One of the most widely read stories on Christianity Today last week was about the author Gary Chapman. Chapman is the author of the wildly successful book, The Five Love Languages, which has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide since its release in the early 1990s. While Chapman is an evangelical himself, he notes that he wrote Love Languages with a more general audience in mind. He clearly hit his mark as his publisher noted that 2.5 million visitors come to their website every month to take a quiz to help them determine their personal love language.
It’s no secret that people love to use the internet to take quizzes about all types of things. In fact, Buzzfeed built an entire business model on driving traffic to its website by offering hundreds of quizzes on all kinds of subjects while using that ad revenue to power a news division that has broken some of the biggest U.S. stories over the last few years. They even won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021.
In the field of psychology, personality tests have become ubiquitous. Everyone seems to want to know their Myers-Briggs personality type, their Enneagram number, or their top strengths. Often, these results become a connecting mechanism—brought up at dinner conversations, amongst work colleagues, and tweeted out to friends and strangers alike by those looking to find others like themselves. It makes a very easy way to strike up a conversation with others, whether online or in person.
When I was a student at Greenville University, every freshman was asked to take the Strengths Finder assessment. Then throughout the year, our freshman class completed various activities that focused on the theme of our strengths. Once, we attended a dinner where we sat at tables with other students who had the same array of strengths that we did. It was fascinating to hear stories about how other people thought about life in the same way that I did and by the end of the night, I felt I had made authentic connections with those at my table.
While we utilized Gallup’s Strengths Finder at Greenville, on Twitter, it’s clear that as the school season moves into full swing, the Myer-Briggs framework tops the list via social. In just the last week, the acronym “MBTI” appeared nearly ten thousand times per day. The Enneagram, which is incredibly popular in Christian circles, still frequently appears but is not quite as popular, with about 250 mentions per day. The Strengths Finder is a bit less popular, appearing a few dozen times every day.
But the popularity of these personality tests speaks to a bigger trend in the United States—the hunger for a quantified self. Just as people continue to read Chapman’s The Five Love Languages nearly 3 decades after its launch to better understand relationships, they also track how many steps they take each day, or chart their food intake to understand how many calories they are consuming at each meal.
Why do we want to “quantify” ourselves?
It is human nature for people to want to really know themselves, to compare themselves to others, put themselves into graspable categories, make sense of their inner motivations, and know what they are doing that works—and what doesn’t.
Because technology has become so much more sophisticated and convenient, it’s easy and inexpensive to track the inner and outer metrics of our daily lives. In 2019, the New York Times published an essay entitled, “The Surprising Benefits of Relentlessly Auditing Your Life.” In it, the author describes how tracking her sleep gave her a better sense of just how many hours of slumber she needed to operate at peak capacity, and how much personal time she needed to stave off depression. Her focus was improving her life slowly over time using data and by quantifying various aspects of her life, she was empowered to become a better partner, parent, and person.
So when we look back three decades ago to the The Five Love Languages, one could posit that Gary Chapman was the pioneer of the quantified self movement.
His work gave people a framework to understand themselves and others by creating empathy, common language, and a way to measure and compare.
For ministry leaders, it’s crucial to remember that community members are constantly trying to make their lives better. They want to get more sleep, handle their children’s temper tantrums better, and know how to encourage their spouse when they are struggling. Use your platform to share biblically-based advice on how to do each of those things. And consider ways to embrace and iterate the hunger to “know thyself” into your ministry. People are seeking practical ways to be better and anchoring them in Gospel-centered ways to do that will help remind them of the only way to truly find lifelong improvement.