“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.” —1 Corinthians 12:12
In one of my last reflections, I wrote about what it means to live not by lies in a culture that rewards comfortable deception. I used the phrase secondhand souls—people who live on borrowed convictions, repeating tribal outrage instead of cultivating firsthand discernment.
But secondhand souls don’t just appear. They are made. And to see how, we need to return to C.S. Lewis’s prophetic warning about men without chests—and forward to Paul’s vision of the body of Christ.
Lewis’s Diagnosis: Hollowed-Out Humanity
In The Abolition of Man, Lewis warned that modern education was creating “men without chests.” The head—our capacity for reason—remained intact. The stomach—our appetite and emotion—was still active. But the chest—the seat of rightly ordered loves, moral courage, and virtue—was missing.
And here’s the devastating result: a body without a chest isn’t just weak. It’s a corpse.
A corpse can be dressed up, but it cannot breathe.
A corpse can be manipulated, but it cannot move itself.
A corpse can be paraded in public, but it cannot sustain life.
Maybe you have seen the comedy—Weekend at Bernie’s—where two men spend an entire weekend propping up a dead body, dressing it up, moving its arms, trying desperately to convince everyone that Bernie is still alive. It’s absurd. Funny and at times exhausting.
That’s what happens when virtue collapses in a culture—or in a church. We’re left with bodies that look alive but are hollow inside, propped up by borrowed convictions, animated by others’ outrage, desperately trying to appear vital while being spiritually dead.
And what do corpses attract? Things that feed on decay. Parasites. Algorithms. Those who profit from death.
This is the world we’ve built with the media we consume. Every outrage headline, every algorithm designed to reward contempt, every post celebrating the demise of those we’ve labeled as “other”—these are not signs of life. They are the scavengers circling what’s already dead.
Lewis saw it coming: clever minds and passionate appetites, severed from moral formation, become easy tools for manipulation. Paul saw it too: “tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine” (Eph. 4:14). Both diagnoses point to the same reality: when the chest is gone, the body doesn’t just falter—it decays.
The Generational Inheritance
On our social media platforms: many people don’t speak with conviction—they echo the noise they’ve consumed. That isn’t discernment. It’s mimicry. Secondhand souls mistaking destruction for virtue.
This is exactly what secondhand souls are: people borrowing the language of virtue while missing its substance entirely. They’ve learned to mimic compassion while practicing cruelty, to echo justice while celebrating injustice—as long as it serves their tribe. It’s the gap between professed values and actual behavior, the dissonance between what we claim to stand for and how we actually treat those we disagree with.
The tragedy is generational. Corpses don’t hand down life—they hand down decay.
The last century handed down relativism: “your truth is your truth.” This present age is handing down tribalism: “defend your side at all costs.” And already, the air our children breathe is outrage in place of discernment, slogans in place of Scripture, performance in place of virtue.
What will the next generation say? What banner will they raise? Will it be one of resurrection—or one more anthem of decay?
Moses stood before Israel and named the choice: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and love the Lord your God” (Deut. 30:19–20).
That choice is still before us. When one generation refuses formation, the next does not inherit soil for growth—it inherits scorched ground. Outrage becomes the inheritance; discernment becomes extinct. Roots are abandoned, and rot takes their place.
Paul’s Vision: The Living Body
But Paul offers a different vision. In 1 Corinthians 12, the church is not a corpse but a body, not a tribe but a family, not hollow but alive.
The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you.” The head cannot despise the feet. The weaker parts are indispensable, and all must be honored.
This is what a culture with a chest looks like: a body that breathes, loves, and sustains life. A body animated by the Spirit, where truth and love circulate like blood and order every member under Christ the Head.
Without this, we collapse into rival tribes, each convinced of our own righteousness while devouring one another. In other words, we become secondhand souls mistaking destruction for virtue.
The Stalwart Path
Lewis diagnosed the hollow man. Paul prescribes the living body. The question is whether we will remain a corpse culture, feeding on decay, or become once again the Body of Christ, animated by love.
Secondhand souls will not stand. Men without chests will not endure. Rival tribes will not heal.
But the body of Christ—formed in truth, bound by love, ordered under the Spirit—can. That is the stalwart path. That is how we live not by lies but by the truth that sets us free.
The world will always be full of lies and rival tribes. Let them come. Let them even reign. But let them not reign through us.
Instead, let the body of Christ stand stalwart—breathing with His Spirit, ordered under His head, unshaken in love, alive in truth.