Reclaim Your Humanity: People, Place, Past & Prayer
The world is trying to turn you into a machine. I don't mean that metaphorically — I mean it quite literally. The systems and ideologies surrounding us, whether political, economic, or cultural, are quietly and persistently designed to grind down what makes you uniquely you and reshape you into something more useful, more manageable, more predictable. Something the machine can use.
That's the argument Paul Kingsnorth makes in his book Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, and it's one I find deeply compelling — and deeply Christian. Kingsnorth is a British author and thinker who has spent years wrestling with what's gone wrong in our world. And while he comes at this from a broader cultural and spiritual angle, his diagnosis lines up remarkably well with what Scripture tells us about who we are and what we're up against.
This post is the second in a two-part series. If you haven't seen the first video yet, I'd really encourage you to start there, where I introduce Kingsnorth's four essays and unpack the idea of the Machine in more depth. But this one will stand on its own too, so keep reading — and I think by the end, you'll have something concrete and hopeful to hold onto.
You Were Wanted
Before we get into the four anchors, I want to slow down on something we don't pause on nearly enough: the miracle that you exist at all.
God knit you together in your mother's womb. He chose the times and the places you would live. All because, even before you ever existed, he loved you. Sit with that for a moment. Think about the staggering chain of events — stretching back through generations of your family — that had to unfold exactly as it did for you to be here. Think about all the small, seemingly random moments: a conversation that led to a relationship, a decision that changed a direction, a meeting that shouldn't have happened but did. You can call that luck if you want. But the more biblical word for it is that God wanted you to be.
All it would have taken is for one of your ancestors, somewhere back in that long line, to have made a different choice — and you wouldn't exist. Not a version of you. Not a similar you. You. Gone before you ever arrived. And yet here you are.
That's not luck. That's love.
God made you. He redeemed you. He gifted you with a unique set of experiences, relationships, and abilities that no one else in human history has had or ever will have. And he wants you to live fully, uniquely, and completely human — in Christ. The very fact that you exist is a sign of God's love for you.
We don't pause on that enough. What a miracle it is that we exist at all.
What the Machine Wants
The Machine wants the opposite of all of that. It wants you isolated and rootless. It wants you to see yourself as interchangeable — a consumer, a voter, a demographic, a data point. It wants to strip away everything particular about you and replace it with something generic and manageable.
Kingsnorth argues that the great clashing systems of our age — socialism, unfettered capitalism, collectivism, liberal democracy — are, whatever their differences, united in this one goal: they want to reduce human beings to something the system can process. They want to unmake our humanity.
Pink Floyd said it decades ago: you're just another brick in the wall. That's exactly what the Machine is after. But that's not how God created us. That's not what he intended for us. He made each of us to be unique, with varying gifts and blessings. And while we have a great deal in common with other people, you are intrinsically you — and as such, you are very much loved by the Lord Jesus. You are valuable in God's sight. So valuable that Jesus died and rose for you.
So what does it look like to push back against the Machine? What does it look like to live as the fully human, redeemed creatures that God made us to be? Kingsnorth identifies four anchors — he calls them the four P's — that help protect our humanity. I want to walk through each one, because I think they're not just culturally insightful, they're profoundly biblical.
The Four P's
1. People
Who are your people?
Maybe you grew up in a loving family. You can trace the ways you were shaped by your relationship with your mom, your dad, your grandparents. Maybe you're a chip off the old block. Your family connections give you a heritage that brings you great joy and a strong sense of identity.
Or maybe your family background is more complicated. Maybe your parents were difficult — or worse. Maybe you suffered as a child. Maybe a lot of the choices you've made in life have been defined by your determination not to be like the people who raised you. Even then — maybe especially then — those people are an essential part of your humanity. The relationships that form us, even the painful ones, are woven into who we are. A lot of the choices we make in life are shaped by the people who impacted us most, for better or for worse. Maybe you wrestle with the same weaknesses your mother or father did. Maybe you've spent years trying to break a cycle. Whatever the case, knowing who you are is really tied to living in an honest relationship with that history — and with the people in it.
