The Dark Kenosis of Medical Education

There is an expected kenosis, or “emptying of the self,” and for those who bring a uniquely Christian identity to the profession, there is an understood assignment: forget about the richness of your Christian identity and personhood. This is a dark kenosis, one in which those aspects of one’s personhood that are explicitly of God must be emptied out, leaving only a bio-reductionistic machine that medicine can deploy toward its goals of efficiency, pragmatism, and nihilism. The hidden cultural curriculum of medicine silently, and sometimes not so silently, demands that students forsake their deepest, most treasured personal, moral, and religious commitments, disintegrating their persons in the name of contemporary medicine’s hollow, bio-mechanistic anthropology.