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What follows is the keynote address delivered by Luke Bretherton, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford, at the inaugural Understory festival at the Washington National Cathedral in May 2026. We have preserved the cadences of the spoken word rather than recast the text as an essay, trusting that what was voiced into that nave carries something the page alone could not produce.
—The Editors
What does it mean to be human? Today, this question confronts with existential urgency every society, political vision, and moral system.
The ability to edit human DNA, to merge humans and machines at a cellular level, and to develop forms of artificial intelligence that share characteristics of human consciousness leads some to ask whether different kinds of humans or even post-humans will emerge. At the same time, political barriers and ideological divisions have brought about the denial and demonization of other humans, so that any sense of a shared humanity is severely strained.
We stand in powerful currents that are dissolving the very idea of humanity as a coherent moral and political reality. The need to recover and defend a shared conception of our humanity—and, with it, the intrinsic dignity of each and every person—is ever more urgent. These currents gain energy from two fundamental challenges.
The first is a crisis of agency. We find ourselves acted on rather than able to act in the world, and rather than being enabled to act with and for others, we are constantly positioned to act against others in competition, ideological conflict, and actual war. We find we have to act by ourselves, hassling and hustling, alone in a crowd, rather than cultivating forms of meaningful and purposeful shared life. We wake up in the morning and find decisions about our work, our institutions, even our children’s futures being made somewhere else, by someone else, according to logics we can’t quite see or grasp.
Artificial intelligence is only the most recent expression of this dynamic. It generates faceless processes driven by algorithms that decide who gets the mortgage, the interview, the surgery, the scholarship—without any accountability or comeback. The crisis here is not first and foremost one of technology. It is a crisis of agency.
My intuition is that people want to have their sense of agency restored—to recover the belief that our lives are not meaningless or merely managed, that there are ways we can act together rather than simply act alone or in competition with others, and that we can act to shape the world we live in rather than be passive consumers.
Alongside this loss of agency sits another crisis: a loss of trust in the institutions that shape our common life. Hospitals, universities, schools, courts, and museums, for example, are seen as distant, procedural, and ideological rather than as spaces of belonging and common purpose that contribute to our shared flourishing.
From the left, the charge is that institutions are oppressive—racist, patriarchal, homophobic, extractivist, ableist—and so must be dismantled or abolished. From the right, the accusation is that institutions are bureaucratic, unaccountable, elitist, and “woke.” In both cases, the result is the same: a disenchantment and disidentification with the very structures that once gave shape, continuity, and purpose to our common life across generations.
Our current crisis is not one of people, ideas, or even money. There are plenty of good people, interesting ideas, and finance around. It is a crisis of institutional imagination. We know the problems before us—environmental degradation, social polarization, mass migration, lack of affordable housing, food insecurity, and the like—but we no longer trust the institutions we have. At the same time, we cannot imagine the institutions we need in order to address the long-term problems we face.
Our current crisis is not one of people, ideas, or even money. It is a crisis of institutional imagination.
There are good reasons for this lack of trust in institutions and the structures that determine our living and working conditions. We are treated by them either as units of social administration to be managed or as units of data to be processed, optimized, and surveilled, with our relationships and emotions sold back to us as clicks and likes. Instead of our tools and technologies serving us and making life better, we find our lives and identities re-engineered to serve them and their logics, and in this reversal we find our own lives drained of joy, wonder, and human depth and connection. Life gets faster and more efficient but less humane.
The Failure of Institutional Imagination
To understand our moment, we need to recover some historical perspective. The modern world, for all its individualism, was built through institutions. From the late eighteenth century onward, we saw the invention of the modern university, museum, political party, trade union, prison, public library, sports club, and myriad other institutions. Each was an attempt to answer a collective problem or pursue a shared good, and to organize what was necessary for addressing that end through a sustainable form of common life.
How do you get clean, potable water to a rapidly expanding urban population concentrated in increasingly close-knit living conditions? You create an institution: the municipal sewage and waterworks. This institution not only solves the problem but also forms the people with the vision to address the problem, the ethos to fulfill that vision with care and moral concern, and the technical knowledge to do the job well. The same goes for solving any other social ill or question that emerged with the Industrial Revolution.
The church was at the heart of the birth of much of this institutional world. Parishes and congregations shaped civic order at a local level; Christians laid the foundations of the university, the hospital, public education, and public housing. But by the end of the twentieth century, that institutional imagination faltered. Society became, in Robert Putnam’s phrase, composed of people “bowling alone.”
