How the Church Can Restore True Humanity

In an age where identity is increasingly fluid, morality subjective, and truth treated as an outdated construct, the Church faces a deep and pressing challenge: how do we remain truly human? Before we can shape our laws, our classrooms, our families, or our spiritual communities, we must answer a foundational question what does it mean to be a human being?

Modern culture insists that humanity is malleable, that gender, purpose, and moral standards are social inventions we can reconstruct at will. But if we lose the thread of our created identity, we also lose the capacity to govern rightly, teach clearly, parent wisely, or minister truthfully. And without a return to biblical anthropology a Christian understanding of what humans are and were made to be we risk being shaped by philosophies that ultimately dehumanize us.

At the center of a biblical understanding of humanity are two vital truths. First, humans are not cosmic accidents but beings created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), imbued with dignity and worth. Second, though we were made good, we are now fallen capable of great beauty, yet deeply marred by sin. Because of this, we need both salvation and formation. Our hearts must be shaped by God's truth, and our desires must be ordered according to His design.

C.S. Lewis and the Lost Meaning of Man

Few thinkers have captured the erosion of human identity better than C.S. Lewis. Though widely known for Mere Christianity and The Chronicles of Narnia, it is in The Abolition of Man and his lesser-known Ransom Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength) that Lewis most clearly sounds the alarm about a culture abandoning the very foundations of what it means to be human.

In The Abolition of Man, Lewis warns that once society teaches students that all values beauty, goodness, morality are mere feelings, we create what he calls "men without chests." That is, people who have intellect (the head) and appetite (the belly), but no moral center (the chest). Without the chest, people lack the inner compass to distinguish between courage and cowardice, virtue and vice. They become easily manipulated and morally disoriented.

Lewis draws from both Christian and classical sources to affirm that objective standards of goodness, truth, and beauty do exist and they are written into the fabric of the universe. What the ancient Chinese called the Tao and the Bible refers to as God's law are, in Lewis's words, "the doctrine of objective value." This universal moral code transcends culture and age and is accessible because humans are made in God's image.

Modern Education and the Hollowing of Humanity

In Lewis’s critique of modern education, he exposes how students are subtly taught that value judgments such as calling something “beautiful” or “evil” are not real truths, but emotional projections. A textbook he critiques teaches that saying a waterfall is "sublime" reveals only the observer’s feelings, not the nature of the waterfall itself.

This leads to a society that scoffs at honor but is shocked by betrayal, that rejects virtue but demands justice, that celebrates personal truth while dismissing objective reality. Lewis's haunting conclusion: “We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” In other words, we remove moral training and then wonder why our children lack integrity and purpose.

The Ransom Trilogy: Stories That Restore

In his science fiction Ransom Trilogy, Lewis dramatizes this erosion of humanity and the possibility of its restoration. The protagonist, Ransom, begins as a modern man—rational, skeptical, and detached from transcendent truth. But on Mars and Venus, he encounters unfallen beings who live within the Tao. Through his interactions, Ransom gains a "chest" a restored moral sense that helps him discern what is truly good, true, and beautiful.

In contrast, the antagonist Weston embodies modern ideology. He dismisses virtue in favor of preserving the human species at any cost, even exterminating Martian life. Weston’s reduction of morality to survival ends in spiritual blindness and destruction a warning of what happens when humanity is separated from its divine telos (purpose).

In That Hideous Strength, Lewis envisions a dystopian future where scientists, working for an organization called N.I.C.E., attempt to create a perfect society by removing human nature itself. Their symbol of progress? A decapitated, demonically possessed head. Lewis's fiction reveals a terrifying truth: when man tries to conquer nature by rejecting divine design, he ends up enslaved by it.

Reclaiming the Tao in a Post-Truth World

The Church today must recognize that many modern ideologies claim to liberate humanity but actually fragment it. Concepts like “freedom from norms” or “self-defined identity” often mask a deeper rejection of the Creator’s design. Yet even these ideologies unknowingly borrow from the very framework they reject. Values like justice, equality, and love only have meaning because of the imago Dei and the Tao. Without those foundations, these ideals collapse into contradictions.

The solution is not political rage or cultural withdrawal, but a humble return to truth. We must begin to teach our children and remind ourselves that there is a moral order built into the world and into our hearts. This isn’t just for the sake of tradition; it’s for the sake of humanity’s survival.

When education, parenting, preaching, and government reject fixed standards, we end up adrift. But when we embrace the full picture that we are made in God's image, fallen in sin, and capable of redemption we return to the path of life. We learn, as St. Augustine taught, to love things in the right order. We reclaim our chests.

Finding the Straight in the Crooked

In That Hideous Strength, one character is thrown into a room where everything is distorted walls, paintings, and angles deliberately twisted to unseat his sense of order. It's a metaphor for the world today, where morality, beauty, and truth seem constantly under attack. Yet in that chaos, he begins to yearn for “the Normal,” something he had never noticed before: the sweet, the straight, the good. He begins to remember what it means to be human.

Today, we find ourselves in a similarly lopsided room. Entertainment, social media, higher education all can warp our sense of reality. But within each of us is a longing for what is real. C.S. Lewis provides not just a critique, but a path back a way to stay human in a world determined to forget.

Let the Church be the place where this journey back begins.

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