Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
Carl Trueman is Professor of Biblical and Religious Studies at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. He earned his Master of Arts in the Classics from the University of Cambridge and his PhD in Church History from the University of Aberdeen. Professor Trueman has a distinguished and well-known career as both a teacher and an author, having published several books ranging from works on Reformation theology and history to biographies on figures such as John Owen and Martin Luther. More recently, he’s the author of the book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. That work led to the most recent of his works, and it’s that work we discuss today, Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution. Carl Trueman, welcome to Thinking in Public.
Carl Trueman:
Great to be here, Al. Thanks for having me on again.
Albert Mohler:
Very much appreciate you, our friendship through the years, and frankly, the ability to think through so many of the issues that you have so cogently addressed, not only in your first book, The Rise and Fall of the Modern Self, which can only be described as kind of a spectacular success in terms of starting a lot of the most healthy conversations in our midst, but in this new book. So, you’ve written on the rise and fall of the modern self, how does this new book, Strange New World, fit into that?
Carl Trueman:
Well, in part it’s something of a precis of the larger book. Ryan Anderson at the Ethics and Public Policy Center contacted me shortly after the longer book had come out and said, could I do something for DC staffers, something to get into the hands of people that they’d read on their commute? He said nobody’s going to read a 400-page book. At the same time, a lot of pastors had contacted me…
Albert Mohler:
They’ll just claim they had.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. A lot seem to have claimed they read it since. But I was also contacted by a number of pastors who were saying, “Is it possible to get this material in a form that we could do in Sunday schools or discussion groups at church?” So, the book had a twofold origin. It does actually contain some new material. Obviously, I’ve thought about a few things since the first book was written, and we had the summer of 2020 between the submission of the manuscript and the publication of the big book, which also raised a lot of new questions. So, there’s some new material in it as well, but it’s really designed to be more accessible to the layperson or the busy person who doesn’t have time to read a 400-page book.
Albert Mohler:
Well, all 400 pages were well worth the read, but that’s even more true in terms of this shorter work, Strange New World. And you also focus on, I think, what a lot of people would immediately understand and about which they’re already very concerned, and that is the sexual revolution. And these days, I guess I’ve just been looking at some of the stuff I’ve written and presented in radio, academic lectures, and The Briefing, and all the rest, and I’ve just noted about 20 years ago, I had to start talking about the sexual revolution in general and the LGBTQ revolution specifically.And we’re going to talk about how that happened.
But I want to get back to something that I think is as current as anything we could talk about as a headline controversy, and that’s the notion of “the self”. So let’s just have some fun here. You entitled your first book, The Rise and Fall of the Modern Self. That implies there is a modern self, different than whatever came before. I’m not loading the gun, we’ll let you shoot it here. But this idea of the self is necessary. I mean, we assume, on good grounds, that a part of the imago Dei is this sense of self, a sense of self that dogs and cats and tigers don’t have, but that human beings do have. So, what is that self?
Carl Trueman:
Well, bottom line is that the self is self-understanding. It’s how we think and imagine ourselves to be relative to the world around us. Human beings have always had an inner space. We’ve always had this ability for self-reflection. If you read the Psalms, the Psalms are full of emotions. They’re full of the Psalmist reflecting on who he is, where he fits into the world that he finds himself, how he experiences that world. The key thing, I think, for the modern self is the level of authority we’ve come to grant to that inner space.
I use as an illustration to draw this out, think of transgenderism, which is perhaps the most extreme example of modern selfhood we are currently witnessing. If you’d gone to the doctor 150 years ago and said you’re a woman trapped in a man’s body, the doctor would’ve said, “That’s a problem. It’s a problem of your mind. We need to bring your mind into conformity with your body.” If you go to a doctor and say that today, the doctor will say, “It’s a problem. It’s a problem of your body. We need to bring your body into conformity with your mind.”
If you juxtapose those two scenarios, what you see is a culture that has shifted dramatically towards seeing our inner emotions, our inner convictions, our inner psyche as being the foundation of who we are, an external reality as having to bow or conform to that. So, the modern self is one that prioritizes inner feelings and is, I would say, dramatically impatient with external authorities, even now the authority of our own body.
Albert Mohler:
Or even the reality of the world around us, of which our body is a part. You know, as I lecture on this, I often point to this emergence and redefinition of the word authenticity, because if we had talked about the self as being authentic in any time other than in the modern construct, then we would talk about the self rightly aligning itself with objective reality. And as a matter of fact, that’s pretty much the standard fare of at least the Western understanding of the self, the self in Western cultures. But this modern idea of authenticity is that the authenticity is grounded only in the self, reflecting on the self, in order to project the self.
Carl Trueman:
Yes. And you can see this, get good illustrations of this from philosophies of education, of course. But I went to a British grammar school, very traditional boys’ school, and to put it somewhat facetiously, the purpose of my education was the school took on board individuals, crushed our individuality and turned us into members of the team. It’s why rugby was important in the winter and cricket in the spring. Team sports, you were part of a team—that was the purpose of education, to take little savages and turn us into good members of society’s team.
