The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

by Carl R. Trueman

Given this, it is hard to conceptualize a culture in which the rights of religious conservatives and the rights of those who identify as sexual minorities can both be accommodated.

what constitutes dignity and appropriate recognition, are at stake that makes a negotiated settlement impossible.

Whether the psychological and subjective categories that are embodied in The Yogyakarta Principles and that inform sexual orientation and gender identity laws will provide as sound and long-lasting of a foundation for American society as the freedom of religious exercise guaranteed in the First Amendment remains to be seen.

The first is that the church should reflect long and hard on the connection between aesthetics and her core beliefs and practices.

As Mario Vargas Llosa expresses it, a central characteristic of our contemporary culture is the impoverishment of ideas as a driving force of cultural life. Today images have primacy over ideas. For that reason, cinema, television and now the Internet have left books to one side.

The church needs to respond to this aesthetic-based logic, but first of all she needs to be consciously aware of it.

And that means that she herself must forgo indulging in, and thereby legitimating, the kind of aesthetic strategy of the wider culture.

decided on the basis of moral principles, not on the attractiveness and appeal of the narrati...

If the church is to avoid the absolutizing of aesthetics by an appropriate commitment to Christianity as first and foremost doctrinal, then second, she must also be a community.

And for this reason, the church needs to be a strong community.

That brings me to my third point: Protestants need to recover both natural law and a high view of the physical body.

My concern here is not primarily for the outside world but for the church herself. She needs to be able to teach her people coherently about moral principles.

Protestantism, with its emphasis on the preached word grasped by faith, is perhaps peculiarly vulnerable to downplaying the importance of the physical.

biblical understanding of embodiment is vital.17 And closely allied with this is the fact that the church must maintain its commitment to biblical sexual morality, whatever the social cost might be.

One last comment relates to the issue of historical precedent. It is appropriate that Christians who acknowledge that they have a religion that is both rooted in historical events and transmitted through history via the church ask whether there is an age that provides precedent for the one in which we live.

religious choice on the world in a manner that meant the Reformation itself could never again occur in such a form.

In the second century, the church was a marginal sect within a dominant, pluralist society.

The second-century world is, in a sense, our world, where Christianity is a choice—and a choice likely at some point to run afoul of the authorities.

By existing as a close-knit, doctrinally bounded community that required her members to act consistently with their faith and

to be good citizens of the earthly city as far as good citizenship was compatible with faithfulness to Christ.