Southern Baptists and American Evangelicals
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 65, No. 2 - Spring 2023
Managing Editor: Malcolm B. Yarnell III
By Carl R. Trueman. Wheaton: Crossway, 2020, 432pp., $34.99.
Carl Trueman has written a sweeping intellectual history that chronicles the rise of the contemporary Western conception of what it is to be a human person. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is clearly written. Non-academics or those not familiar with the thinkers in the book will benefit from a close read. In addition, Truman’s ability to synthesize diverse intellectual traditions will provide professional philosophers, historians, and sociologists, among others, inspiration for further research in their fields. Finally, it is a necessary book. The church needs to engage current cultural debates with a nuanced understanding of the society it finds itself in. Not only so that we might love God with all our mind but so that we can love others.
In Part 1 the book begins with setting up theoretical scaffolding through an examination of Charles Taylor, Philip Rieff, and Alasdair MacIntyre. All three thinkers are referred to throughout the work as Trueman does an exceptional job of fulling the promissory notes he leaves in the text. He concludes Part 1 with the claim that “questions connected to notions of human identity…cannot be abstracted from broader questions of how the self is understood, how ethical discourse operates, how history and tradition are valued…and how cultural elites understand the content and purpose of art” (p. 102).
Part 2 is robust and perhaps the most ambitious and powerful of all the parts. Rousseau, Wordsworth, Shelly, Blake, Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin are examined to demonstrate that the roots of our contemporary attitudes of the self go deep into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is an important point, as crisis has a way of making us myopic in our understanding. Trueman is charitable with his handling of the texts and often is generous with his quotations. It his contention that during these times the Western world, or at least its political and social elite, lost their metaphysical bearings and what replaced it was a worldview where goodness is primarily a subjective matter and what is valued is whatever is psychologically fulling or pleasurable. In addition, he details how Christianity became the villain, as upending the church’s teaching on sexual ethics was seen as essential for psychological well-being.
Part 3 explains how the understanding of psychological well-being and our sense of identity became sexualized and then how sex became politicized. Trueman suggests that perhaps “Freud is actually the key figure in this book” (p. 203). The basis for this claim is that it is in Freud’s theories where the West began to imagine that we are sexual beings primarily and in sexual pleasure that we find utmost fulfillment. In the second chapter of part 3, The New Left and the Politization of Sex, Trueman persuasively demonstrates that sexual identity is now an essential part of our political space. Through the combination of Marxist thinking on oppression and the sexualization of the self, the New Left has succeeded in making sexual freedom central to our understanding of freedom simpliciter.
Trueman deploys his cultural analysis to three areas in Part 4: art, public ethics, and transgenderism. In these chapters he touches on surrealism, pornography, the ethics of Peter Singer, contemporary Supreme Court cases, campus protests, and the formation of the LGBTQ+ political movement. He ends the book with words of wisdom for the church and thoughts on the future.
There are opportunities for further research to fill in parts of Trueman’s argument. There are times when he does a fine job correlating the ideas of a thinker with a trend in contemporary society but where he also acknowledges that the line from the original works to present thought is not direct. For example, he writes “Few of the campus protesters of recent years may have read Marchuse, but the basic ideas that he promulgated have penetrated the popular consciousness in such a way that challenges to classical liberal thinking are commonplace and often well received” (p. 252). Correlation is not causation and so there is an opportunity to tell the stories of how the ideas highlighted by Trueman influenced culture, laying out the causal process by which they entered the zeitgeist. This is important not just for completion of the story but to explain the ways in which Western societies have differed in their absorption of these ideas. While the West is often treated as a monolith in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, a look at abortion laws in Europe and America or attitudes to campus protests in France and the United States will reveal a great deal of particularness as well in the ways in which different societies in the West have created the modern person.
