By Dave Doveton, Anglican Mainstream. (Image: Unsplash)
A Parable
James was startled by a sudden banging on the road outside his house. He looked up from his laptop and saw the source of the noise. Workers were unloading sections of steel palisades from a truck. He watched as they welded them to the poles already installed in front of his house.
Initially, James hadn’t been concerned about what was being built. The authorities had told residents that it was a new security plan and was meant to protect residents and their families from thieves and terrorists. However, as time went on and new barriers to access the outside world were erected, he began to get more worried. He phoned the Council for Security again. They said, not to worry, the gate to his house would have an electric lock and he would have the passcode.
James and his family got accustomed to the barrier around their house and used the gate every time they went to town shopping or out visiting.
One day he punched the code into the gate, but it didn’t squeak open as usual. In a panic he emailed the Council. After some hours he received a reply- “We are very sorry for the inconvenience, there must be a mistake”. Then time passed, another message, “We notice that you have committed a hate crime in terms of Public Policy no 344. You will be restricted from exiting your house for 3 weeks”.
James was thunderstruck. Why didn’t he see this coming? Why didn’t he see the erosion of his freedoms – freedom to speak, freedom to move, freedom to spend his money where he wanted? The words of his friends came back to haunt him, “It’s for our protection, they said, “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear”, they said.
Well, he thought, now ‘wrong’ has been redefined, and it is not in my favour.
___________________________________________________________________________________
This parable describes a creeping authoritarianism which takes advantage of the average citizen’s trust. Most people trust that the state acts in their interests (even though that trust has been severely strained in the United Kingdom). But the parable shows how freedoms can be slowly and quietly removed, the social control mechanisms quietly assembled, resulting in an accumulated infrastructure of total digital control. Eventually all it will need is for an outside authority to control the passcode, and we will be prisoners of the system.
Whoever controls the digital infrastructure effectively has control over many aspects of our lives. The Chinese credit system proves this. Whoever has the digital keys controls our lives.
Britain and the European Union are building a digital infrastructure layer by layer, piece by piece, with ever more regulatory control. On the surface these are unrelated regulations, but all potentially integrating into a larger infrastructure which increasingly shapes our everyday lives. Tools of control meant for a legitimate purpose are via what is termed ‘function creep’ extended to cover other purposes. For example, age verification to protect children against online harm can be used as a digital surveillance system that extends to everyone.
Each new piece of the system arrives with a justification that is difficult to reject on the face of it. The digital euro is presented as monetary sovereignty. Age verification is motivated by child protection. Chat Control is a part of the fight against child sexual abuse. The problem does not necessarily lie in each isolated measure but in the cumulative logic on which they rest.[i]
As we allow the state to take more control over our children’s behaviour, we give up a little more of our rights as parents, but also our freedom of agency. Moreover, all our other related freedoms are coming under threat – such as freedom of speech [ii] , freedom of movement, and freedom of association. And how much longer will we have true freedom of commerce – the freedom to buy and sell what we like to whom we like? If governments issue digital currency, they will be able to monitor every transaction we make, set a time limit on the validity of our money, block us from buying certain things they don’t approve of, or supporting causes they regard as a threat. The Chinese credit system shows how draconian such digital platforms can become. The experience[iii] of an American citizen who was debanked, shows how already western financial systems are increasingly controlled, not by human beings, but “algorithms and risk-assessment matrices”, in what he terms ‘late-stage surveillance capitalism’.
This leads us on to another question – what has this increasing state control to do with our identity?
Gatekeepers of the Soul
When Western explorers encountered remote tribes in Africa and America, they were eager to make photographic records of the people they encountered. Imagine their puzzlement when the people they came across were reluctant to be photographed. These tribes believed that capturing their images would also be capturing their souls. The Apache and Navaho believed a portrait captured a piece of the subject’s spirit, which could bring them harm. In Ethiopia among remote animist communities, capturing a likeness without permission is still viewed as taking magical control or capturing a person’s essence.
This seems strange to us even today in the age of an enlightenment worldview, which holds an impermeable separation between the material and the spiritual as if they were mutually exclusive dimensions. We may dismiss this apprehension, but what if it carries a warning? What if we are in danger of surrendering ourselves, of losing something of great value?
