Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution
By Carl R. Trueman, Foreword by Ryan T. Anderson
Crossway, 2022. 208 pages.
Author and Theologian Carl Trueman has risen to prominence in recent years for his social and political commentary. The Englishman, Orthodox Presbyterian Church minister, and Grove City College professor articulates the postmodern American condition and explains philosophical thought leading to this social deconstruction. Strange New World is a condensed version for young people of his best-selling 2020 book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution.
A widening acceptance of transgenderism and the phrase “I feel like a man trapped inside a woman’s body” has come to be normalized, accepted, and coerced in the public sphere. Strange New World seeks to understand the present age so that the Church can respond.
Trueman identifies terms to conceptualize our present time, among the most important to the modern understanding of the self is its revolution to “expressive individualism.”
Coined by American scholar Robert Bellah, the term “expressive individualism” was defined as holding “that each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized.” (p. 22)
This is paired with philosophical thinkers, from Karl Marx to Fredrick Nietschze to Oscar Wilde, who helped shape the modern understanding of the self into viewing inner feelings as authoritative and rejecting human nature as having moral significance or responsibility.
The self becomes a “public performance” to be realized. As Trueman mentions in his sixth chapter, we have become “Plastic People” in a “Liquid World.” The self has become “plastic” where there is no higher calling, objective, or obligation from us; we create ourselves from our inmost desires. Likewise, the world is viewed to be nothing more than “raw material to be shaped by the human will” (pg. 95)
Psychologicalization of the self eventually led to a sexualization of psychology. Cultural understandings of the world came from thinkers such as psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (who furthered the notion that sex is foundational to human happiness and civilization), while Wilhelm Reich shifted the notion of political oppression from the physical to the psychological realm.
Trueman summarizes Reich’s philosophy and its implication towards expressive individualism:
“The authentic person is a sexual being, the one guided by the inner voice of (sexualized) nature, and the role of education is not to repress that for the purpose of personal formation but to liberate it for the purpose of self-expression” (pg. 84).
Since the modern self is identified with one’s inmost feelings, and philosophers have influenced culture to affirm that those inmost desires are inherently sexual, the self is defined by its sexual attitudes. As Trueman describes, sex is “no longer what we do, but who we are.”
Trueman explains the move from a sexualized psychology to the politicization of sex as:
“If a person is in some sense their sexual desires that they experience, then how society treats those desires is an extremely important political question.” (pg. 88)
Since the self has entered the psychological realm, so has politics. Words and ideas, even religion and speech can take on a “harmful” “dangerous” or “violent” disposition.
“The world where freedom of religion, let alone freedom of speech, is now regard[ed] by some (many?) as a problem for a free society rather than a basic foundation of the same is indeed a strange new world.” (pg 167)
The right to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” has changed meaning where happiness is tied to a sense of “personal, psychological well-being…” Affirming sexuality has become pivotal in the laws, public policy, and our public discourse.
From this description of the modern self in its modern condition, Trueman offers a perspective on how this culture has impacted the church, as well as offering a Christian perspective on how to react in Strange New World.
Trueman describes that the culture has influenced churches to be “happy.” This shallowness follows understandings of modern expressive individualism instead of operating within historical continuity by providing a place to “understand our misery.” In response to this, Trueman suggests that the Church should sing songs that holistically describe human emotions and turn to God. Likewise, the Church has adopted a sense that one should “choose” the church they attend based on qualities that they personally dislike or approve of. To remedy this, Trueman describes that one should attend a church based on theological conviction.
In light of this strange new age, Trueman suggests the Church react by teaching a biblical sense of what it means to be human amongst a different cultural narrative. Likewise, Trueman suggests a need to renew Protestant teaching on natural law and a theology of the body, while preaching a holistic story of the Bible.
Furthermore, Trueman suggests that the Church continues fulfilling its call by preaching the gospel and remaining focused on Christ. The Church should adopt a posture that is neither optimistic nor in despair but remains hopeful in Christ.
Comment by Bob on December 6, 2024 at 1:02 pm
Currently doing a study of this book. Great insights as well as a good refresher of how we got to where we are.
Comment by Diane on December 6, 2024 at 11:07 pm
I retired decades ago after more than 30 years teaching kindergarten. I worked closely with and observed hundreds of children, long before “transgender” was a word. When a four year old, identified as male on birth documents, walked into my classroom thirty years ago, I wasn’t prepared when students started coming to me in small groups within the first couple weeks of school. With puzzled expressions, they told me Brandon was telling them “I’m a girl” while they engaged in play. Never was it reported Brandon said, “I think I’m a girl”.
Down the hall, my colleague, also a kindergarten teacher, asked her students to draw a picture of what they wanted to be when they grew up. One boy drew himself as a ballerina.
On the opposite end of the hall was a nine year old child who couldn’t stay awake. Turned out, his body was exhausted as he was starting to go through male and female puberty. He was diagnosed intersex, with more than one X chromosome. He was given an IEP (individual education plan) that allowed his parents to send him to school a couple hours late so he could get the sleep he needed.
Long before “transgender” was part of our common “trending” vocabulary , there have always been children who are outside the boxes adults try to put them in. Brandon had already figured out a safe space to declare “I’m a girl”, not “I think I’m a girl” was among peers…Brandon knew that “I’m a girl” was a phrase rejected by authoritative adults. Brandon never told me or his parents this phrase. I suspect Brandon’s parents would not have been supportive. I did eventually talk briefly with Brandon and learned Brandon feared telling mom and dad because “they’d tell me I’m a boy”. Was Brandon transgender? I don’t know, teachers are not qualified to diagnose. Brandon socialized well, appeared happy, and was a strong learner. What I know is Brandon wasn’t pretending and like any other child the same age, was clear, not confused, about gender identity. Children that age intuitively know their gender and unless someone has told them to associate gender with their private parts, they don’t make that association. They just know who they are with certainty.
There is much we don’t know about gender identity – it seems to usually line up with body parts, but not always. I have fibromyalgia, well-established as a woman’s condition..when men are diagnosed with it, they’ve crossed over a gender boundary. I’ve known men with fibromyalgia and they’re embarrassed. It’s a trans experience – they have a women’s health issue through no choice of their own making. We know brains are sexed …gay men’s brains cross the gender line, their brain scans are similar to that of females. That, too, is in its own way a crossing or transitioning across biological sex boundaries. Our skeletons are sexed…and we now know that the Polish Revolutionary War hero Casimir Pulaski had a female skeleton…very likely, scholars believe he was intersex, between the sexes biologically.
As an educator with decades of experience, I know that trans children exist, albeit in very small numbers. There is a lot of gray we’re still learning about human beings, sex and gender. What I know is “God is Spirit” and spirits aren’t sexed or gendered. It is sufficient for my faith to believe in a Creator God who loves variations on a theme. Even evangelical Pat Robertson concluded that some people are indeed transgender – he came to that understanding as I did, by meeting people who sincerely know they’re not what’s on their birth certificate. I don’t understand why an element in our society is so negatively reactionary to such a small number in the population. We don’t react negatively to natural redheads, although biologically, they’re statistically abnormal – only about 1-2% of the human population. And Jesus wasn’t all hung up on these things either…when the sheep and goats are divided on judgment day, the sheep are those who clothed the naked, fed the hungry, visited the sick and those who’re in prison, gave drink to the thirsty. Nothing in there about biological sex or gender. Thank-you, Jesus.