There’s a paradox in the way we talk about identity now: the language meant to “elevate” often narrows instead.

For Christians, that narrowing misses something essential. The idea that every person bears the image of God isn’t a slogan — it’s a claim about irreducible dignity. It resists the liberal urge to sort people into neat, legible categories and then call it “understanding.”

Which makes the current pattern of coverage feel less like recognition and more like reduction, even when it’s framed as celebration.

Just look at what happened at the 2026 Met Gala.

For once, the issue at hand wasn’t what people wore (or didn’t wear), but rather the way people were being described.

If you’ve given any modicum of attention to this year’s Met Gala, you’ve no doubt heard about Aariana Rose Philip, a runway model who recently signed with a major modeling agency.

Well, if you haven’t, you probably assumed Philip got some glowing coverage and people were gushing about the model’s personality or some viral moment.

Nope.

This decrepit culture instead focused on four things almost exclusively: Philip is black, transgender, someone who has quadriplegic cerebral palsy, and the first such model to sign with a major agency.

That’s it. Nothing about who Philip is as a person. For all I know, this history-making model could be a serial puppy murderer (after some light digging, I can confirm Philip has not murdered any puppies, as far as I can tell).

What made the coverage feel so nauseating wasn’t that those descriptors were mentioned, but that they seemed to replace everything else. They weren’t context; they were the content. The person disappeared behind the framing, as if the only relevant thing to understand was how neatly Philip fit into a set of categories.

That kind of presentation doesn’t read like curiosity or admiration. It reads like sorting — like the audience is being handed a pre-packaged figure to react to, rather than being invited to actually learn anything about the individual at the center of it.

And that’s the uncomfortable truth about modern liberalism: even when it’s framed as “progress,” it carries a transactional cost.

The emphasis isn’t on who someone is, what they’ve done, or what they might become — it’s on what they represent.

In trying so hard to signal importance, this sort of coverage ends up flattening the very person it claims to celebrate.

And that’s a fundamentally un-Christian worldview. From a Christian perspective, that flattening cuts against something foundational.

If every person bears the image of God, then their worth isn’t assembled from descriptors or milestones — it’s already there, whole and untouchable.

Any framework that trains us to see people primarily as categories, no matter how “nice” it may sound, is missing that deeper truth.

It trades something intrinsic and God-given for something constructed by man, and in doing so, actually lowers what it means to even be human.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.

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