Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution

by Carl R. Trueman

The person was a creature of God, who sought to conform himself to the truth, to objective moral standards, in pursuit of eternal life. Modern man, however, seeks to be “true to himself.” Rather than conform thoughts, feelings, and actions to objective reality, man’s inner life itself becomes the source of truth. The modern self finds himself in the midst of what Robert Bellah has described as 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.2 Authenticity to inner feelings, rather than adherence to transcendent truths, becomes the norm.

Welcome to this strange new world. You may not like it. But it is where you live, and therefore it is important that you try to understand it.

In short, the modern self is one where authenticity is achieved by acting outwardly in accordance with one’s inward feelings.

In short, Marx lays the groundwork for some of the most basic of our culture’s contemporary intuitions: Religion is a sign of intellectual weakness in its adherents and a means of social oppression for its proponents. Further, freedom can be achieved only by the abolition of religion. Above all, the idea that human nature is to be morally framed by theological claims such as the notion that men and women are made in the image of God is to be repudiated. Of course, few today have read Marx himself, but these ideas have in many ways infiltrated the cultural imagination in which religion is instinctively regarded as both childish and oppressive.

We should also notice in closing that Marx’s claim that all human social relations are economic relations has one more significant result: all human social relations must therefore be political because they all serve the status quo.

The prepolitical is no more. There is nothing in this world where human beings can relate to each other that is not a potential arena of political conflict, because all areas of life connect to the overall economic structure of society and thus to society’s inequalities and injustices; and Marx should be given much of the credit for laying the theoretical foundations of that.

We might say that the death of God is also the death of human nature, or at least the end of any cogent argument that there is such a thing as human nature. If there is no God, then men and women cannot be made in his image and are not therefore required to act in accordance with that image. And if men and women are not made in God’s image, to what absolute moral standard must they submit themselves? To none, says Nietzsche, for the very idea of an absolute moral standard becomes meaningless in a world that is intrinsically of no significance beyond the matter from which it is made.

We might express Nietzsche’s thought this way: freed from the burden of being creatures of God, human beings must rise to the challenge of self-creation, of being whoever they choose to be. Put perhaps even more bluntly: be whoever or whatever works for you. You should feel no obligation to conform to the standards or criteria of anybody else.

So what criteria should we use, according to Nietzsche, to discern what actions are good and what are bad? Well, at the heart of Nietzsche’s approach is self-creation: if there is no God, then we are our own masters.

For Marx, morality is historically conditioned and designed to justify and maintain the current (unjust) economic structure of society.

For Nietzsche, morality is a fiction invented by one group to denigrate and subordinate another. For both, moral codes are thus manipulative and must be transgressed to find true freedom.

And in Oscar Wilde, we find the classic, sophisticated example of what that might look like: the transgressive, sexual adventurer, for whom pleasure was an end in itself, and for whom aesthetics replaced the outmoded and oppressive notion of an external moral code.

If we are at root defined in large part by our sexual desires—if sexual desire (or “orientation,” as we now say) is who we are—then sex must be political because rules governing sexual behavior are rules that govern what is and is not considered by society to be legitimate as an identity.

This self-conscious sexualizing of politics is, in terms of intellectual genealogy, largely the result of the fusion of certain elements of Marxist and Freudian thought in the 1930s.

Reich and those who stand in his wake make explicit the obvious implications of this shift. If a person is in some deep sense the sexual desires that they experience, then how society treats those desires is an extremely important political question.

We can now see that once identity is psychologized, anything that is seen to have a negative impact upon someone’s psychological identity can potentially come to be seen as harmful, even as a weapon, that does serious damage. This includes those words and ideas that stand over against those identities that society chooses to sanction. This has clear implications for traditional freedoms: religion and speech.

If, as I argued in previous chapters, the modern person considers himself to be something he can create for himself, so he tends to extend that same notion to his relationship to the world in general. We no longer think of ourselves as subject to the world’s fixed nature, or of it as having an objective authority or meaning. We are the ones with power, and we are the ones who give the world significance.

Religious institutions, family, and nation have even in the recent past been three fundamental external anchors for identity. They provided much of the fixity, and thus stability and authority, of the early modern world. In answer to the question, “Who am I?” each could give an answer: You are Carl Trueman, a Christian who is the son of John and English by birth. Once those three lose their authority or become problematic or even sources of shame, the question of my identity needs to find other anchors. And the question is: Where can I do so? Shorn of such external markers, the turn inward gains yet more momentum.

We can express this more bluntly: institutions are no longer authoritative places of formation but of performance.

And, according to Rieff, that places us in an unprecedented and highly volatile situation: our cultures must now justify themselves purely on the basis of themselves. As with the collapse of the authority of church, nation, and family, this creates a vacuum of moral authority that is filled with the competing voices of a myriad of new identities and no objective way of adjudicating between them.

The advent of the pill is central to this story. It allowed women to take control of their own fertility and made it very easy to sever the link between sex and pregnancy. This changed the context of sexual activity.

With the pill, the risks (financial and social) of sex were dramatically lowered. The idea of sex as a pleasant recreation without the need for long-term commitment is simply far more plausible in a world with access to the pill.

If we are honest, Freud was touching on a significant truth: sex and sexual desires do shape who we are in fundamental ways. In short, we might perhaps say that human identity tilts in a sexual direction; and when external anchors of identity are weakened or even collapse, then the ideas of Freud, the availability of contraception, and the proliferation of easily accessible pornography can all find receptive soil in which to grow and make that tilt something obvious in the way our societies think and behave.

In short, the role of the cultural elites today is not to maintain continuity with the past, to preserve its beliefs and practices, or perhaps to modify them to make them fit contemporary conditions but still to do so in a way that respects and stands in continuity with previous generations. Rather, it is to overthrow them in the pursuit of establishing the new values, those of expressive individuals who need to be liberated from those historical cultural chains that inhibit them from being truly themselves and society from being truly free and just.

human beings do not simply wish to be free. We also wish to belong, to be part of a group where we are accepted and affirmed. We are social creatures and thrive best in situations where we are connected to others and have a sense of communal identity.

freedom without belonging is a grim burden to bear.

The old chestnut of “love the sinner, hate the sin” simply does not work in a world where the sin is the identity of the sinner and the two cannot be separated even at a conceptual level.

In a time when the normative notion of selfhood is psychological, then to hate the sin is to hate the sinner. Christians who fail to note this shift are going to find themselves very confused by the incomprehension of, and indeed the easy offence taken by, the world around them.

Underlying much of the argument of previous chapters—indeed, underlying the notion of the social imaginary—is that identity is shaped by the communities to which we belong. And we all have various identities—I am a husband, a father, a teacher, an Englishman, an immigrant, a writer, a rugby fan, in addition to being a Christian. And the strongest identities I have, forming my strongest intuitions, derive from the strongest communities to which I belong. And that means that the church needs to be the strongest community to which we each belong. Ironically, the LGBTQ+ community is proof of this point: the reason they have moved from the margins to center stage is intimately connected to the strong communities they formed while on the margins.

And that means we need to work harder at explaining not simply the content but also the rationale of Christian morality.