Selves and Psychologies: The Rise of the Post-Christian Self

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Carl Trueman
I think the problem in the United States is that Protestant evangelicals thought they owned the country. And it’s becoming patently obvious, they don’t own it anymore, if they ever did. And the temptation then is to think something’s being stolen from you, that you’re powerless in the face of this act of theft and to despair. I think preaching the preaching of hope, the preaching of the return of Christ, the preaching of the Lamb, we’ll try it. I think these things have to feature.

Glen Scrivener
Hello, and welcome to post Christianity. My name is Ben Scrivener. And I’m Andrew Wilson. We’re trying to think about our cultural moment in historical perspective, how do we get where we are? And what should we do about it. And we’re very thrilled to have our guests on the podcast today, Carl Truman, he is the author of many books, including the rise and triumph of the modern self, and strange, new world. And he joins us on the line now. Hello, cop. Hello.

Carl Trueman
It’s great to be with you guys.

Andrew Wilson
So one of the things you say towards the end of your book, I think is and it’s a while since I read it, but I remember it making an impression on me. But words to the effect of my a lot of my goal in writing is to help explain the world to the church. So I’m trying to help the church understand where they are. Could you as much as I know, you’ll have had to do this many times. Could you summarize that narrative in three or four minutes like so when you you’re saying there is basically something about modern selfhood and identity which feeds through into concepts of who I truly am, and also to our sexual politics, which is the result of a series of ideological changes that began in the late 18th century, and have been refracted through, particularly some key late 19th and early 20th century thinkers. But could you just give us a quick summary of that account? Just

Carl Trueman
Sure. I mean, I think at the center of the thesis I’m trying to make is the idea that certainly in the way we experience reality, what has occurred over the last four or 500 years is that our inner feelings have been granted, increasing authority in understanding who and what we are. Now, again, it’s a little more complicated than that, of course, because the outer world shapes our inner feelings in significant ways. But subjectively, I think what we’ve experienced over the last four or 500 years is the idea that, who I am is increasingly determined by who I feel myself to be what I feel myself to be. And that tracks with what you could trace an intellectual genealogy as I start with Rousseau, one could say that in Rousseau, you get this move towards seeing culture as that which which corrupts culture is that which prevents me being myself. And therefore, the real goal is to is to go back to reflect on my inner life, prior to culture getting hold of me and messing me up in order to find out who I am. So we get this authorization of the inner space, I think in the 18th century in a way that we had not seen before. It’s not that the inner space never existed. Clearly the psalmist the explorers, in emotions, you can read Homer and read about Achilles sulking. Clearly, Homer has a concept of the inner space. But with the 18th century, the inner space takes on more importance in terms of who we are. And it’s not just a non Christian thing, either. I am struck by the fact that as Rousseau is writing his material exploring the inner space, you have, for example, Jonathan Edwards, writing the religious affections. The 18th century seems to me to be a tipping point in terms of that exploration of the inner space, because emotions are becoming more authoritative. And then as we move closer to the present day, the big question becomes your why is sex so important? Why does sexual desire suddenly take on an importance in terms of identity that it’s not heard before? Again, sex is not invented in the 20th century, how dare you read Homer and Homer makes sense because we all know, we all know that, you know, one guy can fall in love with another guy’s wife run off with her and the husband is mad, and he chases after that sort of erotic dynamic is not something that is new in Western culture, at all, but what we see in the 20th century is this idea that actually my sexual desires are some of the most foundational things for understanding who I am. So we get the emergence of the language of L GB or even if straights where, you know, you think you describe yourself as straight, what are you doing you’re, you’re grounding your identity in the nature of your sexual desire. That’s it. Interesting and relatively modern thing to do. So you have this authorizing of the inner space, I think in the 18th century, and then by the time we get to the present day, that inner space has been colonized really by, above all sexual desires. And that helps to explain I think, both much of the politics we now struggle with in the West, but also to bring this into a more Christian perspective, many of the pastoral issues that pastors and elders are having to deal with in their local church, because they have a generation of people rising, who’ve been trained by the culture, to think of their identity in terms of, of sexual desire. So this move this authorizing and sexualizing Vienna space, I think, transforms everything, both public life and pastoral life,

