The West Cannot Keep Christian Benefits Without Christian Beliefs

Carl Trueman’s The Desecration of Man is partly cultural diagnosis and partly evangelistic appeal. He writes especially for people who recognize that the West is in crisis and suspect that Christianity might supply the moral foundation we have lost, yet hesitate to believe the Christian story itself.

Trueman argues that Nietzsche’s famous parable of the Madman has closed off that middle position. If you’ve forgotten most of your college philosophy class, the point of Nietzsche’s late-1800s parable was that atheists in his day were unprepared to accept the implications of a culture without God: no obligations to the frail and infirm, no inherent dignity or rights of man. Nietzsche’s Madman mocked atheists who still wanted to claim the moral framework they had inherited from centuries of Christianity but he predicted that one day mankind would bravely accept the full implications of existence without the myth of God.

Trueman claims that the day the Madman prophesied is now here, laying out the proof in our treatment of sex, birth, bodies, and death.

Some critics of modernity describe our problem as “disenchantment.” Science, technology, bureaucracy, and consumerism have flattened a world once experienced as mysterious, sacred, and charged with divine meaning. Their proposed remedy is “reenchantment”: recovering wonder through beauty, ritual, nature, ancient liturgy, fantasy, or renewed openness to the supernatural.

Trueman considers that inadequate. A person may admire cathedrals, Gregorian chant, Tolkien, or Christian morality without believing Christianity is true. That makes faith an aesthetic preference rather than a durable account of reality. Our deepest problem is not merely that the world seems less magical. It is that human beings are no longer regarded as sacred.

The answer is reconsecration through “creed, cult, and code”: Christian truth believed, Christian worship practiced, and Christian ethics embodied together. This is a long game, not a political quick fix. It begins in churches and homes, particularly through hospitality that receives neighbors, strangers, the weak, and the unwanted as people made in God’s image.