The deeper pattern underlying these dynamics is the shift from institutions of care and moral purpose to institutions that control, commodify, and lack any sense of their meaning and ethical rationale. Everything becomes a market, every person an individualized and atomized producer or consumer who must brand and sell themselves to be noticed. Hospitals, for example, are no longer institutions that serve the moral good of health. They are “health-care providers,” and patients are “service users.” This language is not neutral. It recasts moral relationships in transactional terms. When a nurse treats a patient as a data point rather than as a person, as mere biology rather than as someone with a biography, both are dehumanized.
Underlying and driving these shifts is the anti-humanistic vision of what the late Pope Francis and Pope Leo call the “technocratic paradigm,” in which a wholly instrumental view of nature separates and alienates us from creation. It operates with what Francis calls a “tyrannical anthropocentrism” as well as a hyper-individualism, equating scientific and technological progress with human progress while denying any moral and spiritual basis to life. Everything is subject to a will to power without moral limits, save for a cursory utilitarian calculus. And it is precisely this paradigm that fuels post-humanist and transhumanist visions that want to dissemble and re-engineer our shared humanity so it can be either fired off to Mars or fed into a large language model.
The reality we know in our bones is that human life cannot be reduced to ones and zeroes, then managed and optimized for either market share or a social-engineering project. In short, we cannot live by money and technology alone.
What Is Christian Humanism?
At the heart of any theological vision for renewing human agency and reimagining our institutions in this context lies a simple but radical conviction: Every human is made in the image of God.
This does not mean that human beings possess some fixed quality, such as rationality. Rather, it means that every human life reflects something of God’s own relational life. Each person is open to communion, is filled with creativity and possibility, and presents us with an invitation to discover our own meaning and purpose through learning how to care for the person before us.
Toward the end of John’s Gospel, Pontius Pilate presents the beaten and humiliated Jesus to the crowd and says, “Behold the man,” or, more literally, “Here is the human being.” Ironically, Pilate speaks more truth than he realizes. The Christian tradition hears in those words the revelation “Here is true humanity.” What does it mean to be human? Christian humanism answers that if you want to know what a fully human life looks like, look at Jesus Christ.
For Christian humanism, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus provide the clearest picture of what humanity is meant to be. However much our humanity has been distorted by sin or idolatry, whether personal or structural, Christian humanism contends that our humanity can be restored through learning to imitate Christ. That imitation takes many forms. One form is contemplation: looking at an icon or painting of Christ, or reading stories that portray a Christlike way of life. Another is participation: doing the kinds of things Christ did, especially caring for the vulnerable, forgotten, and excluded.
Christian humanism begins, then, from the conviction that our humanity is revealed in Christ. But it also insists that we recover our humanity not merely through ideas but through practices: acts of love, service, and solidarity. It is crucial to notice, however, which Christ we are invited to contemplate and imitate. The scene before Pilate is not one of triumph or worldly success. Christ stands there beaten, humiliated, bound, abandoned, and about to be executed by the state. The central image of Christian humanism is therefore not the powerful ruler, the autonomous individual, or the self-made success story. It is the wounded body of Christ.
That matters enormously. It means that human flourishing is not discovered by leaving behind suffering, vulnerability, or hard relationships. Christianity is not a form of spiritual escapism or inner consolation in a difficult world. It does not warrant a movement away from messy material realities. It demands a movement into them: into suffering, loss, and the traumatized and fragile places of human life. Christian humanism insists that we discover our humanity precisely there.
This theological conviction is clearly articulated in a common reading of the parable of the good Samaritan. The Samaritan encounters a stranger lying wounded by the roadside, abandoned, vulnerable, and in need of help. More than that, the Samaritan and the wounded man each belong to a people regarded as enemies. It is the Samaritan who acts as the truly human figure in the story. His humanity is revealed in the moment of encounter and in how he responds, crossing boundaries of fear, hostility, and social division to show mercy and loving kindness.
The parable suggests something profound: We discover our humanity through our encounter with those who are not like us, especially those who suffer and those we consider our enemies. In the Christian imagination, that is also where we most fully encounter Christ. It is the central claim of Matthew 25: “When did we see you hungry, thirsty, naked, imprisoned?” ask those questioned by Jesus. He answers, “Whenever you cared for the least of these, you cared for me.”