Glen Scrivener
I guess your first real historical figure that you’re analyzing is Rousseau, which thrills Andrews heart, who has been in the 18th century for the last few years working working on his book. But if we’re going to trace back the origins of the modern self, couldn’t we trace it back a lot further? Descartes, or Luther? Or what about the mystics? What about Augustan? Are there further sort of prequels, to the Enlightenment sense of the modern self that you could have had a look into?

Carl Trueman
Yes. I mean, it’s, it’s an obvious question, in some ways, why? Why did you begin where you began? And it’s a question that I think any historian faces when they’re right on on any topic, because, you know, history doesn’t begin at a certain point in time, there’s always a backstory to whichever figure or whichever event or action you look at. So the choice of Rousseau was on one level relatively arbitrary. could certainly began with Descartes could have begun with Luther could have begun with late medieval nominalism could have begun with the mystics could go back to Paul and the exploration of the inner self there. I had one person email me asking me why didn’t start with Eve in the garden? Surely that was where the problem began. It was, yeah, but the book needed to be less than 130 pages. So it’s a fair question. I think Rousseau isn’t, on one level, an arbitrary starting point, on another level, I think it justifiable starting point on the grounds that Rousseau does have a huge amount of influence, for example, on modern educational theory. So we can see his specific fingerprints on certain aspects of the modern world in which we now live. But certainly, one could one could go back further. And I think so I’m, I’m speaking to you from the United States. I would also say the narrative I tell in some ways is, is a bit of a Western European narrative. I’ve been asked, you know, why didn’t you include Thoreau? Why didn’t you include the transcendentalist. So I think there are a lot of players in the modern story, and really, for the sake of keeping things concise and coherent. I started with Rousseau and I tried to trace a line through at the risk, of course of some degree of simplification.

Andrew Wilson
So one of the things we talked a bit about on the fact quite a lot about on this podcast is the way that the you can account for the modern world, as a series of sort of modifications or then exaggerations of and then gradually removals, the foundations of Christian thought that basically become so normalized in society, you know, the week shall be made strong. And that’s, that, as you can tell almost the account of some of what’s happening in Rousseau, certainly a lot of what’s happening in Marx, probably less of what’s happening in Freud, but a lot of than what’s happening in the 20th century, and our current political divides, through the lens of a sort of universalization of Christian values that make me we were just talking about in the previous episode about, you know, why we find fascism, so much more reprehensible than communism is because communism would sort of appeal to a Jewish anyway, even the Magnificat and that sort of thing, whereas Of course it has, we don’t. And I’m wondering as to what it about, of course, your account is, is a more if I can put it, there’s not a negative in it. But it’s a more negative account is a more sort of an anti Christian account of how we got to where we are with some of the political and moral and cultural divides we face. To what extent do you think that those two, if I can call them the Truman Doctrine, and the sort of the, and you know, Tom Holland’s take on and many others, to be honest, Glenn and I have both been influenced by both, but to what extent do you think they’re complementary accounts? To what extent you think that there is actually a bit of a, they are opposed in certain ways that there are certain things you say, and I think we disagree about this. I actually think that’s an attempt to try and sanitize or Christianize something that is more fundamentally in opposition to Christianity than that. Yeah. Or would you see them as basically being just two different ways of telling a story and that we need both?

