Emerging from the Fog

Pointing toward a great resource

As I continue to recover from Covid, my fatigue and brain fog have limited my time for writing and research. But the fog is finally beginning to clear. Though still recovering, I wanted to point you toward a significant and thought-provoking resource which is incredibly helpful in understanding the landscape being ravaged by the Sexual Tsunami.

OK, no, that’s not me.

I had hoped to eventually write an article about the work of Carl R. Trueman, a professor from Grove City College. His main work The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to the Sexual Revolution, is stirring the waters in intellectual think tanks around the world as they analyze the rapid changes in Western culture. I’ve purchased both this book and his shorter version on the topic (Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution), but have not gotten very far in digesting them.

While The Rise and Triumph . . . is 430 pages, the latter book is only 187 pages of text and is written for group discussion. After reading just the Foreward by Ryan T. Anderson, I began recommending it to colleagues! Consider the following quotes from Anderson as he describes Trueman’s work:

It is a penetrating analysis of several hundred years of recent intellectual history to show why people are willing to believe ideas today that every one of our grandparents would have rejected out of hand—without need of argument, evidence, or proof—just two generations ago.

I would describe the broad arc of [Trueman’s] work as an account of how the person became a self, the self became sexualized, and that sex became politicized.

. . . a culture of “expressive individualism”—where each of us seeks to give expression to our individual inner lives rather than seeing ourselves as embedded in communities and bound by natural and supernatural laws. Authenticity to inner feelings, rather than adherence to transcendent truths, becomes the norm.

This modern self, then, is not accountable to the theologians who preach on how to conform oneself to God but to the therapists who counsel how to be true to oneself—thus giving rise to what Philip Rieff described as the “triumph of the therapeutic.”

Hey, it’s a head-throbbing read. But today, perhaps more than at any other time, we need to be thinking Christians who know how to live out the love and purposes of God before an increasingly skeptical and antagonistic world. We quickly obsess over every new development in the news which proves the world is going to hell in a fanny pack. But God calls us to be the body of Christ, not the voice of Chicken Little, squawking over all that ruffles our feathers.

Trueman’s work gives an incredible analysis of the past three centuries—how thinkers, philosophers, and writers have led us into the current cultural everglade. We will be better able to guide people out of the swamp if we know the reason they first began wading in.

If you want to delve deeper, here’s a recent article that provides a tremendous summary of Trueman’s¹ The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.

1. Yes, it really is spelled T-r-u-e-m-a-n. Strange, but hey, the guy’s a Brit. They seem to like adding extra letters. At least that’s my judgment.