Now, of course, the purpose of education is increasingly, at least explicitly stated, as allowing children to express themselves. I watched a discussion recently on the television about a school attempting to reinstate school uniforms. And one of the parents made the comment to the effect of, “Why can’t we let the children express themselves through their clothing?” To the teachers at my school, that sentiment would’ve been incomprehensible. The answer would’ve been, “Because that’s not the purpose of education, self-expression is not the purpose of education. It is turning you into part of the team.” Whereas now education is all about allowing the individual to flourish as the individual. And that’s a reflection of the aspirations of society relative to modern selfhood.
Albert Mohler:
You know, one of the modern sociologists of reality refers to the modern, or what we might call after the modern or postmodern sense of reality as a liquid modernity. And I think the self is turning liquid as well. And we see that with, as you mentioned, the transgender revolution most graphically, but we also see it in modern people who seem to invent themselves and reinvent themselves every 24 to 36 months. You know, you talk about how children dress. Well, we kind of expect changes in a sense of the self between say ages 10 and 13 and 16, but now we’ve got 30, 40, and 50-year-olds playing this game.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah, constantly reinventing themselves. Of course, it’s an image projected in pop culture. I always think about Madonna in some ways as the great harbinger of our present age. She was the great master, or perhaps mistress, I suppose a better term, she’s a woman, but the great genius of reinvention in the ’80s, ’90s, and on into the 2000s. She seemed to have a new image or persona every six to 12 months and marketed herself very effectively. The fashion industry is predicated on us reinventing ourselves with great frequency.
One should also add the broader, I think, social framework to this as well, that there is a sense in which, you pointed to liquid modernity a few moments ago, the self is liquid also because the world in which we live is constantly changing. It’s not always our choice to reinvent ourselves. Actually, the old, external markers by which we would’ve identified ourselves and had a sense of self, they’re constantly changing now. The institutions that we look to for solidity are no longer solid.
Albert Mohler:
Robert Gordon, the very well-known economist has made the point, and he’s not directly addressing what we’re discussing here, but it’s directly relevant, and discusses the fact there had to be certain technological means of allowing this kind of liquid modernity or this kind of very flexible authenticity-centered self, and one of those is the ability to move. So, in other words, if you’re grounded in a village, it’s really hard to reinvent yourself every six months, because everyone in the village knows exactly who you are. They know who your mom and dad are, and all the relations. But we now live in a society in which people are ripped out of that and, frankly, cannot only reinvent themselves every two or three years or whatever they choose, but they can actually just move and become someone else in their own minds.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. The whole world is kind of Alaska now. The old self can disappear into the wilderness. And clearly I’m an immigrant. You can tell by my accent, I’m not from Pittsburgh or Philadelphia. I, too, am the beneficiary, I suppose, of modernity in that sense, in that I’ve come to America and been a very different person than I would’ve been if I’d stayed in the United Kingdom. Technology absolutely facilitates this, this liquidity of the self at every level. And again, I mentioned transgenderism earlier as the most extreme example of the modern self. Transgenderism is only really imaginable in a technological world. The doctor of 150 years ago had no choice but to give the answer that the problem is your mind, not your body, because there was nothing he could do with the body. Now we tricked ourselves, I think, into thinking our bodies are just stuff. We can manipulate our bodies and turn a man into a woman.
Albert Mohler:
Well, again, as you well know, and affirm, the limitations of that are pretty clear, and the most fundamental limitation on that is it can’t change the genetic code. And so I was in a debate a few years ago and I simply said, “Look, it doesn’t even really matter, in one sense, how our debate turns out, because if indeed this society is to pass away and some successor society were to come and dig up an archeological dig in our graves, it will show XX and XY, and long after the gravestones are long removed, it’s going to say XX and XY.” And so, I mean, that’s just been so much a part of it.
You know, another thing that strikes me, and your own personal background, especially in the UK, can speak to this. The more I think about this, the more I think that the idea of the self follows a narrative that especially emerged, and you could say even in revolutionary, colonial North America, but beyond that, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when someone who might be, say, fixed in a class system in Europe could come to the United States and with enough ingenuity, enough money, or just, frankly, enough self-confidence could kind of all of a sudden emerge as Count this or the Earl of that, in a way that couldn’t happen in Europe. So we live in a society that kind of hyper accentuates all this.
Carl Trueman:
Yes. I agree. I think the old class system that I grew up with and that sort of, if anything, has messed me up, I think it’s the British class system. The old British class system was kind of fixed because originally it was tied to land, of course, going back to the geographical thing. The British class system was very fixed. And as that has broken down, as we’ve had immigration to the United Kingdom, or as people have emigrated to United States, that kind of reinvention, that kind of social mobility, all plays into the way we intuit the world. And I think intuitively now we think of the world as a place of obvious change, of obvious fragility, of obvious liquidity, in a way that our ancestors would not have done. And America’s a great harbinger of that. And of course, one of the ironies is that’s not an unqualified bad thing. We like freedom, we like social mobility, but all of these things also come with challenges and drawbacks as well.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. And that’s kind of where I’m headed, because there’s a sense in which that American ethos, and you might say the modern ethos, was about liberating people from unjust constraints. And so the fact that, and by the way, Americans love to watch Downton Abbey, but they all think they would be living upstairs.
