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

by Carl R. Trueman

the definition of sexual orientation is essentially contentless and defined merely by desire. It

gender is divided from sex,

psychology trumps biology: the personal “sense” of the body is important, and if that “sense” is out of step with the person’s “deeply felt” identity, then the body can be modified.

So the reality of the body is not as real as the convictions of the mind. And it is both irrelevant to identity such that it is no ultimate

gender is assigned at birth; it is not simply recognized. The

First, while few if any would disagree that all persons should be equal before the law, the close connection of personhood with self-determined sexual identity renders personhood so subjective and plastic that the results in terms of formulating and applying the law would seem vulnerable to precisely the same subjectivity and plasticity.

transgenderism involves the exorcism, or erasure, of parents in general, for they play no role in the identity of the transgender person at his or her most fundamental level of being beyond actualizing his or her mere existence.

significance of biological

sex in the oppression and liberation of women.

you can decide who you are; not your father, not your mother, nor even your own body can give you any help here . . .”), it also places potentially huge power in the hands of the

government, of the medical profession, and of the various lobby groups to whose tune they tend to dance.

my vain life I have seen everything. Ecclesiastes 7:15

might have highlighted the crisis in confidence in the nation-state as a unit of political organization in a world in which individualism corrodes older notions of national identity from within and globalization makes national governments increasingly impotent to address the most pressing economic problems of the day. I could have discussed the way that Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube have created a world in which life is performance art or the manner in which reality television projects the idea that outward expression of inward thoughts and feelings, however crude, is a sign of authenticity. Had I done so, I might have traced its influence even on our cultural elites, among whom, for example, politicians speaking with profanity is now considered evidence of integrity, a performance of authenticity, and openness about sexual preferences (at least those lionized by the Sittlichkeit of our culture) is an electoral asset.

regulative practices that characterized Western society until recently—particularly, though not exclusively, in the realm of sexual ethics.

this repudiation lies a deeper rejection, that of any and every sacred order on which they might be grounded, whether it be that provided by a formal religion, such as Christianity, or a commitment to some broader philosophical metaphysics, such as that found in Immanuel Kant.

killing—of the Christian God, or, indeed, of any god.

repudiation not only of history but of any authority that might pose a challenge to the present—even the authority of physically determined sex in favor of the fluid concepts of sexual orientation and gender identity—is something that marks all the areas on which I have touched in this last section.

Supreme Court judgments affect everybod...

nothing more than just another kind of animal would find his basic premises plausible. And

care policies for both the very young and the very old. And transgenderism is set to change everything, from notions of privacy to the very language that ordinary people use in their day-to-day lives.

long-term implications of this revolution are significant, for no culture or society that has had to justify itself by itself has ever maintained itself for any length of time.

Such always involves cultural entropy, a degeneration of the culture, because, of course, there really is nothing worth communicating from one generation to the next.

generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. Ecclesiastes 1:4–5

is a basic, practical truth that we live in this world at this time and are therefore required to respond to the problems we face in the context in which we find ourselves. In short, as any bridge or poker player knows, we have to play with the hand that we have been dealt.

lamenting that we are not holding better cards is of no practical value. In

highly plastic view of human existence needs to be supplemented by a narrative of how the liquidity of our age intensifies this plasticity—the transient, temporary, and ephemeral nature of the institutions and the technology that shape our identity.

challenging time because of the coincidence of plastic people and a liquid

deeper revolution in what it means to be a self.

LGBTQ+ movement arises out of the sexual revolution, and the sexual revolution arises out of the kinds of philosophical ideas and trends that can be traced from Rousseau through the Romantics to Freud and then the New Left.

albeit perhaps the most vocal and influential. The problem is that we are all part of that revolution, an...

“belief in God isn’t quite the same thing in 1500 and 2000.”

European in 1500 did not. At that time, belief in God was the cultural default position, and being a member of the Catholic Church was the only option.

expressive individualists now, and there is no way we can escape from this fact.

for expressive individualism is not an unmitigated evil. In some ways, it marks a significant improvement on that which it replaced.

inherent dignity of the individual.

position within the social hierarchy. With Rousseau’s emphasis on the individual and the state of nature as the ideal, the shift to individual, intrinsic dignity is clear. And

The idea that all human beings are of equal worth is rooted in the idea that all human beings are made in the image of God.

nineteenth century and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Rather, it is the fact that expressive individualism has detached these concepts of individual dignity and value from any kind of grounding in a sacred order.

us off from any agreed-on transcendent metaphysical order by which our culture might justify itself.

understand human existence teleologically, we both are isolated from the past, where ends transcending the individual were assumed, and are left free floating in the present. Our

lived merely for the present, where the pleasures of the immediate moment—whether produced by artificial means

are the only things that

acrimonious and futile today is that there is no commonly accepted foundation on which such discussions might constructively take place.

That the key issues in American society are now decided by the law courts is a function of this disconnect: democratic processes are regarded as having less and less legitimacy, given that winning at the ballot box might simply indicate to the losing side that the majority of the electorate are hate-filled bigots of the kind from which law courts are designed to protect people.

of personal narratives isolated from any larger metaphysical or theological framework. Even in the church, personal stories have a powerful emotional impact that can easily transform the chief end of human beings into the personal happiness that stands at the heart of the therapeutic culture.

The routine use of sarcasm and insult in polemic may not be a monopoly of the present age, but given that such is now profoundly associated with a deeper cultural iconoclasm and cynicism than in the past, we might do well as Christians to think critically about how frequently we resort to it—especially when debating with other Christians.

which it has frequently adopted the aesthetics of the present moment in its worship, is arguably a sign of the penetration of the anticulture into the sanctuary of historic Christianity.

Christians today are not opponents of the anticulture. Too often we are a symptom of it.

first is that these debates are not primarily about sexual behavior. Certainly, sexual behavior is something about which Christians should be concerned.

Bible does teach that the body has a proper and appropriate sexual use, and it does teach that sex has a particular significance.