Welcome to Conquest of Grace! If you would like to know more about who I am and where I am coming from, I highly recommend checking out my about page.
When it comes to the matter of self-identification, and the problems that stem from it, we can point to one particular issue to see why it is an issue. The challenge of transgenderism. This belief relies on making a person’s biological sex a matter of self-identification. Transgenderism has been exposed as extremely irrational largely because of a nonsensical belief that being a man or a woman is something that you can simply “identify” as, regardless of biological reality.
The problem is obvious: our bodies are fundamentally male or female. Without exception. Even the rare cases of intersex conditions don’t actually validate the views of transgenderism. This is because they are not ever fully hermaphroditic in the way transgender advocates present them as. Besides the fact that intersex conditions are extremely rare, making them somewhat irrelevant, the majority of cases involve individuals where it can be determined that they are clearly a specific sex. They just have features or body parts of the opposite sex, which are deformed or non-functional.
You never have a perfect hybrid of male and female sexual characteristics. An examination of these conditions reveals the person’s actual sex, and then the genetic, developmental, or birth defects that led to stunted or partial features of the opposite sex. Making it an obvious physical defect. Just as Down syndrome creates physiological and mental issues as a person grows up. There may be some cases where we don’t really know, but not only are these so rare as to be useless as a point of validation for transgenderism, they only mean we don’t know all the details. Fact is, how many of those who claim to be transgender actually have a legitimate intersex condition? We all know the answer is close to zero.
However, there is another problem that goes far beyond this specific instance of self-identification. It is the fact that self-identification as a whole is extremely unreliable, yet it is constantly used to make determinations of what people are. Completely ignoring all the issues that exist in such lazy categorization. Examining the Pew Research data on the religious landscape of the United States provides a great example of this. I pulled data from the Religious Landscape Study, focusing on the 2023/2024 survey, to showcase this.
We get indicators of this overall problem by looking at a handful of the results. For example, we are told that 62% of US adults identify as Christian. However, this identification has some rather serious complications. First, we are categorizing people as Christians only through self-identification. The sole factor that makes a person a “Christian” here is having selected either Protestant, Roman Catholic, Mormon, or Orthodox on the question “What is your present religion, if any?” This means a person is treated as a “Christian” merely because they claim to be a Christian.
All we have to do is look at the beliefs held by these self-identified “Christians” to get a glimpse of why this is problematic. Of these so-called Christians, 2% “Do not believe in God or universal spirit.” Which makes absolutely no sense. Putting aside the issue of what a “universal spirit” is, and how it muddies the question, you have people claiming to be Christian while simultaneously stating they don’t believe in God. Even the loosest definition of Christianity would include a belief in God. Besides this group, you also have a full 24% who state that they believe in God or a “universal spirit” but aren’t absolutely certain. While people have doubts, it’s questionable what answering this way means. It is hard to accurately call someone a Christian when one is uncertain about God’s existence. Even if we give the benefit of the doubt to people who may experience some kind of crisis of faith or struggle.
However, it gets more absurd than this. According to this same survey, you have 1% of atheists who claim to believe in God’ or a universal spirit’ with absolute certainty! You have a full 7% who claim to believe in God, just without being absolutely certain. The very basis of atheism is to reject the belief in a god or gods, yet somehow a significant portion of self-proclaimed atheists state a belief in God. If you look at the survey data from 2014 and 2007, this percentage is much higher. In 2007 there were 8% who claimed to have certainty in their belief in God and 13% claimed less than certain belief in God. How do you have almost 1 out of 5 self-proclaimed atheists saying they believe in God?
The contradictions and nonsense found in this survey are plentiful. It isn’t restricted to Christians or atheists either. Clearly, people are giving answers in ways that make little sense. Or at least they make no sense if we assume they are telling the truth. Here is just a sample of the examples that can be found that cast doubt on the validity of these self-identifications.
14% of “Christians” claiming the Bible is “Not too/Not at all important.”
8% of “Christians” saying that “The natural world is all there is.”
5% of atheists saying they believe in heaven and 4% who say they believe in hell.
7% of “Muslims” say they do not believe in God.
25% of Muslims who say the Bible is “extremely/very important” (not the Koran but the Bible).
And of course, a full 52% of Buddhists who say they believe in heaven (Not reincarnation or nirvana, but heaven).
What the data indicate is the fact that people are not honest about their self-identification. An atheist who believes in God is an impossibility. Either they are making a mistake in the survey, are ignorant of what any of this means, or are answering falsely on purpose.
We can’t rule out the possibility of people deliberately providing troll responses because of anti-social contrarianism. But this cannot explain all the discrepancies we find in the data. It cannot explain everything we see. Because these nonsensical outcomes exist in all kinds of polls. They are not restricted to this study, nor just on matters of religious identification.
Very importantly, it does not explain why 57% of “Christians” say that homosexuality “should be accepted.” That one particular conundrum should be a hint of the truth. What is really going on is an exposé of the unreliability of self-identifying labels. We are seeing deliberate obfuscation and manipulation of labels for some dishonest purpose. Yet, despite the provably unreliable nature of this data, we still blindly use it. Social analysis is made upon this garbage data and conclusions are drawn even when it is trivial to see how inaccurate it is.
People are ignorantly and falsely claiming a label for various reasons. Which is a phenomenon of serious importance. This initial article is the first in a multi-part essay where I describe the significant problems of self-identification. Especially when it is relied upon as a method of evaluating religious belief and categorization. This serves as the introduction to the problem. Next, we will cover the reasons a person might want to label themselves as something they really aren’t.
