Carl Trueman’s magnificent volume has been my first read of 2021. I found it spellbinding, though it would be hard to say in a pleasant way.

The tale Trueman tells of how we arrived at our present cultural and political moment is encapsulated in his simple summary: first the self is psychologised, then the psychological is sexualised, and finally the sexual is politicised.

To tell his story, Trueman makes particular use of the concepts of Charles Taylor (expressive individualism), Alistair MacIntyre (emotivism) and Philip Rieff (sacral order, third world, pyschological man, and deathworks). All of these seem to me to have potency in getting a grip on the vast changes that have taken place in the social imaginaries (another Taylor concept) that we now inhabit.

The first stage is the domain of Rousseau. The inner psychological life becomes the foundation of the real identity of the person. Society, culture, institutions, tradition are all things from which the self needs to be freed in order to be authentically realised. The agenda of the Romantics was to transform the values of society through their art, to pull down the social constraints on our natural humanity, of which foremost were religion and sexual morality.

But while in Rousseau the idea of a shared human nature remained, the combination of Nietzsche, Marx and Darwin that followed soon obliterated it. Nietzsche presses unflinchingly the consequences of the death of God: human nature must go too. There is no transcendent, and so no transcendent category of humanity or human dignity. Humans are free to create themselves and seek their own meaning, and must unlearn the moral framework of Christianity, which shorn of its metaphysical underpinnings is exposed merely as a manipulative power grab. Marx thoroughly subordinates human nature (such as it is in his thinking) to his materialist dialectic of history: human nature is an ever-changing thing, being determined by the particular economic and technological conditions of the age (presciently forecasting the diminution and eventual eradication of the differences between the sexes as means of production). And Darwin makes materialism believable, even eventually the default position, by eliminating the need for a divine designer.

The second stage is “the move from understanding sex as an activity to seeing it as absolutely fundamental to our identity” (202). Freud is the key figure: though his theories may now be scientifically discredited, they gave a plausibility to his central argument that “human beings are at core sexual” (221) and that human fulfilment and happiness is therefore also primarily a matter of sexual fulfilment and happiness.

The final move is the combination of Marx and Freud by the thinkers of the New Left. Identity has been made psychological, psychology sexual, and now identity is made political; and hence in these thinkers transforming society politically means transforming it sexually.

The final section traces some of the results of these shifts in modern phenomena such as the pornification of culture, the legalisation of same-sex marriage and most recently the ascendancy of the transgender movement.

Painful yet encouraging

I found the book both painful and yet oddly encouraging. On the one hand, Trueman’s account demonstrates abundantly that the recent shifts in popular opinion on sexual morality, though they have seemed stunningly fast to us who have lived through them, are the fruition of a centuries-long process. That is not to say they were inevitable, but the roots go very deep indeed. They will not be reversed swiftly by either media messaging or politics. They are here to stay for the foreseeable future, and the pressure to conform will likely only increase.

And yet, the foundation of the new order is inherently unstable. Nietzsche saw it like precious few have dared to; to kill God is to wipe away the horizon. Once marriage is redefined around pyschological satisfaction, and sexual ethics becomes solely a question of consent, taboos around polygamy and incest have their justifications removed (beyond perilously arbitrary aesthetic ones). The conflict within the LGBT+ movement around the notion of transgender demonstrates such instabilities.

We cannot triumph over the wreckage that results when these instabilities cause collapse, for they are disasters that involve people. But they are proof to us that a claim to a transcendent foundation upon which to build both the lives of individuals and the shared life of society is not a luxury.

The response of the church can only be as it ever should have been: to preach and to teach the gospel from the Scriptures, and to live as a community and as people who find their identity (rather than construct it) in the account it gives of the order and the end of the world and the history in which we find ourselves.

I take Carl Trueman’s book though as a reminder that our goal together as churches has to be to form a counter social imaginary. More than just teaching a worldview, it is to shape the rhythms, practices, the stories, the imagination of ourselves and of our children. And of course, Scripture in all its manifold variety of genres and styles does just that. But it can’t be done in a thin community, the kind of church commitment that extends to Sunday morning alone (on weeks when that’s convenient). It requires deeply shared life; but that is a whole other subject.

What is to be done in response is therefore not easy, nor does it promise instant and widespread results. But it is not unknown.