The presence of Christ is thus not confined to sacred spaces or religious rituals. Alongside bread and wine and times of prayer, Christ becomes present in the encounter with vulnerable human beings—in the stranger, the prisoner, the poor, the excluded. That is one of the profound gifts of Christian humanism. It directs our attention toward suffering and weakness because that is where Christ is found, and, therefore, that is where we most deeply discover what it means to be human.
Early Christian writers like Gregory of Nyssa built on this insight. In one remarkable sermon from the fourth century, Gregory condemns slavery by arguing that enslaved people must be recognized as fully human because they bear the image of God. He declares that if Christ is present among the lowly and oppressed, then to encounter the slave is also to encounter Christ. In other words, Gregory understands that in and through Christ our humanity is discovered through solidarity with the neglected and exploited.
Christian humanism is not a theory. It is a therapy for recovering our humanity in and through Christ.
Gregory’s brother, Basil of Caesarea, invented an institution that was inspired by and embodied this theological vision: the hospital. For both Gregory and Basil, this institution that enabled care for the poor, sick, and socially excluded, like lepers, was a direct expression of Christian humanism and the recognition of the image of God in every person. Christian humanism is thus not a theory. It is a therapy for recovering our humanity in and through Christ.
Historically, this vision of Christian humanism has generated a series of interconnected projects, the first of which is philosophical and theological. It asks what it means to be human and explores that question through theological anthropology: human beings as creatures made in the image of God, as finite and fallen, as redeemed in Christ, and as open to a future fulfillment beyond the limits of history.
Second, it is an educational and formational project. Christian humanism has long been concerned with the cultivation of wisdom, virtue, and good judgment. This is the world of paideia, Bildung, the liberal arts, and humanitas—traditions of education aimed not simply at producing workers or consumers but at cultivating humane persons capable of living well with others. This aspect of Christian humanism has taken the institutional form of schools and universities.
Third, Christian humanism is a civic and political project. Because every person possesses dignity, political and economic life must be ordered in ways that resist domination, corruption, and dehumanization. This tradition therefore has helped shape ideas and institutions that have fostered equality, liberty, civic participation, and democracy.
Fourth, Christian humanism is an aesthetic project. It asks how art, literature, music, and other types of cultural production reveal the drama and dignity of human life. Portraiture, the novel, poetry, spirituals, classical music, and everyday practices of cultural creation all become ways of exploring what it means to be human. As an artistic enterprise, Christian humanism holds that humans are not reducible to rational or economic calculators; they are imaginative, desiring, meaning-making beings who shape and reshape culture through their longing for beauty, truth, and belonging.
Finally, Christian humanism is a scholarly project. The great humanist traditions of learning were never simply about technique or method. Scholarship was understood as serving moral, civic, and spiritual formation through enriching our shared scientific and intellectual life. Figures such as Erasmus exemplify this ideal of learning in service of human flourishing.
This interconnected set of projects should not be seen as a solely Western or European development. In its early modern form, it emerged in response to the encounter with the New World and was taken up around the world. Think of the indigenous Quechua theologian Guamán Poma writing his one-thousand-page treatise, The First New Chronicle and Good Government, around 1615, or the formerly enslaved African Olaudah Equiano writing his spiritual autobiography and abolitionist treatise in 1789. Think of Sojourner Truth campaigning to end slavery in the nineteenth century, or of John Wu advocating for Christian humanism in China in the twentieth century.
Taken together, these strands form a rich vision of the human person across space and time: relational rather than isolated, dignified rather than instrumentalized, formed through love, and always open to transcendence.
Enemies of Christian Humanism
Christian humanism stands in sharp contrast to several dominant ways of understanding what it means to be human—ways of thinking that shape much of our contemporary cultural and political landscape, but also have deep roots in the modern period. These alternatives appear across the political spectrum, taking both progressive and reactionary forms. A diminished and reductive account of the human person underlies them all.
The first alternative is radical individualism, or libertarianism, in which an autonomous, self-sufficient Homo economicus, whose flourishing consists of a consumer lifestyle and material wealth, embodies choice, power, and achievement. Shared traditions, institutions, and forms of common life are irrelevant, ignored, or seen as restrictive rather than enabling. What matters most is the sovereign self: my choices, my desires, my self-definition. If humanity is thus defined, what happens to the elderly person who has forgotten everything, or the refugee with no status? What about the unborn, or the one who is no longer economically productive or never will be? Are they less human? Christian humanism answers no.
