A common diagnosis of modernity’s ills, tracing back at least as far as Max Weber, identifies disenchantment as the core ailment. It goes something like this: the forces of the modern world—Enlightenment liberalism, industrialization, bureaucratic governments, scientific and technological advancements—have flattened human existence to that of mere material, utility, and taste. Man has come of age and can explain everything by natural causes, can do anything with the push of a button, and can even create his own identity through authentic self-expression. But what was supposed to be a liberating power over nature and even over ourselves has not led to freedom but to slavery; not to meaning but to despair.
The solution, we are frequently told, is rediscovering mystery and wonder and re-enchanting the world. But in The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity, Carl Trueman argues this is an inadequate response. Enchantment doesn’t get to the root of the problem; it treats the symptom, not the cause. As Trueman explains, enchantment must be rooted in a true vision of reality with its mutually reinforcing truths about God, man, and the world. If it is not rooted in orthodox theology and anthropology, you open yourself to false enchantments of one kind or another. It might be the enchantments of self, aggrandized by the digital ecosystem and a latent transhumanism. It might be the Strange Rites of modern American spirituality or the Faustian bargain of psychedelics. It might even be religious experiences of beauty of one kind or another. But even such religious enchantment needs to be rooted in something more. Trueman explains:
It may be a captivating aesthetic experience to attend a Latin Mass. . . . The Book of Common Payer might give a certain pleasure on Sunday morning. The great architecture and art that Christianity inspired might enrich one’s life. But if one does not believe that the religious dogmas that are the basis of these things are true and not merely inspiring fictions, then that is not a faith that will prove durable as the wider culture exhausts itself. Indeed, it merely perpetuates one of the most distinctive and problematic aspects of modern culture: the confusion of taste for truth. (xv)
This is one reason Trueman finds the disenchantment thesis only half correct. But the other and perhaps more substantial reason that he finds the thesis incomplete is because it fails to account for the willful deconstruction of sacred values, places, symbols, and even the body itself. Where disenchantment could be seen as a flattening of human existence and imagination, desecration is an active destruction and intentional transgression of the same. Hence, his diagnosis is that of the desecration of man, and his cure is the consecration of man. And it just so happens that by reconsecrating man, you get thrown in as a bonus the true enchantment of life that aligns with reality as revealed by God.
What It Means to Be Human: The Defining Question of Our Time
In recounting several cultural flashpoints and recent events, Trueman makes his case that our problem is an anthropological one, evident on both the left and the right. “Indeed, the pressure on what it means to be human does not just come from the trans lobby and the queer theorists favored by the left,” he writes. “The emergence of interest in eugenics and transhumanism on the right is also emblematic of this cultural moment” (2). I appreciated Trueman’s willingness at several points in the book to highlight problems on left and right like this. If those of a more conservative Christian bent think that the political and cultural right is working from a normative view of human nature rooted in orthodox Christian doctrine, they are naïve, deceived, or aren’t paying attention. As Ross Douthat famously quipped back in 2016, “if you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.” This is a real danger here that Christians hitch their wagons to an essentially Nietzschean political project that has more in common with the critical theories of the Left than with the Christianity of the Bible.
Returning to what it means to be human, Trueman further explains that any ethical or moral question implies the deeper anthropological one: What is man? And to answer the anthropological question truthfully, we must also answer the theological one: Who is God? Man is, after all, created in God’s image. And being a creature of God entails a set of limits, obligations, and ends—the very things that grate against modern intuitions of personhood and identity. Which leads right into Trueman’s signature move in recounting a compelling narrative of intellectual history and technological change that together formed the social imaginary enabling the development of expressive individualism. For anyone familiar with Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (2020), or Strange New World (2022), or To Change All Worlds (2024), some of this will be familiar terrain, though here he focuses this narrative on theological anthropology and the desecration of man.
Trueman’s man of the hour is Nietzsche’s madman, who saw the Enlightenment project’s endgame: “God is dead and we have killed him.” But it was more than the death of God. He predicted it would slowly eat away at the basis for morality and meaning, eventually leading to the rise of the Übermensch who forges his own morals and standards and is bold enough to transgress the sacred boundaries of religion, tradition, and culture to liberate himself from Christianity’s “slave morality.” In Trueman’s idiom, the death of God leads to the desecration of man, but there will be a time lag between the two as cultures run on the fumes of a slowly dissipating Christian morality.
