It was late 2020 when, suddenly, the confused world I found myself living in began to make a little more sense to me. The reason it all fell into place was Carl Trueman’s masterful cultural analysis, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.
In that book and the popular-level version, Strange New World, Trueman explains how contemporary Western culture has come to define personal identity and demand social conformity through the psychologized and sexualized self—that is, through “expressive individualism.” Put simply, he explains why the modern Western world is the way it is—and why Christians do, and indeed should, feel increasingly out of step with it.
So when I heard about Trueman’s forthcoming book, The Desecration of Man, I was eager to see how he would further develop his anthropological argument. Yet I will also admit to some trepidation. After all, what was left for him to say about the current predicament of mankind that could be articulated nearly as well as what he had already said?
Thankfully, it doesn’t take long for Trueman to reveal the book’s distinctive argument:
I will make the case that desecration is key to understanding the dynamic of modern culture and the anthropological confusion that it embodies. I will argue that the modern notion of man—free and autonomous as demonstrated by his ability to transgress boundaries once considered sacred—has paradoxically reduced him to nothing. In desecrating God, man has ironically desecrated himself.
Where his earlier analysis traced the historical and social forces that led the modern West to idolize the self, this new work invites the reader to gaze upon that same landscape, this time with theological binoculars: Our rejection of God has degraded our own humanity.
As the title suggests, the concept of desecration is central to the book’s argument. According to the author, the stripping away of mystery—disenchantment—fails to explain the anthropological mess we find ourselves in today. The real issue, Trueman asserts, is our compulsion toward desecration, the “intentional abuse or destruction of something holy, something of more than ordinary significance.” Specifically, humankind has desecrated itself.
Chapters 1 and 2 explain how this tragic reality has come about. The human person is an exceptional creature, made alone in God’s image (Gen. 1:27) and tasked with ruling this world under him (Ps. 8). This is our teleology—a term Trueman frequently employs to describe humanity’s ultimate purpose. Yet exceptional though we are, creatures we remain nonetheless, meaning our purpose is given rather than self-determined. Put another way, “human beings are created by God with a given set of dependencies and obligations, limits, and ends” that accord with and facilitate their teleology.
Trueman argues that even as the murder of the Creator was committed during the Enlightenment, we are only now reckoning with the full effects of his death certificate. In killing God, we have each enthroned ourselves as our own gods, and where there is no creator, we are all self-creations. It therefore follows that if modern Western individuals—subjugated to expressive individualism and drunk on the divinity of technology—are to live with any sense of existential integrity, they must transgress any sacred limit and profane any reigning expectation. Their compulsion is to desecrate.
Chapter 3 reveals how humanity turns the horrible into horrific through our overt delight in such a compulsion. The exhilaration of constantly breaking every rule is addictive. It turns the transgressor into the hero, the perpetual self-creator into the almighty. According to Trueman, this is especially powerful within the “cultural officer class”: the educators, the politicians, and the artists (or overpaid Hollywood celebrities) who dictate cultural meaning.
Of course, the tragic irony is that the ideology of desecration is an endless cycle of degradation: “It is not that the old beliefs, values, and practices are overthrown and something new and stable is put in their place. It is that the practice of overthrowing what is—whatever it may be—is itself the project.”
This is evidenced in certain breakdowns between segments of the lesbian, gay, and bisexual population (those who are attracted to their own biological sex) and their queer, transgender, and sexually nontraditional counterparts (those who insist sex is a matter of self-identification rather than biology). Desecration is always ravenous to uproot any norm, even those that were established a mere generation ago.
This has also resulted in the alliance of strange intersectional bedfellows. As Trueman aptly observes, it is not a shared vision of what life should look like that brings Black Lives Matter activists, the queer lobby, and pro-Hamas protesters to march together in New York, London, and Sydney. No, what they share is a commitment to “overthrow what is and demolish what previous generations considered authoritative.”
Of course, as Trueman is quick to show, too many on the political right are equally dedicated to the task of humanity’s desecration: “It is one thing to believe that illegal immigrants should be deported; it is quite another … to rejoice and celebrate the pain and distress of children involved.”
Chapters 4–6 lay out how this project of desecration has played out in the realms of sex, reproductive technology, and death. The sexual revolution promised freedom from bodily and relational limits but has instead turned us into little more than objects for one another’s gratification.
