Mine, Not Yours: Christianity Against the Open Borders Age

Why recovering boundaries, borders, and personal responsibility is essential for Christian maturity and national survival.

There’s a lot of talk in the modern church about individualism. It's corrosive. It damages Christian spirituality. We need more community. Thinkers like Carl Trueman have rightly criticized the dominance of expressive individualism in our age, where the autonomous self reigns supreme.

But the conversation often skips something crucial: an appropriate sense of individuality.

What I mean is that Christian spirituality has largely failed to teach people how to develop a mature and biblical sense of personal responsibility. We’ve confused the word “mine” with selfishness. Kids are discouraged from saying “mine,” and we tell them to share but we rarely teach them how to take ownership, to care for what’s been entrusted to them, to differentiate between what belongs to them and what doesn’t.

This instinct, to erase boundaries in favor of an imagined universal community, has become foundational to how many Christians think about not just the self, but about marriage, church membership, economics, and even national borders.

The Error of Enmeshment

In our rush to avoid radical individualism, we’ve overcorrected. What we’ve embraced instead is enmeshment. We’ve lost any healthy understanding of boundaries. In psychological terms, enmeshment is when one person’s identity is so entangled with another’s that they can’t tell where they end and the other begins. It’s often called codependency. Theologically, it’s a form of idolatry.

The healthy alternative is differentiation—a concept that has implications for everything from church life to political borders. Differentiation means I know who I am, I take responsibility for what’s mine, and I still relate to others without losing myself.

Take church membership. Today, it’s common for Christians to avoid formal membership because it feels too controlling or exclusive. But church membership is just a biblical boundary. It's saying: “This is my church. These are my elders. These are my people.” If you don’t know how to say “mine” in a local church, you're likely not living out the kind of responsibility Scripture envisions.

The Illusion of Individualism

Modernism promised us a world of self-actualization. “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” But this brand of rugged individualism has led not to strength but to conformism.

Teenagers all dress the same to express their “individuality.” People curate their lives online to show how different they are, just like everyone else. What we’re witnessing isn’t true individuality. It’s enmeshment on a cultural scale. And this confusion between connectedness and conformity is killing our ability to relate to one another as real people.

We’re so bound up in our identities (political, sexual, social) that any disagreement feels like violence. A differing opinion is no longer just an argument; it’s a personal attack. This isn’t individualism. This is the fruit of a borderless world, where no one knows where they end and others begin.

The Borderless Church and State

You see this clearly in our political and ecclesiastical life. Borders, whether theological, relational, or national, are seen as obstacles to love. The borderless church resists church discipline because it a border draws a line. The borderless state has no control over who enters or who belongs. Property is viewed as collective. Doctrine is considered divisive. Even defining gender is seen as oppressive.

But biblically, boundaries are good. God sets boundaries in creation. Marriage has boundaries. The local church has boundaries. Nations have boundaries. And all of this reflects the deeper theological boundary of God's holiness. Without borders, there is no order only chaos.

Abraham Kuyper famously said that there is not a square inch in all of human existence over which Christ does not declare, “Mine.” That declaration implies responsibility. It implies ownership. And if Christ says mine, we must also learn to say it appropriately. Over your home. Over your children. Over your church. Over your country.

Agency and the Image of God

A central piece of this discussion is agency: the biblical idea that human beings are not passive victims but responsible actors. One of the most underdeveloped doctrines in modern evangelicalism is theological anthropology. We don't teach people what it means to be human. We don't teach them what it means to have a will, to make decisions, to take dominion.

This lack of agency is everywhere. A guy won’t ask a girl on a date because he’s “waiting on God.” We baptize passivity as holiness. But biblical faithfulness requires movement. Yes, we pray. Yes, we trust. But we also act. Agency means you can do something about your life. And when you believe you can’t, that’s when anxiety, depression, and despair grow.

Agency also means accountability. You are responsible for your own sins. Christ bore your sins on the cross. Not some collective, amorphous guilt. The gospel is personal, and so is Christian maturity.

This Is Mine

Let’s get practical. It is not unchristian to say: “This is my house. This is my marriage. This is my country. This is my church.” These declarations are not selfish. They are biblical. They are human.

In our church culture today, we’re terrified of anything that smells like exclusivity. We don’t want to offend. So we refuse to draw lines. But love requires lines. Fidelity requires lines. Faithfulness requires that we say “mine.”

Of course, we must say it with Christian charity. We must steward what we’ve been given in love. But stewardship implies responsibility. And responsibility starts with knowing what belongs to you.

Recovering Healthy Individualism

Christianity doesn’t offer communistic collectivism or radical individualism. It offers something far better: a healthy individualism. A person is not just a molecule floating alone, nor are they a cog in a collectivist machine. A Christian is someone who belongs: to Christ, to the church, to a family, to a nation. And because they belong, they are called to take responsibility.

Without this recovery, we will continue to waffle between the extremes of enmeshment and detachment. We’ll fail to disciple people into maturity. We’ll lose our churches to the cultural tide. And we’ll lose our nation to those who are more than willing to say “mine,” even if we’re too embarrassed to.

So say it. Say “mine.” Not because you’re a selfish hoarder of goods or glory. But because God has entrusted you with something worth defending.