensual appetites is not going to be a virtuous person. He’s not going to be in mastery of himself. And Christianity builds upon this basic ethic and, of course, understands it through a Christological lens and tweaks it where necessary, but that has gotten turned on its head so that so many people think to be truly human and to be truly virtuous, I only and I must act according to my desires.

Matt Tully
It almost seems like the distinction between desires and our identity has been erased. It’s not even just that these desires are good or to be celebrated, but they actually are who I am.

Kevin DeYoung
So, I have a lot of kids and so I think as a parent. If you have kids, you should know this by common sense. Your kids have lots of desires, and if you would allow them, they would be consumed by their desires. They would eat whatever they want. They would go to bed whenever they want. They’d wake up whenever they wanted. They would play in the road if they wanted. They have lots of desires. And as parents, you realize, I know more than they know. And I need to prevent them from acting upon all their desires. So if there’s an epistemological gap between parents and children, how much more is there an epistemological and an ontological gap between human beings and God? Shouldn’t we imagine God might know more than I know. He might even know what’s better for me than I know for myself. So if God tells me that these desires are to be mortified, are to be repented of, or are disordered, then God knows what virtue is and what joy is, and he means to help me, not to harm me. But I think our world has come at us now to the point where if somebody tells you can’t act on those desires ,or someone gives you the sort of counsel that makes you feel bad about yourself or feel like you failed, then that’s not just unhelpful, but that may be positively traumatizing or abusive. And it’s not to discount abuse. Abuse is a real category. It can be physical and it can be emotional and it can be spiritual. But the word has become so overwrought that almost any time I feel as if you’re putting upon me and you’re causing me to feel self pain, then you have done something irretrievably wrong to me.

Matt Tully
I’m struck by the way that Christians can respond to that kind of language is with disdain and an I can’t believe that they’re equating me criticizing this portion of them with saying that they should be canceled or they shouldn’t exist. But it does get to me that, as you talked about, how this predominant worldview functions and how we think about identity. There is a certain logic to it, if you start with these presuppositions that they have about who we are. So it’s not necessarily all pure pretense on behalf of the non-Christian.

Kevin DeYoung
Right. And with most worldly deceptions—lies—they’re half truths. Our desires do matter. One of the things in the book—one of those little phrases probably not original to me—is the philosophical question, Does is equal ought? Meaning, does the fact of your desire, or what you feel is the givenness about you, does that mean that is who you ought to be? Or, ought you to act upon that is? And it depends. There’s a truth to that. The truth is that we must and we will operate out of a foundational sense of our identity. I often use the little twist on the Lady Gaga song “Born This Way”—“But you can be born again another way.” So the world does understand I have a certain fundamental identity and I will operate out of that identity.

Matt Tully
And I should try to live consistently with that identity.

Kevin DeYoung
Yeah, that’s right. I should try to live consistently with that identity. The world gets that right. What it gets so fundamentally wrong is it doesn’t have a doctrine of the fall, that you might be in touch with your identity, and it’s wrong and it needs to be crucified. And even as Christians, we’re simul iustus et peccator—we’re at the same time sinners and unjustified. So even as Christians we have desires—indwelling sin—that are aspects of who we are, even though we want to live according to our identity in Christ, as new creations in Christ. So yes, this isn’t just something that we can safely say exists outside the church and it’s just messed up people out there who have this. We have a lot of confusion in our own heads and hearts about how to understand who we are and what that means for Christian life.

Infused into the Culture

Matt Tully
A minute ago you mentioned that so often this secular message of identity is not clearly articulated like we’re doing right now. It’s not taught in a very direct, didactic way. It’s infused into our culture in so many different ways, and then we just imbibe it unknowingly. You give the example of the popular Disney movie Frozen. Probably the most popular song—all the parents are going to hate me because they’re going to start humming it in their heads—is “Let It Go.” It’s a kind of ode to what we’re talking about here. I wonder if you could unpack that a little bit. What is it about that song that speaks to this idea?

Kevin DeYoung
So, this will be the segment of the podcast where we pile on Disney a bit. They have some good things, but this is a recurring theme in lots of children’s literature, or movies more in particular. “Let It Go”—it’s not a surprise that was quickly grabbed onto as an anthem in the LGBTQ community. They saw that, and I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but they certainly saw that as a coming out song. “Let it go! Let it go!” And the message of that song, and it’s so catchy, but the message is “no rules, no right, no wrong for me.” It’s complete, unfettered individualism. Everything about the world around me is frozen, and it’s forcing me to be this frozen princess.