Carl Trueman
I’m inclined to think we need both and I think there are Some interesting aspects of the modern world that are, I mean, one of the things I do in class, when I teach Rousseau is I’m conscious that students might well think that I’m teaching Rousseau as a bad guy. In some ways, in my narrative, he does appear as a, as a kind of villain. On the other hand, there are some things about Rousseau that I think are important contributions that Christians need to bear in mind, for example, Rousseau, makes great play of the fact that morality is has to be connected to sentiments and emotions. And I make the point the students, you know, if you look out the window, and you see an old lady being beaten up by a gang of hooligans, and you don’t feel something, then we would say you’re a psychopath. And we would see you as morally deficient in some way. Secondly, I think what you get with Rousseau practically that you don’t even find in the Reformers is the notion of universal human dignity. I mean, the reformers, yes, they believed all human beings are made in the image of God. But they also knew that some human beings were just better than others. And, you know, Calvin does not want ordinary people running Geneva, it’s the aristocracy, who are supposed to do that. And I think when you when you look at Rousseau, you get these glimpses of the truth that have been perhaps theoretically acknowledged in the past, but have not really leavened the whole way of thinking now. So first of all, there’s that side of it. And I think some of the you know, some of the Enlightenment developments are actually Christian developments on that front. So what goes wrong? Maybe it’s putting it rather simplistically. But But I might put it this way and say, we’re now living in an era where the Christian rhetoric of justice, love, mercy, etcetera, etcetera, persists. But the Christian anthropology that gave that rhetoric, solid, stable content has disappeared. And that’s where I think the real problem lies. So yes, love, mercy and justice. We all know, these are good things. But if you don’t have an agreed anthropology underlying them, then you really have no agreement on what they mean. I think Alistair McIntyre gets this in, in his book after virtue and some of his work after where he points to you. He talks in the language, meta narrative, we’ve lost our narrative, and therefore these ethical terms that persist, no longer have any agreed content, I would say yes. And the narrative we’ve lost actually is the anthropological on it we’ve, we’ve lost, again, put it in a broader terms. We’ve lost Kitt Christian doctrine while retaining Christian moral language. And I think that creates a lot of problems. We now see that yes, there is a sense in which modern society is parasitic on on the best of Christian language, the tragedy is, modern society no longer has the the Christian underpinnings in order to give that language is a stable content.

Glen Scrivener
That makes a lot of sense, therefore, of why you began with Rousseau, I guess, because I mean, there is that sense of the inventing of the individual to use Larry Sidon types kind of term about how we even got to a Rousseau being able to make the statements that he makes, and you’ve got to have the Inviolable dignity of individuals, as individuals who consent to be in the body politic and are equal before the eyes of the law. You You need a whole lot of Christianity to get you to where Rousseau gets us to where Rousseau was, but then I guess that that kind of denial of Original Sin is is just massive, isn’t it? What do you think it would take these days to retrieve Original Sin? How do we make Original Sin? Great Again?

Carl Trueman
It’s that’s an interesting question. And I’ve been very as in a lot of things I’ve been very influenced by Charles Taylor on on many points. And one of the interesting observations Taylor makes about the modern world is You we make a mistake if we think the modern world is a straight fight between believers and unbelievers, Taylor says it’s at least a three way fight. Do you have believers say Christians in our context, you have Christians, you have humanists of which Steven Pinker would be a great example. And then you have what Taylor I think, accurately, Dubs, Nietzsche, an anti humanists, of which Camille Paglia, one of my great heroes would be, or Shia Hara heroine, I don’t know she that Camille Paglia would be a good example. And when you think about that setup, what’s interesting is it depends what question you ask, as to how the sides line up. If you ask about the existence of God, then pinker and palier in one corner and Truman’s in another, if you ask about. Does the universe have a moral structure? Or can we talk about morality in me meaningful, transcendent kind of terms then Truman and pinker line up against pelear. If you ask about a human beings fundamentally sound is it just a question of better education that will make us better? Or are we fundamentally dark and depraved? Then Truman and pally alone up against pinker. And so I’m wondering if actually in the modern world, we, we do actually have points of contact on the issue of sin, and darkness and depravity with which we can work. I find Freud, for example, much of Freud quite compelling in terms of how he understands human nature, and obviously he and I disagree, you know, for him, that’s nature. For me, it’s fallen nature. But I do think there are points of contact with modern thought where evil is taken very, very seriously. Indeed, I don’t know many people who don’t believe in darkness and evil relative to human nature, we may disagree on exactly what its content is, and its origins are. But I think the world we live today, arguments about evil have a, a certain powerful plausibility to them.

