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

by Carl R. Trueman

allow religious conservatives to be religious conservatives is to deny that people are defined by their sexual orientation, and to allow that people are defined by their sexual orientation is to assert that religious conservatism is irrational bigotry and dangerous to the unity of the commonwealth.

free exercise of religion, in terms of the individual’s right to apply his beliefs to life outside the Sunday worship service, something that can no longer be assumed.

connection between aesthetics and her core beliefs and practices. I

incontrovertible precisely because they are personal testimonies—the highest form of authority in an age of expressive individualism.

power of sympathy and empathy in shaping morality.

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

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

of moral principles, not on the attractiveness and appeal of the narratives of the people involved.

sex-as-identity is itself a category mistake, then the narratives of suffering, exclusion, and refusals of recognition based on that category mistake are really of no significance in determining w...

must also be a community. If the struggle for Christianity is the struggle for the nature of human selfhood, then it is worth noting that Hegel’s basic insight, so compellingly elaborated by Taylor, that selves are socially constructed and only come to full self-consciousness in dialogue with other self-consciousnesses, is of great importance. Each of us is, in a sense, the sum total of the network of relationships we have with others and with our environment.

the message about the self is that of expressive individualism or psychological man, and if that message is being preached from every commercial, every website, every newscast, and every billboard to which people are exposed on a daily basis, the task of the church in cultivating a different understanding of the self is, humanly speaking, likely to provoke despair.

The loss of commercial town centers and the rise of the internet have

detached people from real communities. Now bizarre phrases such as “online community” and “he pledged allegiance to ISIS online” actually make sense because we know how the very idea of community has been evacuated of the notion of bodily proximity and presence.

human beings still need to belong, to be recognized, and to have community. Perhaps this is where the church can learn from the

community where real people look after each other in terms of meeting very real needs. And communities shape consciousness. There is a reason why Paul comments in 1 Corinthians

33 that bad company corru...

moral consciousness is very much shaped by our community. And for this reason, the church nee...

ecclesiastical commitment potentially just one more...

Protestants need to recover both natural law and a high view of the physical body.

people coherently about moral principles. It is unlikely that an individual pastor is going to be able to shape a Supreme Court ruling on abortion (though he should certainly try as he is able), but he is very likely to be confronted with congregants asking questions about matters from surrogacy to transgenderism. And in such circumstances, a good grasp of the biblical position on natural law and the order of the created world will prove invaluable.

importance of the body. Protestantism, with its emphasis on the preached word grasped by faith, is perhaps peculiarly vulnerable to downplaying the importance of the physical. But to tear identity away from physical embodiment 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. If, as Rieff claims, sexual codes are definitive of cultures, then an abandonment of Christian sexual morality by the church can be done only on the basis of a rejection of the sacred framework of Christianity and at the cost of the loss of Christianity as a meaningful phenomenon.

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.

the second century, the church was a marginal sect within a dominant, pluralist society. She was under suspicion not because her central dogmas were supernatural but rather because she appeared subversive in claiming Jesus as King and was viewed as immoral in her talk of eating and drinking human flesh and blood and expressing incestuous-sounding love between brothers and sisters.

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. It was that second-century world,