And it's not limited to family. Think about the teachers who believed in you. The coaches who pushed you. The friends who stuck with you through something hard. The mentors who spoke truth into your life at just the right moment. There are so many people who help us become who we are, and staying connected with those people — maintaining those relationships across time and distance — is part of what it means to be human. These relationships root us. They connect us to something larger than ourselves and make us part of a much bigger picture than just ourselves alone.
Here's something I think is worth saying clearly: your most human relationships are going to be with people you actually run into. People you see at the grocery store. People who live in your neighborhood. People who sit next to you at church. The Machine would love for us to believe that our most important connections are digital — followers, subscribers, online communities. And I don't want to dismiss those entirely, because real friendships can exist in digital spaces. But they are not a substitute for the people who are physically present in your life. Your closest, most formative, most human relationships will be with the people you actually live among.
Don't let the Machine convince you otherwise. Stay connected. Stay rooted in your people.
2. Place
Speaking of being rooted — we live in a place.
When I was a kid, a group of musicians got together to raise funds for famine relief in Africa and recorded a song called "We Are the World." It's a beautiful sentiment, and the cause was a worthy one. But here's the honest truth: I will never fully know what it is like to be a child in war-torn Sudan. That doesn't mean I don't care — I do. And when we are able to help people in other parts of the world, we should. We've been blessed to be able to do that. But I don't have that as part of my lived experience, and there's something important in that acknowledgment.
We are not, actually, citizens of everywhere. We are citizens of somewhere. We grow up in particular places, with particular climates, particular landscapes, particular rhythms of life. And those places shape us in ways we often don't even notice until we're away from them.
I grew up on a small farm. We hunted. I can butcher a whole deer by myself — something that genuinely surprises people who grew up in cities or suburbs. And sometimes I'm amazed in the other direction: that people don't know the chicken in the grocery store was once a living animal, that there's real work involved in getting it from a farm into those plastic trays. Neither of us is wrong. We were simply shaped by different places, different ways of being in the world.
Our places shape us. We belong to them in some meaningful way. We are creatures living in a creation. We're not meant to be disconnected from the plants and the animals around us. We're not meant to be unaware of the wind, the cloud cover, the way our local weather patterns work. We're not meant to experience the world entirely through a screen, filtered and processed and delivered to us as content.
This is all part of being a creature living in creation. Some of it is humbling — we are not in control of the natural world, and that's a good thing to remember. Some of it is the foundation for genuine adventure. All of it is part of who we are. It's good to be connected to your place. Know where you live. Pay attention to it. Let it shape you. The Machine wants to uproot you — to make you a nomad of the digital world with no particular attachment to any particular piece of ground. Resist that. Be somewhere.
3. Past
The history of your people and your place matters deeply to who you are. We are shaped by stories handed down from parents and grandparents — the struggles they endured, the traditions they kept, the ways they understood the world.
I've had some really enlightening conversations over the years with people from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds — people who see the world very differently from how I do as a North American of largely Germanic heritage. And so much of that difference comes down to the experience of people's parents and grandparents. The history they carry. The stories they were told. We carry the past with us, even when we don't realize it. Even when we think we've moved on from it.
Think about the foods that you find normal. I mean really think about it. They're normal to you because of where and how you grew up. I grew up helping my grandmother make sauerkraut. Fermented cabbage. Something I enjoy very much, even though I'll fully acknowledge it is, technically, spoiled cabbage. She learned it from her mother, who learned it from her mother, going back generations to Germany. It was just part of our family life — nothing exotic, nothing remarkable. Just how things were done.
Not long ago I was at the store and I saw sauerkraut on the shelf, and right next to it, I saw kimchi. If you're not familiar, kimchi is a beloved Korean dish — also made with fermented cabbage, but with very different spices and vegetables. I decided to try it. Honestly? I don't particularly like it. It's nothing like sauerkraut. But I can appreciate it, partly because I once read a story about a Korean American who went back to visit her grandparents in Korea and helped them make kimchi together — the same kind of generational, hands-in-the-bowl connection that I had with my grandmother over a pot of sauerkraut.
