https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/to-those-who-only-speak-out-when-it-is-risk-free/
For Christians it should be a no-brainer to conceive one’s existence as a gift of life. Christian faith derives from the gift of sacrifice: Jesus Christ died for our sins. Even if one considers the logic of this as absurd, the idea of someone not clinging on to his own life as an act of service to humanity as a whole (and not just his own clan or tribe), serves as a powerful antidote to identity thinking and the brutality of self-preservation. The gift of life is not limited to birth but also to worth, as the idea of sacrifice in the name of not just humanity but the entire web of life elevates life beyond the brutality of self- preservation. This is something that “selfish genes” and “selfish memes” simply lack.
In this sense, one can use Jesus Christ as an example, perhaps as the example of an antidote to identity thinking and thereby also as the most fundamental rejection of the schmittian conception of the political as derived from the distinction between friend and foe (which includes the enemy-within) and this then also defines his notion of communitas in terms of friendship and immunitas as agonistique. This also explains why self-identifications and Christian Nationalist or Christian Zionist are oxymoronic, as Christ came to die for all sinners, and not just those of his own tribe. This is the cornerstone of the teachings of St. Paul and explains why the Catholic notion of Communion does not rely on Agonistique, even if it has often been corrupted to function in the name of identity politics.
The exemplary role of Jesus Christ unfolds in the accomplishment of kenosis. Kenosis as the emptying-of-self is the radical alternative to identity-thinking; it takes incredible courage, loyalty and honesty to engage oneself in acts of kenosis, as even the “heroic fame” that may follow acts of selflessness has to be rejected. And exactly this is what makes Christian Nationalism and Christian Zionism not only oxymoronic but also blasphemous. By touting the figure of Christ as some kind of heroic warrior, one corrupts the messianic kenosis. This is also why the historical persona of Jesus would have been rejected as a radical left wokist by Christian Nationalists and – had he not been turned into an Aryan icon – a radical, anti-Semitic terrorist by Christian Zionists, had he been alive and present in the flesh today. In the narrow mind set of identity thinking, kenosis equals weakness and shame; as kenosis exposes the reality of its reliance on repressed self-loathing.
Identity thinking is, perhaps unfortunately, not something we can easily reject. This is because there is a very close alignment between thinking in terms of identities as esse (being) and the perceived necessity of self-preservation (the selfish genes and memes). However, to think exclusively in terms of identity thinking is also very difficult, as ultimately one has to trust in friendship, i.e. one has to rely on others to share their esse with you. That is, even the most extreme forms of identity thinking, rely on the collaboration of others, with whom one shares (inter) esse (interests). This is why sociologists prefer to talk about “social identities”, i.e. subjective identifications with “collectives” on the basis of assumed shared characteristics (interests). Social identities are a kind of “membership”.
In the end, Social Identities are themselves a bit oxymoronic if one takes both components as absolute. The absolute social is sharing everything, the absolute identity is sharing nothing. Hence, when sociologists conceptualize community, they remain rather vague about the boundaries as they are quantities – e.g. degrees of similarity – not qualities. Ultimately, the quantification of social identities is performed by technologies and sanctified or legitimated by institutions. However, as identities are about thresholds, the notions of identification and disidentification remain arbitrary and thus can only by enacted through symbolic (more often) and/or physical (less often) violence.
One very clear manifestation of the violent arbitrariness of social identities is the notion of place. When women, for example, are told to “know their place”, it is quite obvious that the possessive pronoun “their” does not mean that this place (e.g. the kitchen or “below men”) is their property; instead, they are told that “their place” is the place where they belong. They are thus the property of that place. This analogy also works for most people who are encouraged to die for their country. It is obvious that those most likely to die for their country are also the least likely to own much of the land that makes up the estate of that country. Again, those who die for their country belong to that country.
This is the basic conception of estate: it is a territory of belonging-to for most and a territory owned-by a few. Belonging and ownership are the two central topological conceptions of social identification. Most of us will understand social identities primarily in terms of belonging-to; indeed, it is a form of subjugation. I have never had the privilege of hanging out with people who own a lot of land, so I do not know how they identify as property owners, if they see themselves in terms of belonging or owning or both. However, the mere fact that social identity discourse is so strongly biased towards the rhetoric of belonging does suggest that is is more closely aligned with the experience of being subjugated and thus structured according to the logic of the victim rather than the perpetrator. And this might explain – again but by other means – why more often than not, identity thinking is steeped in slave morality.
Disaffected Sociology 
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