You Are What You Love

What You Are What You Love is

You Are What You Love is a short trade book — about 200 pages — built around a single thesis: that human beings are fundamentally lovers before they are thinkers, and that what we love is shaped over time by habits and rituals Smith calls "liturgies." Worship, on this account, is not first about transmitting ideas; it is about aiming the heart. The book moves from that claim through chapters on what Smith calls "secular liturgies" (the mall, the smartphone, the stadium, the university), then turns to Christian worship, the family, education, and vocation as sites where the heart gets re-formed toward God.

It is positioned as the accessible version of Smith’s academic "Cultural Liturgies" trilogy — Desiring the Kingdom, Imagining the Kingdom, and Awaiting the King — which made the same argument at far greater length and with full philosophical apparatus. Smith writes from a Reformed background and taught philosophy for years at Calvin University, but the book’s core sources are Augustine and the historic liturgical tradition of the wider church, and he writes for any reader inside the Christian tradition who wants to understand why formation works the way it does.

Why the “you are what you love” lens broke through

The single biggest reason this book traveled where the academic volumes did not is its central reframe, stated in a single accessible sentence: the most important question is not "what do you think?" but "what do you want?" Most discipleship, Smith argues, has operated as if people were "brains-on-a-stick" — as if changing what someone believes would automatically change how they live. The book’s contribution is to insist that this gets the human person backwards. We are shaped from the bottom up, by what we do repeatedly and love habitually, long before our stated beliefs catch up. That claim is intuitive enough to grasp in a paragraph and unsettling enough to chew on for years.

The other piece is Smith’s diagnostic eye for the ordinary. He reads the shopping mall, the smartphone, and the sports stadium as "liturgies" — rituals that, whether or not anyone intends them to, are training our desires toward a particular vision of the good life. He reads the thoughtful Christian’s daily routine the same way. The triplet runs underneath the whole book: you are not primarily what you think. You are not primarily what you say you believe. You are what you love — and what you love is being formed all day long, by something.

The thesis: you are what you love, not what you think

The structural argument of the book is that the human person is, at the deepest level, a lover rather than a thinker — that we are oriented toward some vision of "the good life" by our desires before we ever reason about it. Smith draws this directly from Augustine, whose claim that the heart is restless until it rests in God runs underneath every chapter. On this account, to be human is to be aimed at something; the only question is what. And because our aim is set by what we love rather than what we merely know, simply giving people more correct information rarely re-aims them. The will follows the heart, and the heart follows habit.

This is the move that reorganizes everything else in the book. If people are formed by what they love, then discipleship cannot be primarily a matter of downloading the right beliefs — it has to involve retraining the desires themselves. Smith is careful not to dismiss the intellect; he is a philosopher, and he insists that belief still matters. But he argues that belief sits downstream of love, and that any account of Christian formation that skips the heart and aims only at the head will keep producing people who know all the right answers and live by other loves entirely. Readers across traditions tend to report this as the chapter that rearranged how they think about their own faith.

Secular liturgies: the mall, the phone, and the stadium as temples

The most-quoted section of the book is Smith’s extended reading of the shopping mall as a kind of religious site. He walks the reader through it deliberately, as an anthropologist might describe a temple: the grand architecture, the icons in the windows, the priestly sales associates, the ritual of acquisition that promises a fuller self on the other side of a purchase. The point is not that shopping is uniquely sinful. The point is that the mall is a "liturgy" — a set of repeated practices that, working on us below the level of conscious thought, trains us to want a particular vision of the good life. He extends the same analysis to the smartphone, the stadium, and the modern university.

This sounds like a small thing — calling a mall a temple. In practice it is the part of the book that does the most work on readers, because it makes a claim that is hard to unsee once stated: that we are being "discipled" constantly, by institutions and devices that never announce themselves as formative. The argument is descriptive rather than scolding; Smith is not handing out a list of forbidden places. He is asking the reader to notice that their loves are being shaped whether or not they consent, and that noticing is the first step toward choosing which liturgies get to do the shaping.