Carl Trueman:
Of course. My ancestors were definitely downstairs, born out in the fields.
Albert Mohler:
The vast majority would’ve been downstairs or worse, in terms of economic location. And so there’s a sense in which there’s a just impulse of liberation, but that has been now extended without any limits, including the limits of ontology, of male and female.
Carl Trueman:
Yes. I think you’re right. When you go back to the Founders, I know there’s a huge debate about to what extent were the Founders Christians, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. One thing I think you can say about the Founders is that all of them had shared in common some moral vision. They assumed that there was a moral structure to the universe. They might have disagreed on whether that was grounded in the Trinitarian God or a Unitarian God or a Deistic God. There may have been some theological differences, but as far as I read them, they share a common moral vision.
And that makes the pursuit of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it means that has a shape. They saw that as having limits, as having a shape. The problem is, of course, once you reach a point in society where that shared moral vision has been so attenuated, or has even disappeared, that there is no political, in the true sense of the word, consensus on it, then life, liberty, and particularly the pursuit of happiness, become horribly, horribly subjective and plastic things, and basically subject to who shouts loudest, and who has their hands on the levers of power.
Albert Mohler:
Right. Yeah. And from the materialist interpreters of the Constitution in the early 20th century to, frankly, Marxism in all its forms and current critical theory, the explicit claim is that ending those previous moral agreements, or that moral consensus, is exactly what’s necessary to liberate humanity.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. And that’s the big problem with, I think, all species of critical theory, that critical theory is exactly, we would say back in the UK, critical theory “does exactly what it says on the tin”. It’s critical. It’s really a process of breaking down, of tearing down. It doesn’t have a positive vision. And that’s why, when you look at the Black Lives Matter webpage, and you try to find out what the positive vision that’s being posited is, there isn’t really one. They can tell you where injustice lies, but they can’t tell you what justice looks like. Because of course, as soon as you prescribe what justice looks like…
Albert Mohler:
It’s someone’s understanding of justice.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. Yeah. You render yourself liable to critical theoretical approaches.
Albert Mohler:
Right. And that’s the reason why people need to understand that when you talk about, for instance, critical race theory, the R is arbitrary. It’s critical theory, and you could insert just about anything including, as we will discuss, sex and gender. And it’s the approach of critical theory that’s particularly toxic, and, by the way, was intended to be. Critical theory was never intended to be constructive. It was intended merely to be destructive on the way to something else to be negotiated in the future.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. On the way to a utopia, which by definition can’t be defined, but “we’ll know it when we see it” kind of thing. It’s… Yeah.
Albert Mohler:
Well, without taking this too far, I would argue that a lot of the critical theories, actually, are Marxist without a utopia. There is no utopia because it’s kind of a surrender to the fact that all that’s left is what Karl Marx himself referred to as “the ruthless critique”.
Carl Trueman:
Yes. And this is why, I mean, Georg Lukács, the Hungarian Marxist, talked about the Frankfurt School as the “Grand Hotel Abyss”.
Albert Mohler:
Right. That’s exactly right. Yeah.
Carl Trueman:
He saw the critical theorists, really, as staring into a great black hole. And Theodor Adorno, one of the founders of critical theory, one of the things I appreciate about him is his pessimism, if you like.
Albert Mohler:
And his honesty.
Carl Trueman:
As an Augustinian, I can feel some sympathy with his pessimism.
Albert Mohler:
Yes. And as an Augustinian shaped by Christian theology and that Augustinian tradition, we can understand the rejection of a utopia. But the biblical promise is something better than utopia.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And that’s where ultimately an Augustinian is pessimistic for this age, but has to be hopeful for the rest of time.
Albert Mohler:
That’s right. And confident, yes, and grounded, all the things that the modern self are not. I think of a suggestion that the self now has to be preceded by something. And so, you have Michael Sandel with the encumbered and the unencumbered self, or you have the Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, with the notion of the buffered self. So, you can’t really even talk about the self anymore. Now you’ve got to talk about what variety of the self some modern thinker is bringing forward.
Carl Trueman:
Yes. And that’s where you get into the plethora of options we have out there. Do we define ourselves in terms of race? Do we define ourselves in terms of sexual desire? Do we define ourselves in terms of our nationality? I mean, you can pick and choose now exactly how you want to identify yourself, because we’ve lost that common grounding, I think, in the public space that allows us to feel a commonality with our fellow men and women.
