What The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is About

Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is a book about a single question: How and why did the statement “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” come to be regarded as coherent and meaningful? This statement, which in my own lifetime was once regarded as both fodder for comedy and a clear sign of insanity, has now ascended to the rank of the most courageous and truthful thing that a person could say. Those who make this good confession (or the parallel, “I’m a man trapped in a woman’s body”) are lauded as heroes, and their cause has been championed by institutions of all stripes — churches, corporations, schools, universities, and governments. How and why has such a radical inversion come about in so short an amount of time? And how has it been so quickly and thoroughly adopted by average people, not just those who travel in niche academic circles?

Trueman’s book is not a lament that such a thing has happened, nor is it a sustained argument against the logic or morality of this statement. It really is an honest and objective exploration of the question of how we have arrived at such a time and place where the question of transgenderism has come to dominate the cultural imagination. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is an intellectual history of the sexual revolution, which he makes clear “is simply one manifestation of the larger revolution of the self that has taken place in the West.” (20)

The Social Imaginary

Trueman begins by framing the current situation in the language of philosophers Charles Taylor, Philip Reiff, and Alisdair MacIntyre. Three crucial concepts immediately reveal themselves when we deeply examine the culture that we find ourselves in. The first concept is the social imaginary, which is a term coined by Charles Taylor. The social imaginary is how the people of a specific culture tend to think about themselves, the world, and how they should act in it. It is a mass, unspoken intuition about reality, the things that we all (or almost all of us) just assume to be true. Trueman puts it succinctly: “the social imaginary is a matter of intuitive social taste.” (38) The average person doesn’t think the statement “I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body” makes sense because he is committed to radical gender theories; he thinks it makes sense because it seems right to affirm someone in their chosen identities and hurtful not to.

What Live Not By Lies Is About

The coming soft totalitarianism of woke progressivism will release a wave of persecution against Christians (and other dissidents) that the West hasn’t seen since the days of communism. This is the fundamental claim of Rod Dreher’s latest book, Live Not By Lies. Granted, this persecution may not be as overtly harsh, physically torturous, or psychologically cruel as the horrors meted out in the gulags of the Soviet system, but it is coming nonetheless. Already, the Wokesheviks (my term, not Dreher’s) are making lists of those who should not be allowed to work, and therefore live, in the post-Trump United States. Today’s Left has a totalitarian impulse that is unchecked by any religious sentiment, like the necessity for forgiveness or the foundation of agape love, because the Left’s politics are its religion. Therefore, we can expect the areligious Left of today to do what the areligious Left has already done, particularly under communist rule.

The memory of the evil of communism is lost on those under 30 because they never experienced it (just 57% of millennials believe that the Declaration of Independence better guarantees “freedom and equality” than the Communist Manifesto), but there are many alive today who bore the weight of these oppressive regimes and lived to tell about it. Live Not By Lies reads like a long, well-researched, and engaging newspaper article or magazine feature, as Dreher frequently relies on the first hand testimony of those who stood up to communism and were persecuted for it. Many of the communist survivors Dreher interviewed for the book express grave concern for the West, because they hear in our culture the echoes of the totalitarian lies that claimed tens of millions of lives in the twentieth century. They offer us invaluable lessons in perseverance and faithfulness, but we must also hear their calls to wake up and get prepared for what is coming.

Live Not By Lies takes its title from an essay of the same name by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and in many ways the book is a less gut-wrenching, less horror-inducing version of Solzhenitsyn’s vital work, The Gulag Archipelago. To live by lies, Solzhenitsyn wrote, meant “accepting without protest all the falsehoods and propaganda that the state compelled its citizens to affirm…. Everybody says that they have no choice but to conform…and to accept powerlessness. But that is the lie that gives all the other lies their malign force. The ordinary man may not be able to overturn the kingdom of lies, but he can at least say that he is not going to be its loyal subject.” (17) Dreher warns that we are being taught to practice a form of ketman, which is “the Persian word for the practice of maintaining an outward appearance of Islamic orthodoxy while inwardly dissenting.” (16) Ketman is a sort of hypocrisy where one outwardly assents to wokeness but inwardly rejects it. This is dishonest, and ultimately corrupts the individual as he attempts to conform to the system while maintaining traditional or biblical convictions. Ketman is the fiction practiced by those cowardly souls who, under Soviet totalitarianism, turned in their neighbors to save their own skin.

One of the most remarkable things about human beings is our ability to think. We can think about ourselves, other people, or our environment. We can ponder abstract concepts like love or justice. We can imagine things that don’t exist and create whole new worlds in our minds. We can investigate the space around us, discover facts, do math. We can think of ways to accomplish tasks more safely and efficiently, and then we can create the machines that help us to achieve those goals. The human brain is the most incredible object in all of creation, and the fact that you’re now thinking about the thing that does your thinking proves the point!

Ideas are powerful things that shape both ourselves and our world. Sometime around 2008 somebody had an idea for a smart phone, and now the world has been changed forever. We could say the same thing about microprocessors, airplanes, automobiles, birth control, guns, toilets, printing presses – this list could go on forever. But ideas that shape the world don’t always take concrete forms. Sometimes an idea stays an idea, like a philosophy or a worldview, shaping the world by spreading from the mind of one person to the next. A culture is transformed by the behavior of people, and people’s actions are influenced by their thoughts. There’s nothing more powerful than an idea. Think about what we find right in the beginning of Scripture: The idea that humans are created in the image of God. This idea has had as profound an impact for good in this world as any other idea ever thought up!

