We read previously of a shift in Western thinking from virtues to values. Today we’re going to observe a similar shift, this one from character to personality. We know that man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7). However, there are still traces of the image of God that can be seen in man (I think the term “common grace” applies here), and so I think I am safe in saying that to some degree, man also has looked at the heart, although not exclusively or even primarily. Character, too some degree, has mattered. Integrity has been a marketable characteristic. This is no longer true as it once was, and it is becoming less true as time passes.

What we think of today as the self, a kind of internal center into which all our experiences flow and get sorted out, has been thought about as something separate from character only quite recently. Actually, the self came into prominence only in the twentieth century. Before that time people would have been quite baffled by all of this talk about finding the self, cultivating, esteeming it, realizing, and all the other things we think we are doing to it.
   For centuries we in the West have thought about our consciousness — the self, in contemporary parlance, — only in conjunction with nature and, indeed, with character. This center was thought about in terms of virtues to be learned and desires to denied. These virtues were all sustained by a belief in moral law, be it natural, or revealed in Scripture, of perhaps just generally assumed.

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As the twentieth century dawned, Warren Susman observed in his work Culture as History, the great change was under way. The words that had peppered the advice manuals of an earlier generation, words that came out of a moral world, were disappearing. These were words like “duty,” “golden deeds,” “morals,” “manners,” “honor,” “citizenship,” and “reputation.” But as the new century began, a different set of interests came into view. These were signaled by the prominence in the advice manuals of words like “fascinating,” “stunning,” “attractive,” “glowing,” “masterful,” “creative,” “dominant,” “forceful.” The words most common earlier had been the words or character; these new words were those of personality. Character is not fascinating, glowing, of masterful. By the same token, personality is not dutiful, honorable, of full of golden deeds. Character is good or bad; personality is attractive, forceful, or magnetic.
   Here was a move out of the older moral world, where our internal moral intentions were important, to a different world. This is a psychological world. It is a shift from what is important in itself to how it appears to others. God may judge the heart, but our preoccupation is with the outward appearance that, after all, is what others see. In a society where affluence is important and ethical norms are disappearing, success is paramount and character in not. Our preoccupation, therefore, is how we “come off” before others.

—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 147–148.

So now we live in a day when attractiveness is more important than honesty, and charisma trumps integrity. The value of a person is only skin deep. Yet, while society changes, God does not. He still looks on the heart, and so must we.