Albert Mohler:
If I am asked the most surprising development of, say, the last 20 or 30 years, but particularly of the last decade, I would say that the most stunning development is the jump of so many of these ideologies and critical theories, in particular into public discourse. Because as I was a first-year college student, I had two cultural Marxists as professors. They were both very young. They had both been trained by Frankfurt School theorists, and one of them at Berkeley, and they just showed up in the college campus and were filled with this. And the first thing I thought was there is no way that that becomes common conversation. It is so analytical, so theoretical, that it’s just very difficult, not to mention pessimistic. But I think historical events of the last several years have, all of a sudden, created the entree for these ideologies to enter into, I mean, the conversation of 16-year-olds.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. It’s remarkable. I think there’s no single cause for this. I mean, historically I think 9/11 is something of a watershed in America for the relationship of religion in general to the public square. Technology has massively liquified where we locate our identity. I raise it in the new book. I didn’t deal with it in the old book, but in the new book, I play around with that phrase, “He pledged allegiance to ISIS online.” It fascinates me that we had in the middle years of the last decade, young men, often from very affluent and comfortable and well-integrated backgrounds in British society, pledging allegiance to this online community that they clearly felt more affinity with than the people they sat next to in the classroom, or at the football game, or something like this. We see national identities being watered down.
And also with critical theory, of course, while the jargon is rebarbative and often hard to understand, the ideas are pretty simple, and they play to modern pieties. It’s all about power and victimhood. It’s all about the idea that if somebody has something, then somebody else has been deprived of it. These are simple ideas that appeal to the commonsense virtues of the modern person. So critical theory has a kind of moral advantage there. But I’m like you, I mean, if you’d told me that… I regard gender theory as the least plausible branch of continental philosophy. And yet it’s the one that has come, even more than critical race theory, I think, to dominate modern society. And it’s totally implausible and bizarre. And yet I read an article yesterday on…
Albert Mohler:
And unworkable.
Carl Trueman:
On the NBC websites about how we should celebrate Leah Thomas, the trans swimmer, in the same way that Jackie Robinson was celebrated 70, 80 years ago, as if there’s any real comparison. The fact that somebody could write that, and get away with it is stunning, I think. And a real indictment on modern society.
Albert Mohler:
Indeed, I will just say that getting away with it is more difficult than getting it run at NBC. Because if you look at the crowd at the NCAA competition, that crowd was not celebrating Leah Thomas coming in first. As a matter of fact, stood and overwhelmingly applauded the woman who came in second.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. I think that what we are beginning to see on the trans issue, of course, is that the trans issue, unlike other issues, can impinge very directly on ordinary people’s lives—bathrooms, sports, things like this. And we’re beginning to see that a lot of the way this theoretical stuff has been pushed, it’s been by elites, by intellectuals and cultural elites. For the man and woman in the street, this pinches, and they’re going to cry out with pain as it pinches. And that’s what we’re beginning to see. And that actually for me, is a sign of encouragement at this point. It’s possible that we could see some kind of pushback against this stuff in the near future. I hope so.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. We are seeing the pushback, but I want to make a note about that. Because the pushback right now is not, “Hey, this entire ideology is insane!” It is instead, “We ought to protect women’s sports.” So, one of the things I’m writing about right now is the fact that the actual terrain of controversy is extremely narrow. And you even have people, whether it’s Billie Jean King or Martina Navratilova, and both of them openly lesbian in identity, and none of them are saying, “Look, we need to actually recover a sane, sexual morality, and an understanding of ontology here.” They’re just saying, “Hey, let’s carve out from the revolution, let’s just carve out women’s sports.”
One other thing I’ll just simply point out is that I’d love to bring Aristotle into the room for just a moment. So don’t bring in some Christian Orthodox figure, don’t bring John Calvin in, let’s just bring Aristotle in, and Aristotle’s first statement is going to be, “You can’t get babies out of this.”
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. Yes. I mean, human beings have a natural telos and a natural end. Our bodies are built to fit together in certain ways and not in others, and to produce certain results and not others. So, I mean, what you really see again with the T stuff, is this dramatic revolt against nature and… J. K. Rowling, I would actually say, J. K. Rowling has certainly… She’s engaging on a broader front than women’s sports. She’s pointing to the importance of biology in how one defines women, and I think kudos to her. And yes, that’s pointing us back to the basic essentialism that Marx, Aristotle, and I think is, pardon the pun, essentially true. We need to get back to that.
Albert Mohler:
Amen to that. Well, rarely are you corrected by someone who says you’re overly optimistic, or overly hopeful, but I’m going to suggest you are when it comes to J. K. Rowling, because the thing is, is that she wants the identity politics. She wants to be very clear she affirms all the identity politics of L and G and B so to speak, but just wants to stop at T. And I know you agree with this, it’s impossible to stop the letters coming.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. I think, bottom line on that front, is a feminism that asserts the importance of the physical body cannot be, for example, a pro-choice feminism. I was talking about this at Grove last night, that people like J. K. Rowling are trying to hold something of an unstable middle on this. My hope is that the logic of their position will start to work through in the way they’re thinking, but maybe I am too optimistic. I’ll wear it as a badge of honor that somebody’s finally criticizing me for being too optimistic.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, well, you could at least say that one time in your life thus far you have faced that criticism.
Carl Trueman:
Yes.
