In recent years, Carl Trueman has emerged as one of the most significant voices in the Christian world. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Crossway, 2020) is a masterful history of what can rightly be called the “identity revolution.” The authority we commonly ascribe to individual identity is, historically speaking, a novel development. Trueman shows us how we got here. I commend it to your reading, though some readers might prefer a more succinct version of the same argument, Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution (Crossway, 2022).
His newest work, The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Humanity (Sentinel, 2026), is equally germane to our current moment, though less technical and more accessible than Rise and Triumph. While many people today talk about “secularization” and “disenchantment,” Trueman provides stronger language for what has happened across the Western world. He describes it as a process of “desecration”: “the denial of sacred boundaries, the profanation of all that is holy” (xii). Desecration has not happened by accident. When Trueman speaks of desecration, he refers to “the active destruction of the sacred” (xv).
Read the full review at Firebrand.
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