Glen Scrivener
So in the in the Rousseau, part of the book, you’re sort of talking about the the self is psychologize. What is good about that, I mean, you talk about with your students, you don’t paint Rousseau as the man in the black hat. Because there’s something good about individuals not being lost in the shuffle of the collective, isn’t there? What’s what’s good about the self being? psychologize?

Carl Trueman
Yeah, I think the the, the rise of the self is a good thing on a number of fronts. I mean, one, as I’ve already mentioned, we we do have feelings. We are not automata we have feelings, a proper moral, ethical formation requires the correct attunement of those feelings. If I look out of the window and see that old lady being beaten up, and it brings me intense pleasure, there’s something wrong with me. So the certainly that dimension to it. Secondly, and again, this perhaps is not so relevant to Rousseau, but it certainly tracks to the Reformation. You know, one of the big I was at Notre Dame a couple of weeks ago, and Patrick Dineen came to the lecture I was giving an I like Patrick Dineen stuff, but Patrick Dineen does tend to blame. You know, everything seems to go wrong, strange detail about 500 years ago, somewhere around about 1570. On one level, I feel some of the pungency of Patrick Deniz critique of modern liberalism, modern individualism, I do. On the other hand, I think that the rise of individualism is, is simultaneous with the rise of personal responsibility. And as a Christian, I cannot make sense of the New Testament, unless there is a high degree of personal responsibility that we are as individuals to repent and believe it, we cannot have the priest or the church doing it for us, we have to do that stuff. Now, that brings with it a risk, it brings with it the risk of the kind of world we live in today, in the same way that I think freedom of religion is a good thing. But it inevitably shifts power towards the congregation, and inevitably, in the modern world has made religion more of a consumer product than it would have been in the Middle Ages. But I still think freedom of religion is a good thing. So my answer, Glenn, would effectively be Yeah, these are good things that are developing in some ways, with Rousseau in the 18th century. But as with so many good things, they bring risks, they bring problems. In in their wake, I happen to think that the rise of the individual allows Christians to do more justice to more of the New Testament than the very strong corporate is hierarchical notion of the church that one has in the Middle Ages.

Andrew Wilson
So that raises to me quite an interesting question about complicity on the part of the church and put it I mean, I’m not just digging into the medieval period, because that would be you know, we’ve we’ve touched on that in previous episodes. And also I know we’d probably would be a bit like shooting fish in a barrel, the three of us but, but perhaps in the more modern period. So if you were to talk about the period, that a lot of your book is sort of, yeah, as I said, late 18th century to early 20th. And then with the with the implications, really in public life, in the last 50 odd years. where and in what ways do you see the church is complicit In and by the church, I mean, you know, evangelical Christians and people in adjacent to us really, whether it comes to issues of sexual ethics or of racial politics, and obviously racial history of various of the cultural hot potatoes that we have now. So obviously, a bit like, you know, I know you’ve, you’ve had this with other people of paint, you know, said to you, Oh, of course, the things start to go wrong in 1517. How do we avoid almost doing the same thing of that with other things start to go wrong in 1775, or whatever it is, and instead say, actually, no, there is an account here in which the church is part of that process? And what so where would you see particular points at which the church is complicit in where we are? And other things even that you think, yeah, we just don’t need to repent of that or get our heads around the fact that that’s what we did.