Albert Mohler:
But you know, it is very interesting, just in the political sphere, where policy is being hammered out, you’ve got a clear geographical distinction in the United States. You’ve got a clear political distinction in the United States. You’ve got an awakening taking place. You know, politically, the big question, or sociologically, is whether that’s coming too late to make any difference. But the reality is that with the T, reality itself is just unbending. It’s hard to get over.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. I mean, nature is going to bite back, and again at the risk of sounding too optimistic here, I think that what we’re going to see maybe 50, 60 years down the line, will be lots of lawsuits being brought by kids who are used as chemistry sets by doctors with the connivance of their parents and the support of insurance companies. Those kids, who were sterilized at 9, 10, 11, 12, had their brains fried with alien hormones, those kids are going to grow up to have miserable and catastrophic lives. And I think they will sue the people who caused those. And at that point, one may see, well, one will see, (a) nature biting back, and one may actually see some kind of pulling back from the abyss on the trans issue, because it’s America. Once you start getting catastrophically high lawsuits being settled, you can expect to see changes in attitude at a corporate level taking place. So, I think on the T, it could well end up in the lawsuits. The tragedy, Al, is that we’re only going to get there after incalculable human suffering.
Albert Mohler:
Right. And sadly…
Carl Trueman:
It’s not going to be because one or two kids have suffered this way. It’s going to be hundreds or thousands of them.
Albert Mohler:
Yes. And sadly, I don’t think we’re going to have to wait 30 or 40 years for that. I think it’s much, much faster than that, because I think there are an awful lot of young people who are already indicating in their 20s and 30s, a dissatisfaction, and that dissatisfaction will not stay vague. And not to mention, we have no idea the long-term medical consequences, but logic itself says they have to be very significant.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. And that’s why I think this is an issue about protecting children. People keep saying, “Well, why do you keep writing on this stuff? You obsessive?” Well, maybe I am. But I think one of the reasons I write about it is this, if you’re a 25-year-old and you want to transition from being a man to being a woman, I think that’s a ridiculous thing to do, but if you want to spend your money or your insurance on that, do it. If it’s a 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12-year-old it’s happening to, I think we have a duty as a society to protect confused kids from themselves. And that’s why I think the T issue is… It should be a pressing concern to all Christians. It should be like abortion. It should be something that we feel the need to speak out on, to become unpopular over, to take hits over, because it’s about protecting the weak, the confused and the innocent.
Albert Mohler:
That’s right. Behind this is a line of thinking, and that thinking is embodied in thinkers. So, let’s name some names. As we’re thinking about this, you have the hermeneutics of suspicion, Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Darwin, all that’s still here. You have the triumph of the therapeutic, everyone from Freud, Maslow, Rogers, on and on. You have the Frankfurt School, you’ve got critical theorists, but eventually you end up with Oprah!
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. Yes. As our mutual friend, Andrew Walker, pointed out recently. Yeah. The obvious objection to the intellectual genealogy is, “Well, that’s great, but nobody reads these people. Does the man in the street, the woman in the street, they don’t read Marx. They don’t read Freud. So how on earth do they come to hold these views?” And I think the answer is, they percolate down through pop culture, Oprah’s view of life as well. Whatever works for you, and doesn’t hurt somebody else, do it. Be whoever you want to be. As long as you’re not hurting somebody else, be happy. Every commercial you look at on the TV tells you that you are the center of the universe, and you have the power to make yourself happy by reinventing yourself, by buying this product or buying that product.
Every soap opera, every sitcom you watch sends the message that human satisfaction is ultimately found in sexual satisfaction, and you have a right to that. So, pop culture is absolutely critical. And as it plays out now among young people, of course, we’re not even talking about the main TV networks. YouTube, TikTok, these are the things that are shaping the minds of young kids today. You have this cacophony of voices, all pressing basically the same message, “You are the center of the universe. Your happiness is paramount. Don’t let anybody else tell you otherwise, and here’s how to achieve it.”
Albert Mohler:
I wrote an article about 20 years ago, entitled The Oprahfication of America. And frankly, she was more influential then than she is now. But the point is that you can’t have the situation we face now without figures like Oprah. And I want to mention two things. Number one, Oprah shamed parents, if they were at all resistant to the gender transition of their children. She’s the first person I know who brought on, and again, just the bizarre nature, but she brought on children who were gender confused, experiencing gender dysphoria, claiming that they were a girl inside a boy’s body or vice versa, and she would publicly shame parents who were not going to facilitate this transition. The second big thing was, that I really blame her for, the formulation, which at least she popularized, which is your truth. And she began using it in virtually every single conversation. She would say, “Tell me your truth.” And then when there were big issues of public controversy, she would actually, more or less, have people on both sides telling “their truth”. The basic notion of objective truth had completely disappeared.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s purely therapeutic at that point. What she really means is, “Tell me what works for you. Tell me what makes you happy. Tell me what floats your boat.” And that’s, again, that’s pervasive in society. And you and I have talked about this in the past so, that’s deep within the heart of the church as well these days. It’s not an “us-and-them” thing. We are all somewhat affected by this. It’s the very air that we breathe in Western and particularly affluent Western culture today, this subjectification of truth, and the reduction of it to that which works therapeutically. Huge problem, and is alive and well within the church, the same as it is within wider society.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. It’ll tempt you to some Marxist thoughts actually—I say that tongue-in-cheek—in the sense that Marx made fun of the upper class, the aristocracy in Britain, and to a limited extent in Europe, for their preoccupations and their self-centeredness and all the rest, but now those are the best sellers for middle America. The commodification of the self has now pretty much come full bloom.