The foods are completely different. The human story behind them is the same. We are people with a past. Even the foods we cherish are often eaten, in a sense, with the ghosts of our ancestors. The history of your people is alive in ways you may not even recognize.
Don't let the Machine tell you that history is irrelevant, or that you should define yourself entirely by what you choose in the present moment, free from the weight of the past. Your past — your family's past, your community's past — is an essential part of what makes you human and grounds you in this world. It's not a burden to escape. It's a foundation to build on.
4. Prayer
Kingsnorth places prayer third in his list, but I've saved it for last because I believe it is the most important — and I want to be a bit more specific than Kingsnorth was in Against the Machine.
He rightly notes that one's faith life — regardless of religion — is an essential part of what makes us human. Sociologically speaking, he's absolutely correct. We are made to live in mystery, to reach toward the divine, to ask the big questions and refuse to be satisfied with purely material answers. That longing is woven into us. It's part of our creaturely nature. We are made to be connected with God.
As a Christian, I believe there is one divine being we are truly made to be connected to. And I don't think Kingsnorth would disagree with that — he's simply telling a different part of the story.
Here's the story I believe with my whole heart: God loved you so much that he made you. He loved you so much that even after humanity rebelled against him — even after we fell into sin and walked away from the relationship he had made us for — he had already made a plan to win us back. Even before we fell, he had decided he wasn't going to let us go.
And so, in a divine mystery that still takes my breath away, God became human. Truly, fully human — in order to reclaim humanity. To restore what we had thrown away. He took on flesh, lived among us, and then accomplished our rescue in the most unlikely way imaginable: by dying on a Roman cross to atone for our sin, and then rising from the dead on the third day.
And then, in yet another mystery, God decided to deliver that salvation through people — through the telling and retelling of the story of Jesus. He sends his Spirit to work through that story, creating faith in us so that we can believe and receive this new humanity that Jesus has inaugurated. It is in Jesus that our humanity is truly restored. It will be fully and finally restored when he comes again in his glory.
In the meantime, we live as he made us to be: people connected to God through prayer, through Word and Sacrament, through the community of faith. People who are rooted not just in the earth but in eternity.
Prayer is how we stay connected to the one who made us, redeemed us, and sustains us day by day. It's not a religious obligation or a spiritual discipline to check off a list. It's a conversation with the God who wanted you to exist, who calls you by name, and who is making you — slowly, graciously, persistently — into the fully human, fully alive person he always intended you to be.
Living It Out
So here's where we land. In a world that wants to isolate you, commodify you, and unmake you, these four anchors help protect and nourish the humanity that Christ has restored in you:
- People — Stay connected to those who formed you, and invest deeply in the people physically present in your life.
- Place — Be present where God has planted you. Pay attention to your local world. Be somewhere.
- Past — Honor the story you come from. Let your history ground you rather than haunt you.
- Prayer — Stay connected to the God who made you, redeemed you, and calls you his own.
These aren't self-help strategies. They're not nostalgia for its own sake, or a call to retreat from the wider world. They are the contours of a genuinely human life — a life lived as a creature made and redeemed by God, rooted in the real, the particular, and the eternal. They are ways of saying no to the Machine and yes to the life God has given you.
The Machine will keep pushing. The forces that want to erode your humanity are not going away. But here's what I want you to hear: you don't belong to the Machine. You belong to Christ. And in him, your humanity is not just being preserved — it is being restored. It is being made new. And one day, it will be made complete.
All of this, by God's grace.
If this has been encouraging to you, I'd love to hear from you in the comments below. And if you missed Part 1, you can watch it here. For those who want to go deeper on these ideas, I highly recommend picking up Paul Kingsnorth's book — Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. It's a challenging, rewarding, and genuinely important read.
See you next week.
— Pastor Eric Tritten, Gloria Dei Lutheran Church, Hudson, Ohio
Comments