The Loss of Significance: Reclaiming Your God-Given Worth

One of the most depressing feelings as a human being is feeling replaceable. It’s to feel like a number in a system or a body online or a label to be dismissed. Sadly, many people today walk around experiencing a profound loss of significance because our modern culture has removed the defining plaque for what it means to be human and the significance it carries.

The Art Gallery Analogy: How We Lose Our Context

In a museum or art gallery, there is often a plaque next to a painting or sculpture. They often share the title, the artist who created it, its origin, and why it matters. These plaques are meant to help the viewer recognize the value of the piece endowed by its creator. If you were to walk into a modern art gallery, these plaques are often missing, and the art is positioned to stand on its own.

Without knowing where the piece comes from or its intended purpose, the object and its significance become open to interpretation. One might look at it and see beauty; another might see a painful story or experience. One person might see a tool, another a simple, worthless prop. Without a plaque or label, the viewer can lose the proper context to honor the piece as the artist intended. And the piece is at risk of losing the given value and significance.

Defining Dehumanization in Modern Culture

Something similar happens when we remove the God-given plaque for human beings. We still believe that people have human rights, but those rights are said to be self-evident and assumed. We no longer know how to name that worth or give reason for its existence. Without this grounding, we start guessing. We interpret people according to what they mean to us, what they can do to us, or what group they belong to. And when we lose the God-given answer to what a human being is and the significance they carry, people made in the image of God are quickly reduced to something less than human.

What Drives the Loss of Significance in Modern Culture?

Dehumanization is the reduction of a person’s God-given significance. And it’s one of the reasons people walk around today feeling like they have no value, purpose, or significance. When people hear of dehumanization, we often think of treating others with cruelty. And while that is a piece, the root of dehumanization is not just bad actions towards others; it begins with seeing others falsely. Dehumanization reduces someone’s purpose, value, dignity, and moral weight to something less than who and what our Creator has made us to be.

Three Ways Culture Dehumanizes and Reduces Our Value

There are three ways we, as a modern culture, dehumanize others.

Reducing People to Numbers and Data Points

One of the most famous examples of reducing human beings’ significance to a number is seen in the holocaust. In Auschwitz, the prisoners were tattooed with an identification number. Elie Wiesel captures the horror of this in Night when he writes, “I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name.” To reduce a human being with a name, which carries history, memory, story, personhood, with a number is essentially to say you are no longer someone; you are something. You are not a person of significance; you are a number to be managed.

From Historical Atrocities to Modern Data Points

Today, we gawk at the atrocities of the holocaust. We know it is wrong. And today we are not tattooing numbers on people’s arms. Yet, we can quickly reduce people to data points, followers, views on their social media, or income tax brackets. These numbers themselves are not evil and can help us see reality. But when they become the way in which we see someone’s value or dignity, they become the means by which we dehumanize.

Measuring Human Worth by Utility

To equate one’s value based on their utility is to measure worth by what someone can produce, provide, or perform. Sadly, many people experience this exact mistreatment at work. When employers reduce you to sales figures and spreadsheet data, they strip away your humanity. We see this same reductionism in the abortion debate, which treats human life as a mere choice, and in end-of-life debates that cast the elderly as burdens. We could go on to talk about immigrants, employees, those with disabilities, or those with certain political stances.

The Danger of Measuring Worth by Productivity

People do have utility. God has gifted each one of us with unique talents and capacities, and the Holy Spirit empowers us to be competent. God created us to work, serve, build, and cultivate in our world. Our human vocation includes a certain usefulness. But this must never become the measure of someone’s significance or value.

Trapping Individuals in Social Categories

To reduce someone to a category is to no longer see a person standing in front of us, but a label. Modern labels would include liberal or conservative, immigrant or alien, Boomer or Gen Z, Addict or Criminal, Influencer or Karen, Uneducated or Elite, Authoritarian or Victim. Categories can help us understand patterns, social structures, behaviors and beliefs, but they can become dangerous when they begin to define the very identity of another human being. A social label one carries may tell the truth about one aspect of an individual, but it will never tell you the whole truth about that person.

The Trap of Ideological Labels and Social Media Avatars

Dehumanizing people’s significance in the age of social media is especially rampant. Online, we do not encounter others face to face. Instead, we encounter a curated feed or an avatar. And when that happens, we stop asking who this person is and what their story is and start assuming that we already know what kind of a person this is.

The Root Cause: Misplaced Authority and Identity

Underneath all these forms of dehumanization lies the very human problem of misplaced lordship and authority. When we remove the creator of human beings’ place of identity, we leave human beings open to our own opinion and interpretation. To dehumanize someone is acting as though we have the authority to determine their worth based on their relation or standing to us. We place ourselves in the position of creator, judge, and owner.

The Christian Antidote to the Loss of Significance

Christianity subverts this belief completely. What God has revealed in scripture is that your value depends on the God whose image you bear. Just as an artist may place an identifying plaque next to their artwork, God has given all human beings a plaque. In Genesis 1:27 we read “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” This is an account of what a human being is, an image bearer of God. And being God’s image means humans have a God-given value.

Christianity removes human worth from human hands. We receive our dignity as a gift; we don’t earn it by pleasing others. Neither governments nor social classes grant our status—God does. Because our worth rests firmly in how God created us rather than our own fragile efforts, it remains permanent. We as human beings do not get to decide who matters and who does not, and that is good news.

The Christian response to a dehumanizing world is not only to defend human dignity as an idea, but to practice it as a way of life. We can recover names that the world only sees as numbers. We can honor people and treat them as valuable when the world only measures utility. And we can look beyond categories and remember that every person before us is someone God has made, knows, and Christ came to redeem.