President Trump’s recent executive order not only renamed Lake Ontario to Lake America, but it also changed how millions of Americans remember what the Great Lakes are. HAMES just doesn’t have the same ring to it as HOMES. So far, President Trump has also renamed mountains and military bases, and he even floated renaming the Strait of Hormuz as the “Trump Strait.”
Political renaming is not new, of course, not for either side of the political aisle. As Bill Maher joked in his opening monologue to Real Time, “The liberals… say you can’t just go around changing things to fit your political agenda. . .. Just ask any Latinx birthing person.”
Things are renamed all the time, sometimes to reflect the ideological shifts of a culture and other times to reflect the growing ego of a leader. In recent years, mountains have been renamed and then renamed again, as have streets and holidays and food products and sports teams. More drastic and consequential has been renaming babies as fetuses, men as women, mothers as “birthing persons” and the vast majority of everyone who has ever lived as “cisgender.”
That’s because there is real power in naming things. The more important the thing named, the more consequential the naming is. A name, in other words, is more than a random label. Names frame how things are seen and understood.
This is an arena of thought where a postmodern analysis comes close but ultimately misses. The influential German philosopher Martin Heidegger had a profound impact on how later postmodern philosophers would understand language and reality. He proposed that humans could not really access reality outside of our language. Quite memorably, in an essay titled “Language,” Heidegger wrote:
“In the naming, the things named are called into their thinging. Thinging, they unfold world, in which things abide and so are the abiding ones.”
The postmodernists he influenced took this notion further: that our language does not merely describe reality, it creates reality. Jacques Derrida famously said that “there is nothing beyond the text.” Reality is what we describe.
And, of course, our words are incredibly powerful. What we call things, people or pets tends to stick. Think of how powerful it is to name the day to ourselves as “hard” or “blessed.” What we name our children or nickname our spouse becomes more than a mere identifier for them. It becomes, in a sense, who they are. Perhaps the best example is how a name invented by an oldest grandchild, even an otherwise random sound like “Babo,” becomes what a grandparent is called for the rest of their lives.
What the postmodernists missed is that there is a reality beyond our words. Yes, our words have creative power, but that’s because we are made in the image of God, whose words brought reality into existence. The power of our words reflects, in fact, the order of reality. We name our pets. Our pets do not name us. We name the forests and the lakes and the oceans where animals live, not the other way around.
Naming is prominent throughout Scripture. From the second chapter of Genesis to the second chapter of Revelation, and everywhere in between, naming provides key markers of a person’s journey through life and with God. And there is a profound distinction between what God names and what God tasks His image bearers with naming. Adam was to name the animals, in part as a way of realizing the truth of what God had said about him, that he was alone and that was not good.
Because names matter, we should always take the God-given task of naming seriously. At the same time, we should not think that we can rename reality into something else. We might play our language games, demanding pronouns, calling good “evil” and evil “good,” or denying that there is a real world beyond our words. In the end, it is God’s words that ultimately determine what is, what is good and what is true.
Photo Credit: ©iStock/Getty Images Plus/artisteer
John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and radio host of BreakPoint, a daily national radio program providing thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN), and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.
The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.
BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can’t find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 – 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today’s news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.
