A sobering parable has haunted the modern conscience over the past century.
This tale begins with a group of atheists congregating in a European town square. Their conversations are pleasant and jovial, until their gathering is interrupted by the exclamations of a Madman. Carrying a lantern in the middle of the day, the man frantically asks the crowds where God has gone. When the atheists begin their ridicule of his antics, the deranged man concludes with sorrow that God is dead because “we have killed him.” Modern man has not only denounced God, but eradicated his presence from society, down to its foundations of reason and morality.
The crowd’s mockery quickly turns to incomprehension at the unconventional seer’s message. Sensing that his warning is falling upon deaf ears, he tosses his lantern to the ground, concluding that his time has not yet come. Western Civilization has yet to see the devastating consequences of severing man from his theistic foundation come to fruition, writes Nietzsche in The Gay Science.
According to Carl Trueman, the ghost of the Madman is back to haunt the public square, for his time has finally come.
The Desecration of Man is the next logical step in Carl Trueman’s historical, philosophical, and theological analysis of the cultural and moral issues confronting modern society. In The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Trueman tells the story of the rise of Romanticism, modern psychology, and the sexual revolution as man fully embraced expressive individualism in the form of radical autonomy with minimal restraints on gender identity and sexuality.1 In To Change All Worlds, Trueman traces the main perpetrators of this revolutionary change through the rise of critical theory and thinkers from Karl Marx to Herbert Marcuse.2 In The Desecration of Man, Trueman outlines the consequences of these ideas in three deeply human areas of life—sex, birth, and death.
The Desecration of Man has been published in turbulent times for Christians. Few altruisms guide morality in modern society today besides consent and the autonomy of the individual. A society obsessed with “reproductive health” justifies both abortion on demand and the “rise of wombs for rent” in surrogacy. There is a growing open embrace of any and all sexual abnormalities (including polygamy and pedophilia) as well as a comfortable acceptance of euthanasia and assisted suicide when life is deemed “no longer worth living.” These three streams together spell a grim outlook for the future of Western civilization. Clearly, the estimated value of human life continues to plummet as men and women regularly engage in practices that obscure what it means to be human.
There is a reason why Trueman’s work is titled The Desecration of Man. His argument is deeper than the abolition of man in the style of C. S. Lewis. Rather, Trueman sees in these contemporary practices and their corresponding ideologies actions of sacrilege. Today, modern society is desecrating man. According to Trueman, the language of desecration communicates “the profanation of all that is holy, that the murderer finds so exhilarating and that makes his crimes so addictive” (xii).
Two comments upon this observation are noteworthy. In committing deicide, man has obliterated the sacred canopy that Scripture asserts defines all of existence, including human nature. The desecration of God results in the desecration of self. Without God, man struggles to find an answer to that aching sense inside him that his life ought to have purpose, meaning, and significance, even if science and reason are unable to explain why.
Moreover, modern man does not merely reject this sacred framework. Rather, man has discovered that slaying gods is thrilling. Fallen man finds deep personal satisfaction in casting down God and the structures of his creation. This twin reality explains the paradox of men and women today reporting feeling the most “free” and “at peace with himself” while simultaneously “anxious,” “depressed,” and “insecure.” Man rejects God, but feels lost without him.
If Trueman is correct in diagnosing the spiritual malaise infecting modern culture as desecration, then the remedy is simple. He writes, “If the problem is desecration, then the answer is his consecration. . . . a return to deep-rooted commitment to Christianity—to its dogmas, to its cultic practices, and to its moral code” (xix). Cultural apologetics and Christian discipleship must recover an exegetical and theological basis for the moral foundation Western Civilization has destroyed. In this way, the church will find herself serving as an ark of refuge—the most pro-human, pro-life, pro-sex (according to God’s design), pro-man and pro-woman, and pro-human dignity institution in the rising flood of our secular society’s impending crisis of meaning and morality.
It is my hope that the description of Trueman’s argument above is sufficient to impress upon pastors, elders, and church members the importance of this book. Trueman is a true watchman on the wall, warning the church of the ideas and issues coming downstream from global centers of influence into elders’ meeting rooms and counseling offices. Ethical issues such as surrogacy and sexuality also make The Desecration of Man a fitting theological companion to a previously recommended work—Them Before Us.
While many elements of this work are worthy of commendation and consideration, I was struck by the many stories Trueman includes as he traces the logical conclusions of our society’s full embrace of atheism and materialism. He recounts how intellectuals are beginning to take the Christian faith more seriously, both in explaining the longevity and successes of Western Civilization as well as viewing Christianity as a legitimate belief system capable of providing a credible intellectual foundation for human existence, including in the realm of the sciences. It may be surprising to learn that Christianity’s status is rising in pockets of Western civilization, as atheism’s status has been decreasing.
Take Richard Dawkins, a world-renowned biologist largely responsible for the advance of New Atheism’s march through the academy and society over the past several decades. The God Delusion claimed to present a “scientific” and “rational” assessment of the irrationality of religion, leaving many professing believers with the “apparent” option of either holding onto their faith at the expense of reason, or walking away from Christ. Many young adults from Christian families began increasingly choosing the latter, to the heartbreak of their communities.
For this reason, it may be of interest to many Christians to hear of Dawkins’s recent fall from grace in the public eye. The claim that most species exist in sexually dimorphic forms of male and female is an essential fact of the discipline of biology. In 2024, Dawkins resigned from his position as honorary board member of the Freedom from Religion Foundation after the organization retracted an article asserting that gender was rooted in biology (178). Secularism, it seems, has turned upon one of its major proponents in the twenty-first century in the name of gender equality. Trueman quips in response, “In short, the science to which he has devoted his life [has been] reduced to ashes” (179).
Trueman’s reflections upon Dawkins’s present predicament are worth quoting at length:
Dawkins wants science—or that narrow strand of science that he favors—to be normative. But why should the body be granted such authority over the feelings or ambitions of the mind regarding sex and gender? If evolution posits no final cause, no goal to which everything is heading, then why grant any aspect of the status quo to the human body perennial normative science? Simply saying, “Science is true!” louder and louder is no answer to the question in this Hour of the Madman. . . . One cannot make the case for the absolute authority of science and then become uneasy when it leads to places you would rather not go. Indeed, I might apply one of the Madman’s questions to Dawkins at this point: What were you thinking when you unhitched the earth from the sun? (180–81)
In a way, Dawkins and modern society after him have fallen upon their own swords. In attempting to dethrone God and exalt man, they have lost all ability to discern any structure or meaning in the world deeper than their own preferences and strongly asserted opinions concerning how the world ought to be. Unwilling to live with the logical consequences of his position, it is poetic that Dawkins finds himself begrudgedly limping back toward the Christian faith he devoted his career attempting to discredit. Apparently, Dawkins has concluded that life without God and religion is dangerous, and Christianity is a cultural good for society (186). The acceptance of the basic premises of The God Delusion within our larger society may have inadvertently played a role in ending his career as a biologist.
Maybe it is the atheist, not the prophet in the streets, who was the madman after all.