Carl Trueman:
Yes. And of course, as Christians, we can see why that would take place, because that is, in some sense, is the essence of the Fall. Eve, in taking the fruit, her desire is to be like God, and in breaking the rules, she sets herself above the rules. That impulse to transgression, and that impulse to wanting to feel like God, is deep within the Fall and human psyche.
Albert Mohler:
Now I’ve known you for a long time. And a part of the fun of reading a friend’s book is that you see a lot of conversations, a lot of thoughts, a lot of background, a lot of common reading in this, but you also pick some personal fights in this book. And there’s a sense in which you write with a background in the UK, background, as you mentioned, the grammar school education. I don’t know that most American listeners know what that is. That’s a fairly elite education, but still in the public sphere.
Carl Trueman:
Sort of, yeah. They’re state-funded schools, but, in my day, you took a test age 11, and if you passed, you went to the grammar school and…
Albert Mohler:
They were academic…
Carl Trueman:
…you did academic subjects. If you failed, you went to what we call a secondary modern, and you learned practical subjects. Highly controversial. But it was, ironically… The system was largely dismantled by the Labour Party, but it was one of the greatest ways of rising from the working class, the middle class, ever invented in Britain. It was a real agent of what I would describe as true diversity. It allowed you to rise through academic effort. Yep! But you end up fearing the working classes and hating the upper classes. That’s what it, that’s the psychology of the grammar school boy.
Albert Mohler:
I can see it. I can see it. And so, you notice some things like the influence of someone like an Oscar Wilde.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. I mean Oscar Wilde…
Albert Mohler:
So, talk about that, because, I mean, most Americans probably recognize the name, and maybe they see a quip or a quote to Oscar Wilde, but in retrospect, I think he was a lot more important in cultural transformation than people think.
Carl Trueman:
Yes. He’s a real harbinger of the modern day. And Oscar Wilde was well known, perhaps most famous, as the author of Picture of Dorian Gray, but he also wrote a lot of witty plays. And he was a very witty figure himself. I’ve often been asked over years when I teach Nietzsche in the humanities class, what does Nietzsche’s Superman look like? And, of course, the popular image is that Nietzsche’s Superman is a kind of Nazi storm trooper, that because of the association of the popular mind between Nietzsche and Nazism.
Actually, Nietzsche’s Superman is more of an artist. And I think Oscar Wilde fits the bill quite well. Why? Well, Oscar Wilde is the first great self-inventor in some ways. He’s a transgressive person. If you show him a sexual law, he goes to break it. Anybody who knows the history of Oscar Wilde will know he comes to a tragic end when he’s prosecuted for homosexual activity. He’s sent to prison for being a homosexual. And it breaks him in the public image, and it breaks him physically, but his whole life was a public performance. He was his own greatest work of art.
The sense in which he captures the essence of our age, because we live in an age now where everybody is constantly living their life as a public performance. On social media, we can be whoever we want to be. We constantly live our lives, I’m thinking generally here, in transgressive ways. If anything marks the modern age, it’s the dramatic transgression of traditional sexual mores. Well, Wilde was doing that in the 1890s, when it was risky and dangerous, before it became popular and cool.
Albert Mohler:
No, dangerous enough that he was a broken man in prison, and he could have avoided that prosecution, but thought he was clever enough to beat it.
Carl Trueman:
Oscar Wilde had that unfortunate ability to think always of himself as the cleverest man in the room, and, generally, he was. But in a court of law, no. Sir Edward Carson, I think, proved himself to be a little cleverer at law. So yeah, he’s a fascinating figure. And he’s also the man who… He’s very… One could describe him as immoral, but it might be more accurate to call him amoral, in that he makes this comment about The Picture of Dorian Gray, where somebody criticizes the book for being immoral and he makes the comment, he says, “There are no such things as immoral books. Books are either well written or badly written. That is all.” Ethics being reduced to pure aesthetics at that point.
So, yeah, between finishing the big book and finishing the smaller book, Oscar Wilde became a fascinating figure to me, because I’m thinking here’s a sophisticated example of the philosophy of Oprah world. He’s a sophisticated modern.
Albert Mohler:
Well, again it’s fascinating that we have minds watching the society change, the civilization morph, are drawn to some of the same figures. I was drawn to Oscar Wilde years ago, because of the observation that he is now one of the most safely quotable individuals of English letters. And that could only happen if the society actually moved his way. Because even at the end of Oscar Wilde’s life, you would not think that it would be… I mean, you could picture a President of the United States quoting Oscar Wilde and getting away with it simply because he’s now no longer considered so transgressive.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. He’s become a member of the Establishment. And again, that’s part of the world in which we live. And it’s perhaps particularly obvious in Britain because we have an honor system that we can compare who gets honors today with who got honors a hundred years ago. When you look at the British establishment today, Sir Elton John, Sir Rod Stewart, Sir Mick Jagger. I remember the year Roger Scruton, the great English philosopher, got a knighthood. I remember calling Rusty Reno, editor of First Things, saying, “Great news, Sir Roger Scruton, he’s got a knighthood.” I look further down the list and I say, “Oh, Rod Stewart’s got a knighthood as well.” And Rusty’s comment to me was, “Well, let’s just say it’s a diluted brand, shall we?” But the fact that the leaders of the anti-establishment cultural revolution in Britain of the 1960s are the now Knights of the Realm volumes about the way in which the establishment has changed. And, as you pointed, the tastes, the tolerances, the things that society affirms and valorizes, have dramatically changed as well.