Carl Trueman
Yeah, there are there are, I mean, numerous points, you talked about shooting fish in a barrel, I mean, this could still be a shooting. And I’m also conscious that the one of the things one has to be be wary of, and this can be very easy to come across as a kind of I thank You, Lord, that I’m not like other men. So I do want to preface everything I’m going to say now with I regard myself as being implicated in the problem. Hopefully, you know, what I say will help people see the problem more clearly. But I’m certainly not saying, you know, look at them over there. What a problem they’ve got. number of ways I think, Christianity and particularly Protestant evangelicalism has connected with with the problems that I pointing out over the last few years. I mean, one of one obvious one, I think, is, is worship, the prevalence of the first person singular in a lot of worship songs. Well, the first person singular really emerges as a force I think, in Montaigne, 16th century that’s where we start in literature to see the first person singular, coming through in in a strong way. Now you get it in the Bible, of course. But typically in the Bible, when when the psalmist uses first person singular, ultimately, he brings himself under the covenant got that his identity is ultimately grounded not in himself and his feelings. But in God’s covenant dealings with Israel, Psalm 73, would be a good example. I felt really miserable about this than the other. Then I went to the sanctuary and put all my personal feelings in the context of God’s covenant dealings with Israel. Even Psalm 88, the most relentlessly depressing psalm of the whole Psalter begins with a covenant name of God. So all of the agonies are ultimately brought under God’s greater dealing. So I think the the prominence we give to the first person in our church life, particularly in our worship, would be problematic. I think, in terms of public issues, certainly, I would put no fault divorce, right up at the top of churches complicity with the culture, I was just talking about this in class yesterday. It was a final class of the year, I know some of my students are going off to get married in the next month or two. And I was commenting to them that if you if you look at the traditional vows of marriage in the Book of Common Prayer, and then put them side by side with the logic of no fault divorce, you’re not simply looking at two different versions of marriage, you’re actually looking at two different anthropologies. It’s two different understandings of what it means to be men and women, what it means to be human that underlie those on the traditional vows. They arise out of a context of understanding human beings as being obliged and dependent. No man is an island. We are all connected, we have obligations and dependencies. And those are the things that define us throughout our lives. If you look at no fault divorce, you have that kind of radical liberal individual anthropology that a man like Patrick Dineen, I think so rightly, pinpoints and rails against in his writings, that’s two different versions of what it means to be a human being. Now think of how did the church take a stand or no fault divorce? I don’t think so. Does the church typically discipline people for getting divorced in my experience, not frequently? Yes, we’ll get very hot under the collar about gay marriage. But the problem with gay marriage really rests upon the anthropology that lies behind no fault divorce. So I would say we’ve been complicit morally on the way that we have downgraded and degraded marriage on that front. And then I think there’s, there’s the more it’s harder to pin down, but I think we’re all subject to this. We tend to take our membership vows in church very lightly. You know, the minister does something We dislike and when we up sticks and go to another church down the road. But during my own time as a pastor, we had, I think, three discipline cases, all of which were pretty serious issues. And in each each case, the individual who was excommunicated, simply went off to another church enjoying it or worships there. Now, those are extreme cases, but I think many of us and include myself in this, feel that temptation to walk away as soon as our church isn’t scratching the knee that we feel, it takes a significant degree of self discipline, I think, to resist that urge. So I would say in the whole area of church commitment, again, it goes that comment I made earlier about freedom of religion, love freedom of religion, but it creates the marketplace of religion, that means that we are vulnerable to treating the church as we might treat a squash club, or a golf club, or something like that, it becomes the thing that we we join that connects with us and traditionalists, like me often point the finger at contemporary worship people and say, Oh, they’re just going there. Because, you know, they like the contemporary songs. Well, you know, traditional isms and aesthetic too. There’s a reason I go to a traditionalist church, I like the old hymns. Yeah. And I could make a theological case for them. But I’m conscious that when I do that, in part, I’m justifying a position I hold for other reasons as well. So I think we’re all at some level. Corrupted might be too strong a word, but perhaps tempted, tilted by this individualist, consumerist kind of culture in which we now find ourselves,

Glen Scrivener
which is very much enabled by technology, isn’t it, and you’ve written very persuasively about how the invention of the motorcar has absolutely changed the dynamics and perhaps more than the sort of Philosophy Of Freedom of Religion has, and I wonder whether technology shocks can play into the narrative here, when you when you talk about the self has been psychologize. And psychology has been sexualized, and certainly we feel the effects of that today. But somebody like Mary Harrington, will point to the impact of industrialization and the fact that, you know, the the domestic realm and the work realm have been split apart by all sorts of just, you know, economic factors. And there is the invention of the motorcar, and then you come through into the 1960s. And there’s this thing called contraception, which absolutely, you know, splits sex from any of its consequences or so the story goes anyway. So how are we going to fit together? The the technological and the industrial, and the economic, the material causes from the ideas that are filtering down?