We are a society defined by autonomous individualism and the right to self-defined identity. We increasingly place the markers of our identity – biometrics, identity numbers, gender identity, other details such as medical and banking records – in the hands of the state and powerful corporations.
Carl Trueman has observed that in the radical individual expressionism of western culture there is no consensus on what the purpose of human beings is, and consequently this requires the state to enforce authoritarian decrees regarding personal identity
In other words, when identity has become a purely political matter, the state will become the ultimate authority. In the 5th century, the Council of Chalcedon met to counter both Nestorianism and Monophysite teaching. Jesus, the Council stated, was both fully God and fully man, not a human who became divinised. Consequently, neither could human beings assume divinity, nor are institutions such as the state divinised through Christ. This totally undermined the ultimate claims of pagan states to mediate the divine. Instead, Jesus Christ alone mediates God’s reign[iv], and not worldly institutions.
There is essentially very little difference between the pagan statism of the 5th century and the developing state of the 21st century regarding how its subjects are defined.
Furthermore, when the state denies the universal biblical account of human identity, it defines human value politically – usually in terms of racial, ideological (gender), or economic criteria. As D P Curtin has observed regarding the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century,
The value of human beings is limited to their utility as instruments of alleged historical progress. Among such states, it has been observed that once dignity ceased to be intrinsic, it became conditional, and what is conditional can always be revoked[v]
This utilitarian anthropology may account for the increasingly callous attitude towards the most vulnerable. Elderly people are considered expendable if they are not playing a ‘useful’ role in society any longer. Our lives are considered worthless if our bodies lose their utility – through disease, disablement, or other trauma. Thus, euthanasia and suicide are posed as solutions, and the unborn child can be aborted. Even the murder of young children does not seem to be regarded as the horrific crime that it really is, any longer[vi].
The abandonment of a biblical understanding of the human person results in the loss of human dignity – this is evidenced by an increasingly utilitarian attitude towards others which can also be seen in the flood of internet pornography. Objectified human beings are reduced to sexual objects to be consumed visually
The Catholic theologian Michael Hanby describes this loss of dignity and worth – he observes how a new morality is being constantly codified into law based on this utilitarian understanding of the human person,
The regulatory state and ubiquitous new global media throw their ever-increasing weight behind the new understanding of marriage and its implicit anthropology, which treats our bodies as raw material to be used as we see fit. Today a rigorous new public morality inverts and supplants the residuum of our Christian moral inheritance.[vii]
Christians must proclaim the truth that identity is primarily a theological matter with transcendent significance. The creation story tells of a loving and providential creator who designed us in his image for fellowship with himself, gave us a wonderful purpose, when sin had bound us set us free by the cross of Christ, who now reigns over all worldly powers. Only a when we recognise the transcendent authority of Christ can true freedom exist, and every person recognised as possessing inestimable value and dignity.
And paradoxically, our true identity is only discovered when we deny the self, as Jesus explains,
Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. (Matthew 10:39)
___________________________________________________________________________________
[i] Javier Villamor, From Digital Euro to Chat Control: The Risk of Function Creep. https://europeanconservative.com/articles/analysis/from-digital-euro-to-chat-control-the-risk-of-function-creep/
[ii] The FSU notes, “In 2023, ninety per cent of all crimes went unsolved, yet over the same five-year period more than 62,000 people were arrested for ‘offensive’ comments and messages online.” https://freespeechunion.org/news/more-than-62-000-people-have-been-arrested-for-speech-offences-over
[iii] https://preppgroup.home.blog/2026/08/19/the-specter-of-economic-death-algorithmic-ostracism-and-the-dissolution-of-financial-personhood-in-late-stage-surveillance-capitalism/
[iv] Ephesians 1:21.
[v] D P Curtin, Human Dignity without Metaphysics? https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2026/07/101404/
[vi] See the legal controversy around Lindsey Clancey and her trial for the murder of 3 children; https://drgavinashenden.substack.com/p/lindsey-clancy-and-the-return-of
[vii] Michael Hanby, The Civic Project of American Christianity, https://firstthings.com/the-civic-project-of-american-christianity/
___________________________________________________________________________________