The End of "The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self"

I've posted upwards of a dozen times on Carl Trueman's book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. While I've made a few observations on what Trueman should have included, his book is a fine piece of cultural history. In his "Concluding Unscientific Prologue," Trueman summarizes his argument and then gives his readers a few thoughts on potential ways forward, at least for those who find themselves increasingly on the outs with the contemporary social imaginary and its increasingly coercive implications.

Trueman focuses his summary comments on three points. I will address two: the secularity of the contemporary liberal order and its focus on sexual expressivism. The liberalism that began to take hold in the second half of the seventeenth century turned its back on the long-held belief in the West that a largely unified Christian faith was crucial to a stable political order. At least in retrospect, the Continental Wars of Religion and the English Civil War were attributed to religious zealots who sought to impose a totalizing version of Christianity on a people and a polity. That this argument was incomplete was unimportant to the efforts to re-form the political order on the authority and consent of the governed. The will of the people gradually supplanted reason and revelation. And it is the triumph of the will that came successively to characterize the political, the economic, and the social orders. And now, Trueman concludes, the "culture of expressive individualism and of choice of identity is ours too." (386) In short, if the State and the market must recognize the unfettered individual will, then so must the rest of us. And nowhere is the duty of recognition of the other more acute than with respect to sexual identity.

Trueman acknowledges that this demotic turn has brought some goods, e.g., the emphasis that modern culture "places on the inherent dignity of the individual." (386) Yet,

The break with the past that modernity represents ... cuts us off from any agreed-on transcendent metaphysical order by which our culture might justify itself... We both are isolated from the past, where ends transcending the individual were assumed, and are left free floating in the present.* [In other words,] the reason why ethical and political discussions are so acrimonious  and futile today is that there is no commonly accepted foundation on which such discussions might constructively take place. (388)

Even for his largely traditional audience, Trueman tamps down expectations for a return to a Christian-dominant social order. And he is quick to point a finger at complicit Protestant in the United States that have for many decades "failed to reflect the historical concerns of the church in its liturgy and practice ... and [in] the manner in which it has frequently adopted the aesthetics of the present moment in its worship." (389) So, gay marriage is here to stay.

Otherwise for the future, Trueman raises several antinomies that remain in play: that the social costs of the sexual revolution remain inordinately borne by women, the difficulty of defining consent where there are disparities of power (for a fascinating discussion of the multiple notions of consent that are in play in different fields of the law, listen to an episode of The Private Law Podcast here), and transgenderism. None of these as-yet unresolved issues, however, bode well for the future of religious freedom. The scope for religious practices that are felt to transgress another's expressed identity is destined to shrink.

Finally, on a modestly more helpful note, Trueman concludes with three recommendations for churches in America that wish to hold to some form of essentialism and to reject the plasticity of the human self. First, such a church "should reflect long and and hard on the connection between aesthetics and her core beliefs and practices." (402) (By aesthetics Trueman means subordination of reason and truth to sympathy and empathy. In other words, subordinating stories to the Story. And to head off any misunderstanding, Trueman fully agrees that personal relationships must be compassionate but that compassion must appropriately be oriented to the good of the other.)

Second, the church must also be a community because community is crucial:

Each of us, in a sense, is the sum total of the network of relationships we have with others and with our environment. Yes, we possess a common human nature but hat nature has expressed--and does express--itself differently in different eras and cultures. (404, emphasis added)

Third, "Protestants need to recover both natural law and a high view of the body." (405) Hear, hear.†

In sum, to thrive in the contemporary age of expressive individualism, churches must "exist as a close-knit, doctrinally-bounded community that requires her members to act consistently with their faith and to be good citizens of the earthly city so far as good citizenship is compatible with faithfulness to Christ." (407) Amen.

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* For my thoughts from over a decade ago on the risks of an ungrounded foundation for human rights see Looking for Bedrock: Accounting for Human Rights in Classical Liberalism, Modern Secularism, and the Christian Tradition (here or here).

† For my observations on the theological legitimacy of natural law see God's Bridle: John Calvin's Application of Natural Law (here or here).