Carl Trueman
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it’s a very good question. I mean, my my book is, is in large part, a sort of intellectual genealogy on that front. And the reason I did that was, I think it’s helpful to look at the intellectuals because they are the ones who reflect on what’s happening, and allow us to see very clearly the implications. But of course, most people are not living the way they do or thinking the way they do because they’ve read Rousseau or Descartes or Wilhelm Reich or Sigmund Freud. It’s the technology. It’s the world in which we live that shapes how we think. And I think Mary is I think her book feminism against progress as an amazing contribution. I did, I actually did a review of it for a feminist website, I sort of broke the glass ceiling, Mara disputations, as the guy who did a review, but I think Mary’s book is is fascinating, and I think, profoundly true. In a lot of its analysis, how do we break free of this? Well, I think there are two two big problems here. First of all, there’s what the German critical theorist Harman Rosa calls social acceleration. And that’s the phenomenon of when you think about the Reformation, one technological development, the printing press, takes your 150 years really to assimilate the impact of the printing press, how it reconfigures structures of power, how it changes life for everybody. I was teaching Pilgrims Progress this week to students. I’m saying isn’t it interesting impermanence progress, how all the gentleman that bunion refers to all the wealthy people, they’re all bad people. And at the heart of Pilgrims Progress, the scene of supreme kind of problem and evil is Vanity Fair. The commerce that sort of tearing bunions world apart. Well, all of that tracks back to the impact of the printing press in some way. Well, when you think the printing press creates 150 years of bloody conflict in Europe, what do you do in a world like ours where we are getting technology Cool developments, I would say not every week, but certainly every six months or so that potentially revolutionize everything. Suddenly, you know, I’m having to talk about chat GP tea at work, and I’m a guy using the cell phone to what I keep it switched on silence. It’s a mobile voicemail, and I order books from Amazon. And that’s what I do on my cell phone. Suddenly, we’ve got chat GPT Well, that’s not gonna be the last thing that hits the shore on what Rosa points out is that when you live in a world of continual technological developments, you live in a world of continual disturbance that you can never settle. You can never grab hold of something that is solid, in order to know who you are and how you relate to the wider world. So and that’s a problem for us all. We can’t simply step aside from technology, we are caught up in this flux at this point. And the second point flowing from that is that, you know, in general terms of technology, we we can’t avoid it. I was simply I’m sympathetic to rob Dre as notion of the Benedict option. Formation of strong communities, yes, but we fool ourselves if we think we can form our strong communities, in isolation from the technological developments that are taking place. When I was a pastor, and Andrew, I’m sure you have the same experience. Andrew, my, my congregants have mortgages, I have mortgage myself they have student loans, they are inextricably tied into the the world in such a way that they cannot simply and straightforwardly withdraw from it to form a strong community. So we have unavoidable technology. And we have terribly disturbing social consequences, I mean, disturbances caused by technology. How do we counteract that? I don’t know that we can do it in the short term. Now there are, I think, glimpses of light. Oddly, I think COVID provided some some hope here. In that I was struck when we had to go, we went online for six weeks at Grove City College. And I remember speaking to one of my colleagues and saying, We got to pray that the students hate it. This could be the barbarians storm, the gates kind of thing. And the thing was, the students hated it. I mean, ultimately, they don’t pay their student fees to be taught by me. They pay their student fees to be on a campus with other bodies, they pay to be in a classroom with other bodies. I think COVID has opened up potential conversations about the importance of actually being present with people. Having said that, one thing that disturbed me was, it was not so much that churches went online, it was chaos. In the early days, nobody knew what was happening, it seemed to me a prudent thing to do to go online. The fact that so few people thought that they lost very much when we did that that disturbed me. Yes, we got to do it. But let’s feel it’s painful. Let’s feel it’s horrible. Let’s be working as hard as we can to get back to normal as soon as possible. The fact that that was not a strong impulse, worried me. And again, going back to Mary Harrington, I think one of the things Mary Harrington really pinpoints in her book is the importance of the body, the importance of the authority of the body. That’s another way I suppose telling the kind of narrative I’ve taught you. Spot is psychologizing. psychologizing, involves ultimately a downgrading of the body. To some extent, I think we need to try to teach and impress upon people. The importance of embodiment, how do we do that? I think as Christians, we do that through hospitality, more than anything else. Hospitality, I don’t remember many classes at college. I do remember being invited to professor’s houses for dinner. The names I remember from churches in the past, when I was a young, a young person, they’re the names of the people who open their houses to me to give me hospitality when I was on my own in a new city. I think hospitality. It’s not like we don’t win this by an argument. We win back the importance of the body by demonstrating the importance of the body in various ways. And I think one of the most delightful is hospitality. It’s one of the qualifications for eldership. And I think elders are nearly to be aspirational paradigms for every Christian. So I think when Paul says that an elder should be given to hospitality. He’s really saying everybody should aspire to be given to hospitality. I think that’s going to be very, very important.

