Carl Trueman’s latest exploration of what our abandonment of God is doing to our humanity may sound familiar, but it will be news to his new, larger, and secular audience.
Carl Trueman is a prophet of late modernity. Not a prophet in the predictive sense but in the biblical sense: one called to remind Israel of who their God is and why their only hope of flourishing lies within, rather than without, the covenant He made with them. In The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity, Trueman establishes the stakes of modernity’s rejection of God.
Trueman has crafted The Desecration of Man with academic clarity, yet the book remains highly approachable for the non-academic reader. His previous two books were aimed at two different audiences: The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (2020) was written for professors, while 2022’s Strange New World was a version of Rise for Christian laymen. In Desecration, Trueman has written a philosophically nuanced book for the secular reader. He frames his argument in stark terms: “We can be Nietzscheans or we can be Christians. There is no stable third option. We must choose today whom we will follow: Christianity’s Messiah or Nietzsche’s Madman. All else is nihilism.” Trueman defines his terms, offers examples, and builds a careful argument.
He begins with modernity, by which Trueman means the contemporary post-WWII global order, as a culture centered not on the sacred but on the process of “desecration,” which implies “the intentional abuse or destruction of something holy, something of more than ordinary significance.” What is sacred within a culture shapes the people’s vision of human nature. Trueman explores Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultures to show that at their center lies a conception of human dignity related to God. Modernity is defined by the death of God and replacement of him with a technologized approach to conquering nature; instead of living in light of the imago Dei, modern man forms himself as an “expressive individual” through courageous acts of desecration.
If the problem in our society is not one between conservatives and progressives but between different kinds of desecreter, then the issue so many conservatives are worried about—the future of Western civilization—becomes immediately more complicated. How does one “save” Western civilization when one plays by essentially the same rules of desecration as those who are accused of trying to destroy it?
Trueman offers desecration as a way of distinguishing realities currently obscured by ambiguous terms: Rather than “left/right” or “liberal/conservative,” American politics can be measured by how far a party is willing to go in desecration.
To the idea of desecration Trueman adds Phillip Rieff’s concept of the deathwork. “A deathwork is a cultural assault on the sacred when the culture itself has lost its foundations and stability.” (Rieff is a difficult but important 20th-century Jewish thinker; see this volume for a helpful introduction to his work.) Trueman offers the painting Piss Christ as an example of a deathwork. Rather than art conveying culture, it is an assault on the sacred. A culture filled with deathworks is a culture lacking a center; rather than affirmation, such a culture is filled with the “spirit of negation.” Trueman argues that in pursuit of freedom from nature, freedom from God, and freedom to form an autonomous self, modernity has rejected everything sacred and written a narrative of the courageous transgressor forging anew what it means to be human.
Having established his theoretical foundations, Trueman proceeds to demonstrate desecration in three areas key to Jewish, Christian, and Islamic conceptions of what it means to be human: sex, birth, and death. “Desecration of all that was once considered holy became a hallmark of that authenticity that expressive individualism craved.”
In his considerations of the sexual revolution, for example, Trueman writes:
And yet, for all of the sexual revolution’s success, there is nowhere that the dehumanizing aspect of modernity’s desecration can be seen more dramatically. For at the heart of the sexual revolution lies a problem. It asserts that the destruction of old sexual codes—codes based on religious promises and a view of sex as sacred—is the path to liberation. But in practice it has turned us all into objects and things that exist merely for the benefit—for the sexual pleasure—of others.
He then examines how IVF and surrogacy shape the imagination, making it conceptually possible to consider children a commodity that can be custom made (thus opening the mental space for eugenics). Technology shifts the social imaginary for parenthood. Trueman clarifies that he is not condemning in- or sub-fertile couples who reach for these technologies; instead, “As with infertile couples, the question is … whether the underlying shifts in the way society thinks about children are ultimately dehumanizing.” Trueman argues that “we fool ourselves if we believe the death of God has indeed freed us from a sacred order. On the contrary, it has merely subjected us to a new one, one that is overseen by a different priesthood: the scientists who have mastery over reproductive technology.” Trueman echoes C.S. Lewis’s argument in The Abolition of Man: Attempts to free oneself from human nature result in enslavement.
Trueman’s chapter on death explains the efforts made by influential forces in the culture (celebrities, politicians, churches) to separate the living from encountering those near death. “If there is a specter haunting the modern Western world and the modern expressive individual it is that of our own mortality.” This chapter offers Trueman space to reflect on Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program, AI bots of the dead, transhumanists, and celebrities who use their wealth to prevent signs of aging. “We denizens of modernity are increasingly engaged in an explicit, intentional, and total war against human nature, specifically embodied, mortal human nature.” Death is natural, but the modern impulse is to use technology to overcome it as if it were unnatural.
Trueman’s solution is perfectly fitted to his diagnosis. If desecration is the problem, consecration is the solution. It is here that Trueman abandons his attempt at showing a unity between the Abrahamic faiths and makes clear his Christian allegiance: Consecration comes from a strong church rooted in historic Christian doctrines and practices. Trueman establishes a threefold framework: creed, cult, and code. Consecration, recentering the cultural imagination on God, can only happen when these three are fully embraced. Churches need to proclaim and believe the creedal nature of Christianity, practice the embodied cultic rituals of the faith, and live their public communal lives in accordance with the code of Christian ethics.
This triplet [of creed, cult, and code] is significant because all three elements are interconnected and cannot be practically isolated from each other without significant loss. To lose the creed is to lose Christian truth. To lose cult is to lose the actualization of God’s relationship with his people. To lose code is to lose the Christian ethic that ties God’s people to each other and to those around them, and shapes those relationships.
Nothing less than the full truth and practice of Christianity will result in consecration.
The Desecration of Man marks a significant accomplishment for Trueman. For regular readers of Religion and Liberty Online, Desecration offers nuance but little new argument; it is a continuation of the “decline of the West” genre. Echoes of Lewis’s Abolition of Man, Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, Huxley’s Brave New World, Chesterton’s Everlasting Man, and even Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine abound within this volume. Those who have read Trueman’s earlier anti-modernity works will recognize that he is building on previous ideas. What is new is the trajectory of publication. Trueman moved from publishing with Crossway, an evangelical powerhouse, to publishing with Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin—and he did so without sacrificing Christian orthodoxy. His writing has shifted to reflect his new, broader audience, however: Trueman makes use of more pluralistic approaches where he can and restrains his commentary on homosexuality. Yet he retains his prophetic edge and Christian identity even as he makes use of a far larger publisher. Carl Trueman has broken containment, moving from the fishbowl of Christian publishing to the sea of mainstream writing.
It’s in this sense that Trueman recalls the biblical Jonah. Jonah preached his message to covenant Israel, and his reward was to be sent to Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian empire, with a message of doom. “In three days, God will destroy your city.” Something unexpected happened—the people of Nineveh obeyed their king’s command to repent in sackcloth and ashes. And God relented. Trueman’s argument, that a civilization cannot survive without God, is now going forth to a watching, rational, secular world. And just maybe they will read his words and turn to the Living God.
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