Jesus People are Idea People

In significant ways, followers of Jesus are idea-people. The Gospel isn’t simply an idea, of course, but rather a message about things that happened in a real place at a real time — that Christ was crucified, that he died and was buried, and that he rose again on the third day. This is more than an idea; it’s a fact of history that can reasonably be proven to be true. But there are many ideas that flow from this message: God loves humanity; God is Trinity; We are saved by grace through faith; We don’t have to fear death and can have hope for a resurrection; We should love others just as God has loved us. The ideas that the Gospel reveals form the heart and soul of the Christian faith. We lose those precious ideas if we change or compromise the message of the Gospel. We all know that nature hates a vacuum, so we need to be aware of new ideas that will replace the old ones. If we lose the Gospel, what ideas will we come to believe? And how will those beliefs shape our words, actions, and desires? If we lose the Gospel, will we become more like Jesus, or less like Him?

For a long time it seemed that we were living in The Technological Age, a time of progress and promise for the human race made possible by significant advancements in science and technology. Scientific preeminence and technological innovation were going to deliver humanity into its long sought utopia where, because of the development of medical treatments through the free exercise of scientific inquiry, there would be no more death, disease, or pain. In a similar vein, internet communication and digital capitalism would allow us to connect with others over vast distances, while simultaneously fulfilling our every desire — whether material, sexual, or existential — so that there will no longer be any mourning or crying or sadness in the human experience. At long last, in The Technological Utopia, the old order of things will have passed away, and all things shall have become new. The Technological Age was creating the world as it should be, the final destination of mankind’s long and bloody journey into civilization.

We are no longer living in The Technological Age. The utopian claims of science and technology were always dubious, but we should not be surprised that they failed to deliver on their promises. Such utopianism should always be treated with great skepticism. Rather, the twist in the plot is that The Technological Age has resurrected an old monster, one that perhaps never truly died, but had at least been cast into the sea. This monster, running like a viral parasite through the same fibers that were meant to unite humanity, has now arisen in a form far greater than we could have ever imagined, leaving us all dumbfounded in awe, wonder, and terror. This monster has swallowed up The Technological Age, crushing the advancements of science and Enlightenment understanding in its iron jaws. It is a voracious beast with endless appetite, filled with bluster and rage and fire. The Technological Age is dead. We are living in what it has created, and by what it was killed: The Identitarian Epoch.

This Cultural Moment is an important podcast hosted by John Mark Comer and Mark Sayers, each of whom pastors a church in cities that are thoroughly post-Christian — Portland and Melbourne, respectively. This is a podcast that I believe every follower of Jesus ought to be listening to very carefully and discussing with like-minded people. In the audio above, I, along with my wife Breena and good friend Corey, discuss the first three episodes of the podcast. I highly recommend that you listen to all three episodes of the podcast first, and then listen to our discussion, which we hope will help you get a sense for how to apply the deep topics covered in This Cultural Moment to your own life and circumstances. Below you’ll find a brief of sketch of the big ideas from the first three episodes.

Three Types of Culture

First Culture: A pagan, pre-monotheistic (for our purposes, pre-Christian) culture. Examples would be Europe before the Christian missionaries, Ancient Greece, etc. These cultures were very spiritual in that they believed in many gods and a strong connection between the material realm and the spiritual realm.

Second Culture: A Christian, or otherwise monotheistic culture. Examples of this would be Europe until the First World War, North America after colonization, or Israel from the time of the Exodus.

Third Culture: A post-Christian, materialistic, and thoroughly secular culture that defines itself against Christianity, specifically. Examples of this would be pretty much all of white, Western culture.

Cultural Colonization

The mission movements that transitioned First Cultures to Second Cultures often included more than just the naked preaching of the Gospel. Rather than simply declaring Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior of all mankind, these missionary movements imported Western culture into Eastern and Southern contexts. We now have a word for this: “colonization.”

Just as some missionary activity colonized indigenous cultures (which was a huge mistake and sin), we now see that the Third Culture colonizes followers of Jesus. Well-intentioned believers who want to live “on mission” for Jesus very often find themselves transformed to be more like their unbelieving friends rather than helping those friends to become disciples of Jesus.

Relevance isn’t Enough

Mark Sayers describes the period from the late 1980s to the late 2010s as “the relevance period,” in which Christians tried to make the church cool enough to be accepted by the world. What we have learned in the time since then, however, is that the direction of the world has diverged significantly and accelerated rapidly away from Christianity. Whatever similarity there used to be between society and the Church (particularly in the West), it is long gone. Digital capitalism and the sexual revolution have seen to that.

In order to reach people in a post-Christian culture, it’s just not enough to be relevant. Relevance isn’t bad, it’s just not adequate. There is nothing that we can do to make the Gospel cool enough for a culture that defines itself by its rejection of the Gospel.

Discipleship & Spiritual Formation Must Come Before Mission

We cannot send people out into a post-Christian culture unformed. They need to be like Jesus, or they will be eaten alive. A significant problem that we experience in our churches today is the almost complete disappearance of the spiritual practices. For many young Christians the Bible is an obstacle to faith rather than the primary aid to faith that it has been for so many generations before us. Sayers and Comer agree that most of the believers in their churches are deeply anxious, relationally dysfunctional, have a sexual ethic shaped by the post-Christian culture, and are genuinely addicted to their phones.

This is a major problem for the Church, and there is no reason to believe that our leaders are any better off than the average monthly attender. Comer and Sayers sketch a solution that begins with discipling the leaders of your congregation. From there, because of widespread smartphone addiction, we have to reteach people how to live in community and practice the basic spiritual disciplines. The secret to formation isn’t a secret — we just have to do the things the Church has always done. We have to obey Jesus, do the disciplines, and have community.

If you have listened to the first three episodes of This Cultural Moment I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section. You don’t have to have listened to our discussion on it, but it might be helpful. If you haven’t discovered it yet, please take a listen and then come back and tell us what you think!