But now the Madman’s time has come. Technological change, philosophical ideas, and cultural narratives have combined to make a potent cocktail in which the self-made self is plausible, palatable, and possible. And anything that gets in the way of such self-expression must be destroyed, deconstructed—desecrated. Trueman goes on to show how this faulty view of humanity is especially evident in the realms that most profoundly touch our unique nature as humans and intersect with our deepest moments of religious ritual and meaning: sex, reproduction, and death.
Diagnosis: The Desecration of Man
Focusing on sex, reproduction, and death to tell the story of the desecration of man is very effective as Trueman martials example after example from past and present.
When it comes to sex, the Sexual Revolution is exhibit A, and rightly so. For it didn’t just change norms around sex, it changed the ends of sex and what it was understood to be. The official cultural narrative around sex went from being something unitive and procreative to being something recreational—a way to express and fulfill one’s identity. This shift normalized the objectification of one’s sexual partner, and, as pornography was mainstreamed and intensified with ubiquitous online access, objectification became a way of life.
The Sexual Revolution also carried with it a rejection of sexed embodiment, especially with its unique burdens and obligations for females. Instead of embracing, honoring, and protecting these distinctives, attempts were made to erase them, as women were shoehorned into the male template when it comes to approaching sex and reproduction. The female body was medicalized as if fertility were a disease women needed liberation from.
Technological changes made perfect, ahem, bedfellows with the Sexual Revolution, making sex “safe” and sterile thanks to contraception, antibiotics, and legalized abortion. But these technologies were only the beginning, as IVF and surrogacy have since raised a new series of questions about sexual ethics and what it means to be human. Procreation has been severed from the act of sex. And that rupture, even when well-intentioned, carries with it a very real danger: “Once children are the outcome of a technical medical procedure that manufactures life, the tendency to start seeing them as consumer products, as another form of commodity, is greater and greater” (128).
A third area where Trueman highlights the intersection of technology, faulty anthropology, and desecration is in our culture’s treatment of death. In one trajectory, we’ve desecrated death by trying to control it through euthanasia. The reign of the autonomous self perhaps reaches its apogee in the one who can choose death as an individual right. But this choosing of death is a desecration, an attempt to play God, and reflects a devaluing of that person’s humanity.
In another trajectory, death has been outsourced to professionals: hospitals, morgues, funeral homes, and crematoriums. Because of this, we very rarely encounter a dead body or experience the intimate and sacred care for a person nearing death. Even funerals are frequently done without the intact body of the deceased and have morphed into celebrations of life. All of this is dehumanizing in a certain sense and makes it harder to process death and grieve appropriately. Death should hurt. It is the last enemy that will be destroyed. And this, Trueman reminds us, “points to a key truth of what it means to be human: We are not the free-floating selves of the modern cultural imagination but rather beings who are made to exist in relationships with others who are persons, not objects or things. As with sex, so with death: The modern attitude which seeks to trivialize it crashes up against the reality of our experience of it” (174).
Cure: The Consecration of Man
Trueman then moves from diagnosis to cure, proposing the re-consecration of man structured around three Cs: creed, cult, and code. The consecration of man requires actually believing in the Christian creed. We cannot just have the cultural trappings of Christianity without its actual substance. It’s not enough to reclaim cultural Christianity; we must reclaim its reality. Otherwise, we’re just back to matters of taste, which contributed to our problems in the first place. Christianity only matters if it’s true—if Jesus really lived, died, and rose from the dead in history. If he didn’t, St. Paul and Nietzsche were right: those who believe in Christ are most of all to be pitied.
The consecration of man also requires a robust cult, an embodied liturgical and sacramental life shared in person with a community of believers. Acts of corporate worship like confession, prayer, singing, preaching, and frequent reception of communion all anchor us in our true nature and identity as creatures of God made in God’s image and remade in Christ. This is how our imagination and desires are formed and shaped in accord with the true story of the world and our ultimate telos in communion with God and one another in the new and perfected Kingdom.
Connected to the creed and the cult is the code, the moral standards that must accompany the doctrinal beliefs and worship practices. The code of Christian ethics brings the proper anthropology to bear in the world, treating human beings as they truly are: creatures of inestimable worth made in God’s image. Creed, cult, and code provide a mutually reinforcing loop that reminds us who we are and who God is and offer a way to overcome the desecration of man.
