Holding the Cultural Rope

Carl Trueman is a wonderful thinker who has been diligent over the last few years in helping Christians understand how our culture has gotten so woefully out of joint. His book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, was a phenomenal analysis of the historical roots of human thought that led to the astounding transformation we’ve witnessed in our culture over the last thirty years. If you don’t have time to read Trueman’s masterpiece, he also offered a condensed version of the material in his book, Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution. And if you’re just looking for Reader’s Digest version, I did my best to summarize his points in an article titled, “From Sense to Cellar” a few years ago in Salvo magazine.

Trueman’s newest book, The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity, is a fantastic follow-on to the themes he explored in his earlier work. And this time, he brings some practical solutions to Christians who want to do something about it but feel overwhelmed by the spirit of the age.

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One point Trueman makes about these topics is that the changes we see occurring all around us, especially in the area of human sexuality, didn’t come out of nowhere. They’ve been happening slowly for centuries. We just happen to be living at the time when things have started accelerating.

It’s like letting out an anchor on a rope. At first, it’s easy to let it out slowly. But as the anchor drops, the combined weight of the rope and anchor make it drop faster. It’s harder to stop. Then, at some point, it’s impossible. The rope slides through your hands so quickly you lose control.

That’s where our culture is now.

The anchor we’re talking about is a corrupted cultural understanding of what makes us human — and what makes humans valuable. Centuries ago, the world’s greatest thinkers understood human nature as a reflection of the Divine Essence. They called it being “made in the image of God.”

Men like St. Augustine of Hippo wrote about that idea back in the 4th century. Augustine saw himself as a poor reflection of that image — naturally wicked in comparison to his Maker.

In other words, the traditional view was that human nature should be measured with reference to a transcendent, objective good — the nature of God himself. This way of thinking led to what we now know as Western Civilization — the establishment of human rights and dignity, liberty and freedom, and the rule of law.

By the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had turned that model upside down. To Rousseau, “natural man” was essentially good. It was society’s external forces that had corrupted him. As Carl Trueman puts it, Rousseau believed that:

Society and its conventions are the enemy, suppressing desire and perverting the individual in a way that prevents the real, authentic self from being able to express itself.¹

Of course, the enemy Rousseau attacked was a Judeo-Christian understanding of the world. If that was what was suppressing individuals from freely expressing themselves, that society — and those conventions — were in the way.

It all needed to be undone.

Sigmund Freud and his perverted pseudo-science helped put Rousseau’s project of undoing how we understand human nature to work. Where Rousseau attacked institutions like traditional marriage because they represented the oppressive societal norms that had corrupted “natural man,” Freud just took it one step further.

He put sex and sexual expression at the center of human existence, and used “science” as the authoritative hammer to make his point.² He succeeded in selling the myth that sexual desire and fulfillment are the keys to what it means to be human.

Then, in the 20th century, the academic intelligentsia used Marxist ideology to label common cultural understandings of the sex and family as “oppressive forces” that controlled the world through patriarchal traditions.

And that meant targeting for destruction the infantile religious dogma on which that tradition rested.

Rousseau psychologized the self and succeeded in selling the idea that man was basically good. Freud made psychology purely sexual. Applying Marxist ideology to all of it made sexuality political.

It took a couple centuries for those steps to play out. But once the stage had been set in the culture’s collective mind, the anchor started to free-fall. This is the only way to explain the things we see going on today that seem to be happening so rapidly.

Once the people in our contemporary culture were convinced that their individual identity was not based on a common, shared value in the Imago Dei, but rather on whatever each individual decides they want it to be, the acceleration couldn’t be stopped.

Human beings took something sacred — the Imago Dei grounded in an omniscient, monotheistic God — discarded it, and declared themselves to be the only arbiters of their own value and purpose.

It’s a new form of polytheism. We have created a multitude of gods, each one made in his/her own image. Sexuality has become the most visible representation of this humanity-destroying phenomenon.

This is what Carl Trueman refers to as the Desecration of Man — destroying the ancient, sacred sexual codes and replacing them with personal pleasure and fulfillment. It’s the new-found path to “liberation” that leads to the perversion and commodification of what God meant to be sacred. We’ve repudiated the idea of human exceptionalism, objectified human persons, and fancied ourselves as “self-creators.”³

God designed sexuality as a sacred bond between husband and wife that cements the relationship and is the method by which we obey His exhortation to “go forth and multiply.” The pleasurable aspect of sex was meant to fortify the relationship, not define it.

But since “we’re all gods now,” sex has simply become a servant of our personal desires. We can manipulate it using science and technology. To paraphrase legal scholar Adeline Allen:

Thinking Christians sense all of this happening, of course. And though few of us could explain how we got here as well as Carl Trueman, we know something ain’t right. But what can we do about it? How do we kick against the cultural, human-desecrating goads?

Trueman closes his book with recommendations about what it means to re-consecrate humanity that are clear and compelling. But let me simplify it for you.

Think and act Christianly.

Take the Bible seriously enough to know and be honest about what it says … about everything. Disregard what the culture wants it to say.

Doing the latter is what got us in this desecrated mess. A consecrated point of view is the opposite of that.

The project of reclaiming and defending the set of beliefs that define the faith — what C.S. Lewis called, “Mere Christianity” — starts with knowing the ancient creeds many of us used to recite from memory. Those creeds were not just poetic expressions, they were objective truth claims about what defines Christianity. They were built to do exactly what Jude said so succinctly:

“Contend for the faith that was once and for all delivered to the saints.”¹¹

We must do that, but not only that.

When it comes to the polytheistic, me-centered world we’ve forged, serious Christians need to focus on how they can turn things around. We need a God-centered view of the world. Humbly acknowledging that God is God — and we are not — is what it’s all about. We have a word for that.

It’s called worship.

Pay attention to the “worship” songs your church is singing. If you hear the words “me” and “I” more frequently than “God,” or “You,” you might be inadvertently caught up in the polytheistic, desecrated morass we’ve been talking about.

And remember, real worship is not just about singing songs. It’s a way of life. All of us need to find ways to think about God — in every situation — more than we think about ourselves.

Know the Bible ... Worship God, not yourself ... Live accordingly.

Shockingly complicated, isn’t it?

The desecration of man happened slowly — until it didn’t. We’re living at a time when the anchor is free-falling. But try to imagine how much different this world could be if all of us just honored and respected every human being as the image-bearing creature they are. If everyone just ordered their lives and families with God at the center instead of their sexual desires?

Relationships would improve. Priorities would change. Society would function the way it was designed.

All we have to do is make human life sacred again — from conception to natural death.

I’m not naive. I know a great majority in our culture have let the rope slip too quickly from their grasp, and find the whole show entertaining. They don’t give any of this a second thought. They will laugh and think they’re exercising their “freedom” as they watch the anchor plunge into the abyss.

But we’re supposed to be different.

The anchor is falling fast. But if enough of us put on some gloves on and grab the rope, we may be able to stop it.

Our kids and grandkids are in the boat with us … and they are watching.

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1. Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (Crossway, 2020), 129.

2. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph, 202–204.

3. Carl R. Trueman, The Desecration of Man (Sentinel, 2026), 20.

4. Trueman, Desecration, 136.

5. Jude 3.