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

by Carl R. Trueman

body sexually in ways inconsistent with its purpose and to engage in sexual activity that does not reflect the biblical purpose of sex is wrong and to be clearly confronted as such by the church in...

matters of identity, of who we think we are at the most basic level. And the problem is that expressive individualism, manifested as sexual ident...

societies have categories for thinking about people and identity, and a real problem occurs when those categories are simply not adequate or appropriate. That

Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that conceding the categories leads to unfortunate confusion.

celibacy really be considered costly.

morality calls for celibacy for all who are not married and chastity for those who

strictly speaking, no more costly or sacrificial for a single person not to have sex with someone than it is for a married person to be faithful or not to visit strip clubs and prostitutes—or, for that matter, for a person not to steal another’s property or slander someone’s good name.

abstain from sex in today’s world is to sacrifice true selfhood as the world around understands it. It is to pay the price of not being able to be who one really is.

up outside the store at some early hour to obtain the latest model on the day it is launched. The same person no doubt experiences distress and frustration if her phone breaks down or if the network is unavailable for some reason. Both the desire for an iPhone and the feeling of frustration when deprived of the same, are real, even though they would have been unknown to someone in the 1960s, let alone the 1460s.

are taught to be authentic in such a way that identity, recognition, and belonging are now deeply connected to the sexual desires we have and the manner in which we express them. It

example, not a surprise that the number of children and adolescents reporting gender dysphoria has grown rapidly in the last few years.

does not necessarily mean that for centuries there have been significant numbers of transgender people who have been unable to express themselves, any more than the rapid increase of sales in smartphones in the last decade indicates that vast numbers of people in previous generations lived lives of inauthenticity because they were unable to post trivia about their lives onto the web while traveling to work or sitting in the waiting room...

unlikely to be radically transformed or overthrown in the near future.

likely to keep pressing our culture in the same basic direction that it has been moving for the past few centuries.

addition, the collapse of the authority of traditional institutions, most notably the church in all its various forms, would suggest that any return to a society built on a broad religious, or even a mere metaphysical, consensus is extremely unlikely.

we currently face an indefinite future of flux, instabilit...

morality of the sexual revolution is itself in trouble at the present moment. It was built on the notion that sex was recreational fun and that, as long as the parties involved had consented, everything was permissible. That

sexual assault, even in today’s society where almost all sexual taboos have been abandoned, is still regarded as heinous.

slap violates the body; a rape violates the person in the deepest way possible. That point does not need to be argued; we all intuitively know that to be the case.

pinpointed the difficulty of defining consent when there are disparities of power between the parties involved and also highlighted the fact that sex is more than mere recreation.

made careers out

representing sexual activity on the screen as nothing more than a fun, recreational activity. And

clearly cries out for setting sex within a moral context, and yet the only moral context its advocates seem able to countenance is one involving an increasingly complex and confusing approach to what is and is not consent.

notion of personal sexual virtue has been abandoned, to be replaced by heteronomous cultural dictates.

to do all kinds of things to which they do not consent, from eating vegetables to attending school. Is the principle of consent, therefore, enough to prevent the advent of pedophilia as an acceptable form of sexual activity?

a general collapse in marriage as a two-person arrangement remains to be seen.

about love. It is about happiness. It is about allowing two people to commit to each other. It is about acceptance.

about inclusivity. And to oppose it is to be against all those things. Given the

be more than just a sour-faced killjoy; it is to act out of irrational bigotry akin to th...

society that prizes individual freedom. I argue below that the way sex has been politicized means that, in reality, this principle is far from an accurate way of viewing gay marriage, but again, it is the rhetoric and the aesthetic impact of the rhetoric that makes the argument a powerful one.

School, workplace, and public-bathroom policy will affect everyone.

More acutely, the issue of parental rights relative to a child claiming to be transgender is likely to prove very serious, bringing into sharp focus the relative status of the family and the state.

points in turn to the basic problem of biology. It is hard for nonscientists to tell which side is most driven by ideological commitments in its approach to the evidence of the connection between biology and gender, but nobody has to be an expert in chromosomal science to see the statistics relative to male and female sports.

men’s mile is held by Hicham El Guerrouj, with a time of 3'43.13".

The women’s record is held by Sifan Hassan, with a ...

Sir Roger Bannister in 1953. To put it more pointedly, no male student running only as fast as the fastest woman in history would be remotely competitive at the Division 1 college level over that distance.

long-term impact of hormone treatment and surgery is unknown, but the current state of the evidence suggests that such will not prove to be simple cures for the underlying problem.

and lives traumatized by medical treatment, will sue their parents, the doctors, and the insurance companies who financed the whole mess.

superficial level, the world of expressive individualism might seem to be a world that would inevitably be marked by religious freedom.

notion of religious choice in the West and therefore laid the foundations for the rise of the expressive individual as the normative self.

general decline in religious commitment in the West, which is particularly marked in western Europe but is also now a striking feature of American society.

seem reasonable to assume that as fewer and fewer people care about their own religious commitments, so they will care less and less about religious freedom as an important commitment for society as a whole.

see sexual identity as the key to the expression of personal identity. Therefore, any religion that maintains a traditional view of sexual activity and refuses to recognize identities built on desires and activities that they regard as wrong is by definition engaged in oppressing those who claim such identities.

grounds of irrational bigotry. In short, they are either stupid or immoral or both. In such a world, the idea that religious freedom is a social good is not simply increasingly implausible, it is also increasingly distasteful, disturbing, and undesirable.

freedom was regarded as a good that actually helped social cohesion; it is now regarded as something that poses a potentially lethal threat to that cohesion.

of the persecution of Christians and Uighur Muslims in China and the very existence of the term Islamophobia seem to indicate some concern for the right to religious expression.

and powerless minority is being mistreated by a larger, more powerful group. It is not so much that Chinese Christians and Uighurs are religious as that they are a minority.

truthfulness of such perceptions is irrelevant: these are the things that inform the social imaginary, as shown by a glance at the portrayal of religious conservatives in cultural products, from sophisticated literature, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, to moronic cheap shots, such as the music video for Taylor Swift’s “You Need to Calm Down.”

There is no compromise that can really be reached here because there is no way that the one can be assimilated to the other.

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.