Matt Tully
Just for people’s memory, I think this comes at a pivotal point in the movie where the main character, Elsa, she’s lived all of her life hiding these magical powers that she has because they’re viewed as dangerous, they’re viewed as unorthodox or something. And so spent her whole life hiding those things. And then she finally comes to this realization that she doesn’t need to hide anymore. She needs to be true to herself.

Kevin DeYoung
Yeah. I don’t care what people think. I’ve been hiding my real self too long. And if I just let it go . . . —that’s the mantra. It’s trying to come to grips with who you are, really. Just be okay with yourself. And again, the smidgen of truth is we all know people in our lives who have misplaced shame. We could all talk about something we don’t like about the way we look or a habit or some embarrassing moment. So the world understands there’s misplaced shame. You feel ashamed for things you don’t have. But the Bible also says there’s rightly placed shame. And Paul quite often uses shame as a moral motivating force in both directions. You should not be ashamed to be identified with these Christians that people hate. You should not be ashamed to identify with Christ, because he will not be ashamed to be called your brother. So there’s lots of don’t let the world shame you there, but then there’s the language of things about which you should be ashamed, or which we wouldn’t even dare to speak in secret or we wouldn’t even whisper about. They’re so shameful. They ought to be hidden. We think we don’t have a category for that. I’ve used a little phrase before that stigma usually speaks longer and louder than dogma. That’s to your point about it doesn’t come to us as a question and answer catechesis from the culture—that kind of dogma. But certain things are stigmatized and certain things are made to look good and other things made to look bad. So paradoxically, even as the world tells us to Let it go! Let it go! it is also telling us, But you ought to behave in this certain way, and you must wear the rainbow jersey for this special hockey night, or hell will fall upon you.

Matt Tully
I think one natural question to this, and maybe especially keen for parents who have young kids—and you have many children; we’ve talked about that before—is, What are we supposed to do? How do we resist this? How do we teach our children? How do we encourage other brothers and sisters in Christ and encourage our churches to resist this, especially when it is so pervasive culturally, and it’s so subtle? Is there anything we can reasonably do to fight against this message, when it comes to who we are?

Kevin DeYoung
It’s difficult. One of my favorite phrases, and I got it from David Wells, is “Worldliness is whatever makes sin look normal and righteousness look strange.” So that’s what the world does. It makes sin look normal. It does that through a thousand images and videos and movies of things. If they can get you to laugh about it, if they can get you to sympathize with it, you don’t even realize your heart is being shaped to see sin as normal.

Matt Tully
Has the church been asleep on that front? I think of how many people—and again, not to pick on Disney—but we consume all of this media and we consume all these ideas, and most of the time I don’t think we’re even aware of the message that we’re actually imbibing through them.

Kevin DeYoung
Yeah, and it comes reinforced through social relationships. I think, by God’s grace, kids can veg out through some Disney movies and sing a lot of songs and watch Moana and not take away that I should disobey my parents and go sail out in the ocean because they don’t know better. So by God’s grace, it’s not a one-to-one correlation. But that does mean that one, you need to have conversations about that. You need to be, whether it’s a homeschool, Christian school, or if you know you’re at a public school, you’ve got to do a lot of extra work to help your kids think about these things when they get old enough to try to dissect it. Okay, what is that message? Here’s what I want to tell parents, not to be despondent, if you would spend time with your kids. And I’m a big proponent, I hope this is right, of quantity, even if there’s not the quality. We want quality too, but you can’t make up for quantity. You can’t do one Grand Canyon trip a year for a weekend and be a jerky parent the rest of the year are never around. Your kids pick up all sorts of things from you. You are providing, in your home—and they don’t even know it—what normal sort of is. This is why when kids raised in good homes have no idea the benefit they have, and kids who are raised in really bad homes have a lot, by God’s grace they can, but a lot to overcome because we’re setting the standard. I grew up in a good home, so I know that affects me to basically think, The world’s probably pretty safe. People probably tell the truth. Moms and dads love each other and they love their kids. My imagination of moral catastrophe is probably smaller than some people. That means I need to be aware of how things can go horribly wrong, but also means, parents, you have an opportunity with your kids to reinforce a whole set of normal things about your family—how you interact, you read the Bible together, how you love one another, how you repent before one another. If you go to our home, I think it would seem very normal. Our kids don’t hate us. They have phones. They’re on their phones. They’re on their phones too much. The parents—we’re on our phones too much. But we can watch something and say, What happened right there? What do you think about that? And kids pick up on that. At least this, parents, if your kids can grow up with a sense that mom and dad love each other, they love me, they love Jesus, and they love the church—if you can get those things—it’s not that they can’t fall away. Sadly, we see that happen. But you are putting some pretty serious roadblocks, in a good way, that they have to say, Now, wait a minute. Okay. My mom and dad didn’t live like this. And that message would mean that my mom and dad are terrible people. That doesn’t quite make sense*.

