There’s a quiet contradiction buried in the way we talk about identity today: the very words we use to "elevate" often end up boxing people in.
For Christians, that narrowing misses something sacred. The belief that every person bears the image of God isn't a bumper sticker—it's a claim about an unstrippable, God-given dignity. It refuses to let us sort people into tidy little labels and pretend that counts as understanding.
So when the media machine spins up its coverage of a person, it often feels less like recognition and more like reduction, even when draped in celebration.
Look no further than the 2026 Met Gala.
For once, the scandal wasn't about who wore what—it was about how people were described.
You’ve probably heard about Aariana Rose Philip, a runway model who just signed with a major agency. If you hadn’t, you might expect glowing profiles about her personality, her journey, her moment in the spotlight.
Think again.
The culture machine zoomed in on exactly four things: Philip is Black, transgender, lives with quadriplegic cerebral palsy, and is the first model with that combination to sign with a major agency. That was it. Nothing about who she actually is as a human being.
For all anyone knew from the coverage, she could have been a serial puppy murderer—though a quick check confirms she is not.
The coverage felt hollow not because those descriptors were mentioned, but because they seemed to replace everything else. They weren't context; they were the entire story. The person herself vanished behind the categories, as if the only thing worth knowing was how neatly she checked the right boxes.
That kind of presentation doesn't read like curiosity or admiration. It reads like sorting—handing the audience a pre-packaged figure to react to rather than inviting them to meet the actual individual at the center of it.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth about a certain strain of modern thought: even when it parades as "progress," it comes with a transaction fee. It focuses not on who someone is, what they’ve done, or what they could become, but on what they represent.
In the desperate rush to signal importance, the coverage flattens the very person it claims to lift up.
And that cuts against something foundational for the Christian worldview. If every person bears the image of God, then their worth isn't assembled from descriptors or achievements—it's already there, whole and untouchable, from the start.
Any framework that trains us to see people primarily as categories—no matter how warmly it's packaged—misses that deeper truth. It trades something intrinsic and God-given for something man-made, and in doing so, it actually lowers what it means to be human.