Albert Mohler:
There are limits to this. And again, something I’m really watching right now and talking about, just to say the name Hugh Hefner.
Carl Trueman:
Oh, yeah.
Albert Mohler:
So, Hugh Hefner was one of the commercial, but also ideological, prophets of sexual liberation. And, of course, you talk about a life self-invented and lived out artificially on the stage. I mean, he wore pajamas all day and just surrounded himself with Playboy bunnies and a Playboy mansion, had a Playboy jet. You know, it was like Batman with the bat mobile. Yeah. But all of a sudden, now Hugh Hefner’s on the wrong side of history. A major film project coming out, basically making very clear that he was abusive of women, and that he had, I mean, here’s a shock, behaved badly.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. I mean, it’s one of those, “Is this really a shock?” moments when I read that kind of stuff. And I’m thinking, when I’m reading the accounts in the secular press of this at the moment, you get a feeling that there’s a sort of who could possibly have seen this coming? Well, I want to say a lot of Christian leaders saw it coming, a lot of feminists saw it coming.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely.
Carl Trueman:
It was the Hollywood elite that covered for him. And I’d say a similar thing with Roman Polanski. For years we had these ghastly speeches being made at the Oscars about how unfortunate poor old Roman Polanski was, not being able to come to the United States because he didn’t want to serve his time for having raped a 13-year-old girl. And you had the Hollywood great and the good parading this, not one of them… Suddenly, guess what? Child rape is no longer acceptable. Who would’ve thought of that? Who could have seen that? Well, the thing is, everybody saw it could have seen it coming, except for the people who presume to dictate the tastes of the culture to us. So, Hugh Hefner is no surprise. I confess actually to being a little surprised at the extremity of his depravity. I read one article on what the documentary was going to reveal, and I was struck at the extremity of his depravity, but it did not surprise me.
Albert Mohler:
No, and it couldn’t be, it wasn’t hidden. And again, the surprise is that you have a society made up of influencers and elites who certainly knew all of this, but now have to be… They’re all going to have to sign up on the right manifesto or they’re going to lose their jobs. And by the way, I didn’t bring up Roman Polanski, but the amazing thing is he is still received in some of the most elite circles in Europe.
Carl Trueman:
Yes. I mean, it’s what George Orwell called “the benefit of clergy”, going back to the old medieval practice that if you committed a crime in England as a clergyman, you suffered less than an ordinary person who committed the crime. It’s sort of counterintuitive really. But Orwell is wrestling in a review of the autobiography of Salvador Dali, and why is this disgusting pervert treated like a genius by so many people? And he comes to the conclusion that the artistic class enjoy benefit of clergy. If you’re an artist, if you belong to that artistic elite, then you will be pardoned for sins that will destroy the careers of other lesser mortals. And we see that all around us. A tweet by an 18-year-old that was ill advised seven years ago, can damage their career today. Meryl Streep can be an apologist for Roman Polanski for years. Nobody mentions that now.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. More than an apologist.
Carl Trueman:
Oh, yes, yes.
Albert Mohler:
Yes. And so, it is fascinating to see how you have a Jeffrey Epstein, in all of his horror, rightly condemned by all people, and yet there are people who are very much engaged with very similar activities who are still showing up in credits.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. Yes. It is very interesting and disturbing that that’s the case. And I think it speaks volumes about who runs our culture, and who sees themselves as having the authority to decide who is tasteful and who is distasteful at any given point in time.
Albert Mohler:
So, you wrote this book as a successor, and I understand, just as you’ve related, and by the way, it’s a brilliant precis, as you say, it’s actually a brilliant introduction to these ideas. I think it’ll be very helpful. I hope it will be useful in schools and in churches, but I think it’s also something that the average well-informed Christian reader can pick up and actually work through to great profit. But this cannot be the end or, to be Churchillian, this cannot even be “the beginning of the end”. So, this is a project that’s pointing you towards something else.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. Well, partly. I hope it’s pointing towards a project that isn’t just me. What I would love, I would love to see practical theologians, I would love to see men involved in day-to-day nuts and bolts of youth ministry, Christian ministry, picking up the mantle, using the analysis I’ve given and coming up with, “How can I build on this to produce practical ways of addressing the problems as they manifest themselves in my world?” So, I’m hoping it provides a foundation for that.
