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Having looked at relationships and sex, we now turn to a set of developments that come under the broad heading of ‘identity’ or ‘self-understanding’. In this context, ‘identity’ refers to a person’s deeply rooted sense of themselves: their habitual, often seemingly automatic, ways of understanding who they are and how they fit into the wider world around them. It refers to deep patterns of feeling, imagination and understanding that colour the whole of someone’s experience. Those patterns emerge through the interaction between a person’s inheritance and their environment, from the first moment in which their cells start developing in the womb. They are shaped by a person’s whole history, by all the people around them, by all the ways in which they have been classified and positioned. They are shaped by all the ways in which a person has responded to all of that, and all that they have discovered about themselves in the process.

To understand people’s identities, one needs to listen to their stories – and that is one of the reasons why this book has stories woven through it. That is not to say that the way people tell their own stories automatically does justice to who they are. People might not have a clear sense of their own capacities and limitations. They might not see the ways in which they are influenced by others, or the impact they have on those around them. They might miss the ways in which they fit into the power structures that shape our world, or the larger stories of which they are a part. To understand people’s identities demands critical attentiveness to the stories people tell about themselves, and to all the stories that are woven around them.

Our more abstract discussions of identity are not meant to divert attention from those stories or push them to the sidelines. One could think of them, instead, as a commentary on those stories - not just the stories given explicitly in the book, but the stories of all the people in our church and in our society, whatever their sexual orientation or their gender. Our abstract discussions are a commentary that might help us listen to those stories more closely, ask deeper questions of them, and see more clearly what questions they ask of us.

There can be many different aspects of identity, including class, race, and nationality, but in this section we are going to discuss sexual orientation and gender. Here more than anywhere else in this chapter we recognize that there is no neutral language to use. Even using the term ‘identity’ as the heading for the chapter is controversial. The word ‘identity’ can be heard as meaning something like ‘the deepest story that can be told about a person’ - and so it can tip us into a competitive argument over what the deepest story about a person should be. We recognize that controversy, but have tried to use the word ‘identity’ more loosely and descriptively. All kinds of factors can be part of a person’s ‘deeply rooted sense of themselves’, to differing degrees and in differing ways. We are not trying, simply by using the heading ‘identity’, to pre-empt discussion of how much all these different components matter, how they might interact, or what difference they might make.

Many of the other terms that we use in this section are similarly controversial. We have tried to indicate some of the main areas where contention and questions arise for some, while also paying close attention to those of us who find the language we have used an important and liberative way of articulating our experience.

See Chapter 10 (here–here) for a discussion of identity in the Christian narrative.