If desecration is the pervasive problem our day, then nothing less than consecration is the answer. We have imagined ourselves to be gods and have ironically reduced ourselves to mere dust. That is a moral problem. It cannot be solved simply by “re-enchanting” our world by acknowledging that nature is mysterious or that there are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamed of in our consumerist philosophies of life. Consecration is not a feeling or an emotional response to something; it has a distinct dogmatic, cultic, and moral shape, with all three elements standing in nonnegotiable connection to each other. Reading Tolkien, talking about beauty, and respecting nature may all be good and worthy things. But they do not consecrate us, and by themselves offer no truly substantial answer to our plight. Only a renovation of the heart, redirecting it toward God, is able to do that. And that only takes place in the context of the church, where humanity by creed, cult, and code can once again realize what being made in the image of God truly means. (209-210)
For Further Exploration
This book is classic Trueman and is yet another important contribution of his for our time. Trueman has his finger on the pulse of cultural tides and has the theological and historical acumen to faithfully interpret it. In offering areas for further exploration, there is always a risk of wishing the author wrote a book he didn’t set out to write, but nonetheless, I think the book sets the stage nicely for the following:
First, I would have liked to see a direct engagement with the different proponents of re-enchantment today. Is there a difference between the re-enchantment theses of, say, Rod Dreher, Richard Beck, or Jonathan Pageau, compared to, say, John Vervaeke, Ian McGilchrist, or those desiring a cultural Christianity? And what about Christian storytellers like Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw? I think fruitful dialogue could be had between these varied strains of thought.
Second, there is a brief section in the book where Trueman acknowledges how Luther and the other Reformers contributed to an inward turn in spirituality thanks to their doctrine of justification by faith, which was a factor in the rise of individualism. I expected more nuance here, especially coming from a Reformed theologian and historian like Trueman. When it comes to Trueman’s framework that he employs throughout the book, one rooted in human limits, obligations, and ends, my hunch is that Luther embraced and proclaimed these just as strongly as any Roman Catholic theologian of his day. Luther was anything but a modern individualist. One of Luther’s most well-known works, his short treatise On Christian Liberty, clearly establishes that the Christian lives paradoxically as a perfectly free Lord of all in relation to salvation coram deo (before God), but is the dutiful servant of all in relation to one another coram mundo (before the world). Perhaps most significant of all, Luther championed the doctrine of vocation, which elevated all human work and life. Instead of viewing true spirituality through the lens of monasticism, which actually could be seen as a shirking of the familial and communal obligations and limits of everyday life, he reawakened the spirituality of the common man, where God was at work through each person as they served their neighbor. And all these vocations were God-given responsibilities you could not get out of, as you lived your life in what Luther refers to variously in his writings as estates, stations, orders, and—using a term that grates against our modern sensibilities—hierarchies. “The works of God,” Luther explains, “are divided into three hierarchies: the household, the government, and the church” (446). The concept takes some getting used to because, as contemporary Lutheran theologian Oswald Bayer says, “it implies the antithesis of the mobility”—and I would add autonomy—“which is characteristic of modern society” (125). I know this wasn’t the point of Trueman’s book nor of this short section, and I’ve read some of Trueman’s other work on the Reformation where he fleshes this out. Perhaps all he was saying here was that in correcting against one error, the Reformers risked setting their inheritors on the road to another error. Nonethless, making that clear and providing this type of nuance is especially necessary on this issue in our day since Roman Catholic apologists and historians frequently make a strawman of Luther and blame him for all the problems of modernity.
Third, in Trueman’s treatment of how we moderns have sanitized and outsourced death, there was a conspicuous absence. His discussions of death, funeral practices, and the desecration of our humanity through assisted suicide was a perfect set-up for discussing the rise of embalmment, cremation, aquamation, and other technological treatments of human bodies that one could argue literally desecrate—even incinerates or liquifies—the body. Furthermore, the origins of such practices frequently were intentionally transgressive rejections of the Christian confession of the goodness of the body and its final raising on the last day. This is something Christians historically took very seriously and is worth reflecting on more fully in our day: does what we do with the dead unintentionally contradict the Christian confession?
Of course, much more could be said about this book. Trueman diagnoses our anthropological problems accurately, paints a beautiful picture of the givenness of human nature and the goodness of embracing embodied limits and communal obligations, and most of all points us toward the fullest expression of human identity that awaits us in the New Kingdom where we will fully know and be known, love and be loved, by God and our fellow human creatures.
Image Credit: Francis Bacon, “Portrait of a Man With Glasses I” (1963)