Instead, Christian humanism argues that we do not become fully human alone. While still seeing the value of modern concerns for liberty and freedom of conscience, it affirms that human beings are relational creatures formed through families, communities, traditions, shared responsibilities, and relationships of care. Freedom detached from solidarity and forms of thick association breeds not just loneliness but deaths of despair, not just distrust but a society devouring itself.
The second alternative is what we might call identitarianism. By this I mean the belief that human identity is fundamentally determined by belonging to a particular ethnic, cultural, or national group. In this view, we become organized around closed circles of belonging: insiders and outsiders, friends and enemies, those who authentically belong and those who don’t. It takes the form of the family, faith, and flag identitarianism on the right and the gender, sexuality, and race identitarianism on the left.
On both left and right, this identitarianism often leads to the idea that human flourishing depends primarily on the recognition and expression of one’s group identity. If that identity is denied, then one’s humanity itself is understood to be violated. Christian humanism resists this way of thinking. We are creatures with multiple loyalties—to family, to congregation, to nation, to vocation—and these crosscut and often contradict each other. Christian humanism refuses the idea that humans can be reduced to a single inherited or ascribed identity. Such a view turns culture into destiny and denies the possibility of solidarity across deep differences.
The third alternative is determinism, which posits that human beings are ultimately reducible to impersonal forces, whether biological, economic, technological, historical, or evolutionary. In different forms, this outlook appears in scientific materialism, confessional forms of Darwinism, strands of Marxism, fascism, and some contemporary forms of post-humanism. The common thread is the belief that freedom, moral responsibility, and creativity are largely illusions. Human beings become products of systems, structures, instincts, or material conditions. Justice gives way to power. Human life is interpreted primarily through either domination and survival or the efficient and effective administration of biological and psychological processes.
Christian humanism rejects this reduction of persons to mechanisms or historical processes. It insists that human beings are neither programmable matter nor expressions of collective forces. People possess agency, moral depth, creativity, and the capacity for change and transformation.
Tragically, Christians have given weight to and baptized each of these alternatives—whether radical individualism, identitarianism, determinism, or a combination of the three. Large sections of the church identify their faith with policies and practices that institutionalize cruelty toward the stranger and contempt for the poor and promote the dismantling of the very institutions of social care their forebears founded. In the process, core Christian doctrines are twisted and deformed beyond recognition, with Jesus remade into a tribal god and love of neighbour labelled as “toxic empathy.”
In this world of shattered mirrors and lacerating distortions of the image of God, Christian humanism offers a path out.
The Image of God, Institutions, and Agency
If we follow a Christian humanist vision of what it means to be human, then institutions are not merely mechanisms for administrative efficiency or for making money. They are means through which we realize our shared humanity. The image of God is not fully expressed in isolation but in common life, in forms of covenantal fellowship (or koinonia).
Our hospitals, schools, and businesses are not just systems. They are, at least potentially, schools of mutual recognition, participation, and contribution through which we cultivate the common life that enables us to realize who we are as persons through relationship with each other, over time, and at different scales. This is a vision of institutions not merely as places of production but also as places of shared flourishing and realizing our personhood.
Good institutions do not simply act on people. They enable people to act with and for each other. They distribute agency rather than centralize it. They cultivate participation rather than compliance. In doing so, they create the conditions under which human beings can genuinely flourish through free, mutually responsible relationships with others. The challenge before us is to foster institutions that are genuinely agency-centred. What the Catholic social critic Ivan Illich calls “convivial institutions” widen the circle of decision-making, distribute power, share knowledge, and, rather than privileging only credentialed expertise, recognize multiple forms of wisdom and experience. They thereby enhance and enable shared human agency.
We already see examples of this kind of convivial institutional life around us, some historical and others just emerging. They are forms of the understory, teeming with life yet largely illegible from the perspective of the canopy. To name but a few: broad-based community organizing exemplified in the work of the Industrial Areas Foundation; credit unions; hospices; recovery spirituality and rehab communities of various stripes; worker cooperatives; the classical school and micro-school movement; mutual aid networks; participatory budgeting; primary health-care co-production initiatives; community land trusts; the digital commons; community gardens; and social enterprises rooted in local participation.