The Most Important Choice a New College Student Will Make

Matt Tully
Sadly, a lot of times it seems like with these stories of deconversion, with these stories of falling away, they do often have a component of failure on the part of solid Christian influences and leaders in their lives. That often is part of the story. Maybe as a final question, in the book that you’ve written, you talk a lot about the importance of choices—the importance of small choices that we make over the course of our whole life. We so often focus on the big ones and we neglect these small ones. One of the maybe seemingly small decisions that you highlight, especially as you talk to graduating seniors—kids who are going off to college for the first time—you mention this little choice that they have to make that maybe would surprise us as something that you would highlight in a book like this. Tell us what that choice is and why that’s so important.

Kevin DeYoung
That chapter grew out of a baccalaureate message I gave at our high school here, where I laid out just that. I said, I want to tell you about the most important choice you are going to make in just a few months from now. I was speaking to a context where almost everybody’s graduating from high school and going to college. I laid out all the sort of important choices they have in life. You’ve already made a lot of choices. You made a choice of where you’re going to school, you may know what you want to study, who you’re going to room with, what sort of activities you want to do. But the most important thing is that first Sunday, will you go to church? I wanted to put it as concrete and as practically as possible. Now, people might miss that go later, but no, you have a much better chance if you do it at the very beginning, because what happens? Yep, I’m a Christian. I grew up in a church and a Christian home. Wonderful. I’m off at school. And even the young person who just doesn’t mean to reject that, they’re not meaning to cast that aside, but if they don’t have in their mind, This is what I’m going to do—not just, I’ll get involved with Campus Outreach or RUF or Crew or InterVarsity. I’ll do those good campus groups, but I am going to be in a local church that first Sunday. I’m going to set the alarm, get up, find a ride, drive there, figure it out. I think it’s nothing less than potentially life defining. Do you go to church? You can go to church your whole life and be barely a Christian or not a Christian. You cannot be a good, growing Christian and never go to church.

Matt Tully
It also strikes me that beyond just the direct benefits of the church for our lives as Christians, what you were just saying, that decision also seems representative of a whole way of thinking about our faith and our lives that we would want to encourage in Christians.

Kevin DeYoung
Yeah, that to follow Jesus means I do things that are hard. And that’s a minimally hard thing. I do things that are inconvenient. And that means now we’re going to have to really reinforce to folks that when you go, I want you to actually get up and go to a church building— to a location. Not brushing your teeth with a live stream on your phone. You’re right. And I love the way you just phrased that because we can just reinforce habits or that yes, I’m still a Christian. Yes, Jesus is still important to me. But over time, it becomes as it fits in my life, as it fits in my identity. If it continues to fit and it helps me, I’m happy to. I don’t need to be at the anti-Jesus club. But that’s a far cry from Jesus saying, “Take up your cross and follow. You must lay down your life. Unless a seed falls into the ground, into the earth, it doesn’t bear fruit.” We need to help people realize those small choices—God is not trying to rob you of joy. He’s trying to set you on the life of maximum joy, maximum happiness, maximum support and satisfaction. So you’re doing this because it’s right. You’re also doing this because it’s what God knows is best.

Matt Tully
Kevin, thank you so much for helping us to think through this common cultural phrase, this underlying message that we get bombarded at us all the time, and hopefully think a little bit more biblically about what they’re saying.

Kevin DeYoung
Great to be with you. Thanks for having me.