American democracy will soon mark its 250th year, and the moment arrives with a question that cannot be avoided: What becomes of ordered liberty when the human person is recast as data?
I recently received an invitation to present at the Journal for Interdisciplinary Studies Symposium 2026, The Future of Democracy: Renewing Ordered Liberty. The paper I will deliver, “Democracy After Datafication: Personhood and the Renewal of Ordered Liberty,” grows out of my current work in law, public policy, and theological anthropology.
The central concern is straightforward. Modern systems extract, analyze, and trade identity data through biometric markers, genetic signatures, health records, and behavioral inference. This environment treats the human person as informational material rather than embodied dignity. Such a framework contradicts the moral vision that shaped the American experiment, which assumed that civic agency rests on the worth of the person created in the image of God.
My argument proposes a federal legislative model that safeguards identity data as a non-alienable extension of the person. The framework establishes meaningful consent, reinforces dignity-based privacy protections, limits identity inference in artificial intelligence systems, and aligns with constitutional principles as well as comparative models such as the GDPR. The goal is to restore trust in democratic institutions by grounding data governance in the intrinsic worth of the human being.
The symposium theme, renewing ordered liberty, points toward a deeper truth. No democracy flourishes without a moral horizon that honors the value of the human person. The imago Dei provides that horizon. This presentation offers a way forward for policymakers, scholars, and citizens committed to preserving human agency in a society shaped by rapid technological power.
I look forward to sharing this work with the JIS community and contributing to the larger conversation on democracy’s future.