Across these exercises in co-production and co-governance, the goal is ownership not in the capitalist sense of possession and control but in the democratic sense: people having a real hand and voice in shaping the social and material worlds they inhabit. What we need is the creation of more convivial institutions such as these, particularly around emerging technologies like AI. Such institutions matter because, through participation in them, people do not simply change the world—they themselves are changed. They grow into forms of responsibility, solidarity, and shared action through which their personhood is realized and deepened.
This connection between agency, participation, and human flourishing is why Christian humanism has so often advocated for participatory forms of democracy as the antidote and alternative to authoritarianism. The theological conviction that human beings are relational creatures, created for communion with God, neighbour, and the wider creation, leads Christian humanists like Jacques Maritain and Karl Barth to link faithful witness to participatory democratic life. If human beings are created for relationship, mutual responsibility, and the shared tending of creation, then social and political institutions should reflect and nurture those capacities.
To be made in the image of the Triune God is to be made for participation, relation, and shared life. And to follow Christ is not simply to await salvation in some distant future but to begin participating here and now in forms of common life marked by justice, generosity, and mutual care. Accordingly, democratic participation is not merely politically useful; it is morally and spiritually formative. Through participating in shared decision-making, shared action, and practices of solidarity, we begin to realize something of our vocation as human beings created for communion rather than domination.
To be made in the image of the Triune God is to be made for participation, relation, and shared life.
From this perspective, democracy is not merely a mechanism for selecting governments. It is a moral and spiritual practice through which people learn to live together as free and responsible persons. Participatory forms of democracy and their institutional embodiment are a vital way of responding to the contemporary crisis of agency, in which our societies are struggling with the destructive effects of unregulated markets, technological disruption, ecological breakdown, widening inequality, and the profound loss of agency these generate.
The economic historian Karl Polanyi observes in his 1944 classic The Great Transformation that such moments like ours inevitably generate “counter-movements”: collective attempts to counter the destructive effects of the unchecked impersonal forces of capitalism and technology. Some of these counter-movements become authoritarian. Fascism is one historical example; contemporary forms of authoritarian populism provide another. In such movements, people seek to recover agency by concentrating power in a single leader who promises to rescue “the people” from chaos and disorder. Other counter-movements, however, take democratic form. Labour, environmental, and civil rights movements all represent efforts to reclaim agency through shared action, and each has generated forms of participatory institutions.
However sharply they diverge, both authoritarian and democratic responses arise from the same crisis: the feeling that ordinary people no longer have meaningful control over the conditions of their lives. Authoritarian movements concentrate agency in the hands of the one, the few, or the party. Democratic movements seek to distribute agency more widely and cultivate what community organizers call “relational power,” the power generated when people act together for shared purposes.
This brings us back to why participatory, small-d forms of democracy and Christian humanism go together. Participatory democracy honours the dignity of each person precisely by enabling people to contribute to shaping their common life. Rather than being passive recipients of decisions made by distant elites, markets, bureaucracies, or algorithms, people become active participants in forming the worlds they inhabit together.
Democracy is therefore not first about elections, party competition, or constitutional procedures. These are but the mechanisms of the system. At its deepest level, democracy is sustained by social practices through which people exercise agency together. Democracy, in this sense, is fundamentally a practice of neighbouring. It is one of the ways we discover our shared humanity across differences of class, culture, race, religion, and ideological conviction.
Because it depends on relationship, dialogue, and reciprocal recognition, democracy as a social practice is inherently opposed to violence. Violence destroys the conditions under which shared worlds can be built. Beatings, torture, terror, intimidation, and state repression all shatter the trust and communicative bonds that make a genuinely common life possible. By contrast, participatory democracy bears witness to a deep theological truth that solidarity across difference is possible, because human beings are already bound together in relations of mutual dependence and shared creatureliness in and through Christ.
Christian humanism offers a radically different vision of the future from one driven by capital accumulation, technological advances, and social control. It points instead toward forms of economic, political, and cultural life that deepen human agency, strengthen solidarity, and cultivate ecological mutuality. At its heart lies a simple but demanding conviction: Human beings become most fully themselves not through domination, isolation, or consumption but through participation in a just and generous common life.
In Christian terms, such a life bears witness—even now—to the work of the Holy Spirit. It forms a people out of fragmentation, cultivating communion where there was alienation, and enabling strangers to become neighbours. For what Christian humanism advocates is not just an idea. It is an invitation to become more fully human by learning to see, love, and live like Christ.