Andrew Wilson
I’ve only got I’d really like that. I’d like to go further a bit on that. I’ve got one more question. I think you might want to ask something and then wrap up but I would we I think is interesting and challenging. He’s saying we don’t You don’t win this with an argument and i i Obviously I agree. I think all the stuff you’re saying about embodiment and hospitality, particularly. He really resonates. But when within the context of being, obviously you’ve served as a pastor within the context of preaching within the context of just sharing the gospel with people in the community, whether it’s conversation, preaching, evangelism, that sort of thing. How have you seen or how have you used some of the stuff that you’ve researched? And how does it come to the surface, if you like in those sorts of conversations?

Carl Trueman
Right? Yeah, that’s a very good question. And I think in a couple of ways, I think the I’ve been very gratified saddened in some ways, but gratified by a lot of the correspondence I’ve had as a result of the books from people whose families had been badly damaged by the sexual revolution in one way or another. But one of the notes that’s come through consistently in the in the letters and emails I’ve received is that the narrative has helped them understand why their son, daughter, brother, sister, wife, husband, is thinking and acting the way they do, I think, a big shift, maybe it’s a generational shift. But for my generation, really, sex was all about behavior. And I think the realization that sex is is much deeper than behavior, that for a rising generation, it’s also about identity. I think that’s passed really useful, because, you know, you can preach against the behavior. But what you’ve really got to do, I think, is address the question of anthropology. What does it mean to be a human being? And I think that has to advance that has two advantages to it. One, the obvious advantages, I think you’re actually addressing the problem people are struggling with. But secondly, it also enables you to avoid the problem of always presenting a negative vision. Yeah, being you know, you mustn’t do this, you mustn’t do that you mustn’t feel this way. Instead, what you’re doing is saying, you know, do you know what it really means to be a human being, it means x. And this is the positive vision. And by implication, y and Zed become problematic at that point, and we need to talk about Y and Zed. But what we’re really looking for here is somebody being truly fulfilled as a human being. And I would say, for example, one thing that I’ve been focusing on with the students at Grove when I talk to them, and I make this a theme in my classes now is, is friendship. You know, we live in a world where, hey, if you have strong feelings for somebody of the same sex age 12, or 13, the only category you’re given to understand that is same sex attraction, you’re gay, you’re a lesbian, I will say no, when I was growing up, we had another category, the category of French, that allowed you to articulate your passionate feelings about somebody else in a non sexual way. And so I think that one of the things that I found that, that I’ve sort of, found emerging out of my narrative is the need to, to realize that the issue is an anthropological one, and to start thinking about the great categories we can use, that help us to capture something that the psychologize and sexualized narrative of, of humanity has lost. I also think it’s it press, it’s pressed me to think as a Christian of well, we need to teach the whole counsel of God the real temptation at this point is to focus on the symptoms, the real temptations to focus on abortion, focus on the sexual revolution, focus on gender, I want to say no, a teaching strategy needs to be much broader base than that, yet we have these pressing issues, but we can only truly approach them as Christians, if we’ve actually set the full framework of the whole counsel of God up in the first place. So second thing in terms of preaching strategy, I was thought, I need to be trying to cover all of the bases, not in every sermon. But I need to be thinking strategically as I preach through the year about what are the things that I’m going to be touching on. And the third thing, I guess, as my final point would be, the temptation for real discouragement at the moment is, is tremendous, particularly in the United States. I think the problem in the United States is that Protestant evangelicals thought they owned the country. And it’s becoming patently obvious, they don’t own it anymore, if they ever did. And the temptation then is to think something’s being stolen from you, that you’re powerless in the face of this act of theft and to despair. I think preaching the preaching of hope, the preaching of the return of Christ, the preaching of the lamb will try and I think these things have to feature as well. pastorally in order to make sure that people are doing what Paul points to in Colossians, not focusing so much on the things of this world but focusing on the things of heaven.