Counter-formation: worship, family, and vocation as re-forming practices

The back half of the book turns from diagnosis to counter-formation: if secular liturgies are aiming the heart away from God, what re-aims it? Smith’s answer is the historic practices of Christian worship, together with the formative habits of the home, the school, and the workplace. He reads the elements of a worship service — gathering, confession, Scripture, table, sending — as a counter-liturgy that, repeated over years, slowly retrains desire toward God and neighbor. He then carries the same logic into family rhythms, into how schools form students, and into how the routines of a job shape a worker’s vision of the good.

It is worth naming plainly that the worship Smith holds up as formative is the historic, structured liturgical tradition, and that this lands differently across the Christian landscape. In liturgical traditions — where a set order of service, the church calendar, and sacramental practice are already central — much of what Smith describes is simply the existing furniture, freshly explained. In low-church and non-liturgical traditions, where worship is shaped more spontaneously, the practices he praises are less familiar and the chapters read more as an invitation than a description. Smith presents the case as a recovery of something the wider church has long held; how natural that recovery feels will depend a good deal on where the reader already worships.

Pricing

Where You Are What You Love falls behind

More diagnosis than program. Smith is exceptional at naming how formation works and why information alone fails to change us. He is lighter on a concrete, step-by-step rule for re-forming your own loves day to day. The book leaves you convinced your habits are forming you and wanting a clearer plan for what to do about it on Monday morning — a plan it gestures at more than it spells out.

It popularizes a dense project. By design, this is the trade-edition distillation of Smith’s three-volume Cultural Liturgies work. That makes it accessible, but it also means specialists, students, and readers who want the full philosophical argument — the engagement with Heidegger, Bourdieu, and Merleau-Ponty, the full citations — will find this version deliberately streamlined and need to go to Desiring the Kingdom and its sequels for the complete case.

The liturgical emphasis is tradition-dependent. The worship practices Smith holds up as counter-formative are the historic, structured liturgical ones, and that emphasis is more native to some traditions than others. Readers in liturgical churches will recognize the furniture; readers in low-church or non-liturgical settings may find parts of the back half describing practices that are not part of their week, so the chapters land more as invitation than description.

Some repetition. The central thesis — you are what you love, and your loves are trained by habit — is compelling, and Smith returns to it often. For some readers that repetition is reinforcement; for others, particularly those who grasped the point in the first chapter, the restatements across later chapters can feel like the argument circling ground it has already covered.

You Are What You Love vs. How (Not) to Be Secular vs. The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry

These three sit near each other on the shelf but do different jobs. You Are What You Love (Smith, 2016) is the popular thesis on formation — it argues that habits and liturgies aim our loves, and reframes discipleship around desire rather than information. How (Not) to Be Secular (Smith, 2014) is Smith’s accessible guide to philosopher Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age — it explains the cultural conditions of belief and doubt in the modern West, and is a diagnosis of the age rather than a formation handbook. The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry (John Mark Comer, 2019) is the practice-forward cousin — it names hurry as corrosive to formation and offers concrete habits to slow down.

Different strengths. You Are What You Love is the best at the underlying theory of how anyone is formed at all. How (Not) to Be Secular is the best at explaining why belief feels different now than it did five centuries ago. The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry is the best at handing the reader something specific to do this week. Smith is the more philosophical writer of the two authors; Comer is the more pastoral and practice-driven.

How to sequence them: read You Are What You Love if you want to understand why your habits, not just your beliefs, are shaping you. Add How (Not) to Be Secular if you want the wider cultural backdrop that makes faith contested in the first place. Add The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry if you have the diagnosis and now want a concrete on-ramp. The two Smith books are designed to live on the same shelf; Comer’s is the one that turns the theory into a Tuesday-evening practice.

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