For me, my next project is… It’s actually for Broadman and Holman. They’ve asked me if I would do a sort of rise and triumph of the modern self for critical theory that can be used in seminary classes and maybe upper-level liberal arts classes to help Christian students think through the issues of critical theory. So that’s where I’m going next. And it connects, I think, to these earlier books, precisely because, as we mentioned earlier, gender, whatever is the middle term is somewhat arbitrary, gender theory, race theory, whatever, the logic of critical theory remains the same. The basic mathematical formula remains the same. And it’s important to understand the dynamics of that in order to be able to relate to it as a Christian, I think.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. One of the most irritating aspects of the current conversation in the culture, is the dishonesty. So, for instance, whether the scene was Virginia’s gubernatorial election or the confirmation hearings for a justice of the United States Supreme Court, the feint is to say critical theory is just an academic theory. It’s not taught to children. I don’t cite it in my work, et cetera. And what is being just denied there and presented as a lie is the fact that it has now become the basic intellectual superstructure of the modern American, and well, I say, it’s a broader problem than America, but of the American academic superstructure.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. I mean, think about what’s being taught about gender to kids in school. I’m assuming that elementary school teachers are not ascribing Judith Butler to five-year-olds. They’re not necessarily handing out the great texts of gender theory. But as soon as you detach gender from biological sex, as soon as you allow that there’s a spectrum of genders, you’re teaching the fruits of gender theory there. You may not be teaching the basic principles. You may not be actually doing it as well, or in as a sophisticated fashion as a real gender theorist would, but you are dependent upon gender theory. And it’s the same with race as well. The other feint, of course, in all of this, is whoever criticizes these theories by definition does not understand them, that critical theory surrounds itself with a certain gnostic mystique whereby any criticism is obviously misplaced. It’s obviously motivated by racism or misogyny or something like that. And that’s the other strategy you’re up against.
Albert Mohler:
Carl, I wanted to have this conversation because I think after The Rise and Fall of the Modern Self, Strange New World really is an important book. But I also know you had to put a lot of work into this, why this particular project?
Carl Trueman:
Really, this was the project all along, I think. I had to do the big book. I’m a Reformation guy by background. I had to do the big book in order to work through the ideas myself, and also to establish my credibility to speak on these things. The shorter book is the one that I hope will have an impact on the church. I don’t expect the hard-pressed homeschooling mom to be able to read the big book. I don’t expect the hard-pressed pastoral elder to be able to read the big book. The short book I think is one that should be easily digestible by anybody, even by teenagers.
I gave a copy to a colleague at work today looking for something to read with her daughter on these issues. I think even teenagers should be able to read this, thoughtful teenagers, and get something out of it. So, the purpose of this book was really to get the message about the nature of the sexual revolution, where it’s come from, how it’s shaping us, and where it might be going to. I wanted to get it into the hands of as many people as possible. And that’s what I hope the short book does.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I will hope that many teenagers will read it. It will tell me that something important is taking place. And I was speaking to a group of teenagers the other day. And you can tell a teenager’s reading ahead when they can’t pronounce what they’re reading. And I had like a 15 or 16-year-old young man come up to me and say, “Man,” he said, “I’ve been reading some of this stuff by Nezitch!” And so, indeed you cover Nezitch and many others. And I’m glad you’ve been…
Carl Trueman:
Freud and company. Yes.
Albert Mohler:
That’s right. That’s right. But I was glad to be able to tell him this book is coming out. And I greet it with enthusiasm, and I thank you for it. I want to ask you in that light one final question, and that is, you teach college students, you look at a bunch of 18 to 22-year-olds there at Grove City College. We have the same privilege here at Boyce College, and then with the seminary students. I find real reason for hope. I find in them a willingness to push back on these ridiculous and poisonous ideas.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. Yeah. I think so. I spoke last night to a pro-life group on campus at Grove to a reasonably full lecture theater on a Monday evening where nobody got extra credit, and we had great discussion afterwards. Now Boyce students, Grove students, these are not a representative slice of 18 to 22-year-olds in the United States. But I think what I’m seeing at a place like Grove is a more self-conscious kind of Christian conservative faith emerging than perhaps was the case 20, 30 years ago.
So, like you, I’m encouraged by the standard of student, by the thoughtfulness I see, by the willingness to realize, yeah, we’ve got challenges coming and we want to prepare ourselves to meet them. So, nothing actually encourages me more at the moment than the classroom at Grove. You get very depressed when you read the news headlines, when you speak to people after church about the agonies they’re going through in their own lives, relative to stuff from the sexual revolution. But the thing that encourages me most are the 18 to 22-year-olds that I have the privilege to teach at Grove.
Albert Mohler:
I tell people, if you feel depressed, just come and be with these college-aged students who are deeply committed Christians, and you’re going to understand that the adversary culture does not own that entire generation. And there is still the potential for pushback.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. God still has His people and the church will prevail.
Albert Mohler:
Well, Carl, once again, I’m very thankful for you, thankful for this book, and just keep them coming. And you keep writing them, and we’ll keep talking about them.
Carl Trueman:
Thanks very much, Al. It’s been lovely to be on.
Albert Mohler:
God bless you.
Many thanks to my guest, Carl Trueman, for thinking with me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you will find more than 150 of these conversations at AlbertMohler.com. Just look under the tab Thinking in Public. For more information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, go to boycecollege.com.
Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public. I’m Albert Mohler. Until next time, keep thinking.