Artificial reproductive technology claimed to conquer infertility but has ultimately divorced procreation and parenthood from biology, redefined what a child is, created a marketplace for babies to be bought and sold, and revived the specter of eugenics. And our refusal to accept death as the final human limit has produced an exploitative antiaging industry and a political system that now determines which lives are worth continuing at what cost and which may be ended upon the submission of the correct application form to the state.
The Desecration of Man is yet another Trueman tour de force. He has again proven himself capable of peering into the heart of society and diagnosing the deadly plague within. This time, however, he also wields a theological scalpel, opening the arteries of our cultural moment and laying bare the deeper pathology that the death of God has wrought upon us all. For that reason alone, this book deserves wide and careful reading. Trueman’s analysis cuts cleanly, and his diagnosis rings true.
We Are Obsessed with Gender
Yet diagnosis is only half the story. What prognosis does Trueman offer? More to the point, what treatment does he prescribe? He is straightforward:
The answer is consecration. … Only by true consecration of man can his desecration be overcome. And that requires a return not simply to the alleged cultural benefits of Christian belief and practice but to actual Christian belief and practice.
Trueman argues that humanity’s desecration cannot be undone by a mere rehabilitation of “cultural Christianity.” Attempting to do so would be like closing open-heart surgery with a Band-Aid. What is needed, he insists, is a return to the actual truth of Christianity itself. The clarity of this proposed remedy, laid out at right at the beginning of the book, raised my expectations for what would follow. Yet as I continued reading The Desecration of Man, I found myself increasingly unsatisfied.
It is not that Trueman says nothing about Christianity’s truth claims. He offers brief summaries of Christian doctrine, cites Scripture and emphasises the place of creed, cult and code in the life of the church. And to be fair to him, he clearly states that “I do not argue in this book for the truth of Christianity. This is not a book of Christian apologetics.” Fair enough: One book can only do so much.
But there is a difference between declining to persuade readers of Christianity’s truth claims and declining to explain the content and significance of those truth claims themselves—especially when you have identified them as necessary for consecration.
Trueman grounds his argument in the imago Dei—humanity made in the image of God. This is the right place to begin. Yet it is not where Christianity’s distinctive claims about human nature and teleology culminate. If humanity’s desecration can only be overcome by the consecration Christianity proclaims, then the person of Jesus Christ—the perfect human—must stand at the center of that claim.
The Incarnation and Resurrection do not merely reaffirm the imago Dei; they fulfill and restore it, revealing both what humanity truly is and what it is destined to become. Yet at this crucial point, Trueman’s argument remains largely implicit. This leaves the careful Christian reader wanting a clearer account of how the gospel itself accomplishes the consecration the author identifies as necessary, and the non-Christian reader without a clear sense of why the gospel alone can provide that remedy.
Indeed, by confining his anthropological argument largely to the imago Dei—without explicitly and extensively bringing the Incarnation and Resurrection to bear upon it—Trueman creates an unintended ambiguity. If the problem is humanity’s failure to live according to the image and design of the Creator, then other monotheistic traditions might seem capable of offering similar solutions.
The reader is therefore left wondering why, as Trueman concludes, “the church is the place where humanity as made in the image of God can be truly realized,” rather than also the synagogue or even the mosque—especially since Trueman himself occasionally enlists all three monotheisms as allied counterpoints to contemporary culture.
Early in the book, Trueman warns that modern culture often confuses “taste for truth.” Because he never fully explains how the gospel uniquely and decisively consecrates a desecrated humanity, some readers may feel that warning rebound upon him. His solution can itself appear to be a matter of personal taste rather than established truth.
Such a reading would blunt the impact of an otherwise excellent book and would be a misrepresentation of what I am confident is Trueman’s conviction that Jesus is the only way, the truth, and the life. But more importantly, it leaves Christian and non-Christian readers alike without an understanding of how the gospel of Jesus Christ alone is able to rescue us from our desecration and consecrate us to eternal life.
In the end, The Desecration of Man is a masterful piece of analysis and social diagnosis well worth reading, even if the theological treatment it prescribes is found wanting.
Danielle Treweek is the author of several books, including Single Ever After: A Biblical Vision for the Significance of Singleness, and the research officer for the Anglican Diocese of Sydney.
The post We Aren’t Just Disenchanted. We Are Desecrated. appeared first on Christianity Today.
