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We all despise being around phonies. Parents concerned about cussing often despise one of the great works of adolescent literature, The Catcher in the Rye, because it constantly drops F-bombs. Yet the most important F-bombs to pay attention to in this novel are a different four-letter word beginning with F: fake. The main theme throughout the book is that the young adult protagonist, Holden Caulfield, is frustrated with the people around him, whom he considers to be living lives of inauthenticity. All of us, but especially young emerging adults, possess an ardent desire to avoid people who are “fake.”
The problem we all face, though, is that it is hard to be authentic if you have no idea who you are. Furthermore, becoming someone you are not leads to living an inauthentic or fake life. You will wind up going through life taking off and putting on masks to try to play a part that has nothing to do with who you really are. Indeed, humans can become quite adept at putting on and removing masks, depending on the crowd. But trying to be someone you are not remains one of the most despairing, inauthentic, and destructive approaches to life.
If this journey is your experience, you might feel as though life has become an awkward performance through which you stumble, hoping never to be exposed as the fake you are. You spend your life trying to please others, but it is never enough. As a result, you may lack worth, confidence, a sense of belonging, a personal purpose, and deep-rooted character. Most of all, you will lack an understanding of your core identity.
That is not to say that we do not have some hint of our core identity as we choose to live the life of the phony, the fake, or—to use biblical language—the hypocrite. For example, when we interviewed Maria, she was recovering from losing her true self. As with many young college students, she had started college trying to make friends by experimenting with various identities.
She shared that, unfortunately, the journey did not go as she had planned: “I had a very toxic friend group freshman year, and I very much became someone that is not myself, which is somebody who would go out every weekend and party and drink a lot and do things that I hated, but I still did, because that was the environment that I put myself in” (emphasis added). As a first-year student searching for friends, she had become someone she did not think she was, due to the need to find belonging and acceptance in a group. In this scenario, she saw herself as a hypocrite.
Interestingly, she had also placed herself in another environment, one that created a war within herself regarding who she should be: “You know, I would still go every Tuesday and Thursday to my Religious Hour choir rehearsal. One of the biggest moral dilemmas that I had was that of living the life of a hypocrite—the life that I wanted to live versus the life that I was living. And what had hit me was just a really terrible night. I went out when I really should not have, the first time I ever blacked out. I hate it. I hate that. It makes me cringe thinking about it because it’s the worst.” Maria recalled that she had let herself become someone she had never wanted to be.
Fortunately for her, the other community in which she had placed herself extended a transformative grace she never forgot: “The next morning I had to drive to Houston with my choir to sing at a nursing home and lead worship at some churches in Houston. And I was hungover, and I was throwing up on the side of the road. And these people were nothing but kind to me. And I didn’t tell anybody why except for one person.” Maria’s identity conflict is one experienced by humans everywhere. We tend to think of ourselves as having a “true core self” and then also a self that is influenced by social contexts.
Usually, we think of our true core self as fundamentally good, but we also find ourselves becoming what we do not want to become (e.g., Paul’s experience in Rom. 7). When I served on my university’s honor council committee, we would constantly hear students talk about how the cheating in which these students engaged “was not really me.” Why do we think that way at times? Are we simply deceiving ourselves? Or are we harkening to a lost identity that we do not know how to recover and live out?
This book argues that the central problems facing young, emerging adults—indeed, anyone of any age—stem from a core problem. We do not know who we are, but we do have a longing for a good, purer self we somehow lost. Although the first two chapters address the consequences of this core problem, this book will focus the bulk of its attention on what it means to discover our whole and coherent true self—the self gifted to us by God. Knowing this self helps us understand who we are and how to flourish as human beings and be and bear God’s image.
Content taken from Unleashing the Image of God by Perry L. Glanzer, ©2026. Used by permission of Baker Academic.
