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

by Carl R. Trueman

Expressive individualism holds that each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized.

Of course, autobiography is a self-serving genre. The reader has no guarantee that the psychological narrative is true, and certain events that would shed him in a bad light, such as the abandonment of his children, are dealt with in a remarkably cursory, unemotional manner so as to lessen their significance.

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.

Yet increasingly, we conflate the hurtful with the wrong and the affirming with the truth.

In short, teenagers frequently all look, dress, and talk like each other. This highlights the fact that 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.

Become a community. By this, the Lord says, shall all men know that you are my disciples, by the love you have for each other (John 13:35). And that means community.