Glen Scrivener
Our podcast is called post Chris The entity and I wonder if you feel like post Christian is an accurate description of our moment? If so, how would you describe what post Christian means? Or do you have an alternative?

Carl Trueman
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s in a sense. Yes. In terms of society’s values, we do live in a post Christian world, what what might I how might I sort of articulate that? I don’t think that either America or Britain has ever been a Christian country, in terms of every member of the population being Christian. I do think that for many centuries, though, both America and Britain had, I would say, a broad moral imagination that overlapped with comported with was consistent with Christianity in terms of its public morality. I think we now live in a world where the moral imagination of the world of the societies we find ourselves in is increasingly antithetical to the Christian moral imagination in terms of its practical, ethical and moral implications. And to that extent, I think, yeah, post Christian. And I think that’s what’s going to create the tensions in our current moment, and going forward. And the way I put it to students at Grove is this the the terms of membership in society, and the terms of membership in the church, are increasingly antithetical to each other in a way that perhaps in the West, they haven’t been for. Maybe since Constantine, you know, we could go back a long way on that front in the broad West. And I think that’s going to create some interesting challenges for us. Because the old liberal model, and again, I don’t want to sound too post liberal, and I love Patrick Dineen, love his stuff, but I’m not with him in many places. But I do think the old model where religion could be safely kept in the private square is disappearing. Because that model only worked when the public square the morality of the public square, and the morality of religion basically overlapped. Do you believe in the resurrection? Yes, well, that doesn’t matter. You can still be a decent member of society in 1776. Do you believe that gay marriage is legitimate? Well, that’s not opinion you can hold privately these days that has immediate public implications. And that’s where I think the post Christianity aspect is is pinching at this point.

Glen Scrivener
Right? And and at that stage, the difference between Christian and world becomes ever more obvious. And there are huge threats and perhaps some opportunities to but we can process those over the course of the podcast. Carl, you’ve been really generous with your time. Thank you so much for joining us the name of your two books are

Carl Trueman
well, it’s keeps me hurts was the rise and fall of the modern south. Wouldn’t it have fallen? It’s the rise and triumph for the modern cell that confusing

Andrew Wilson
you with Reggie Perrin? I think I don’t know if that Joe

Carl Trueman
mon has interviewed me twice. And he keeps calling it the rise and fall of the modern self and I’m too scared of him to correct.

Glen Scrivener
Well, post Christianity that does lead to post humanism so

Carl Trueman
and strange new world, which is the the abbreviated version that you could read when you you’re on the tube heading into London on a morning?

Glen Scrivener
Yes, yes. And people can catch up with your work at first things and elsewhere online as well. But yeah, yeah. Wonderful culture. And thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.

Carl Trueman
Brilliant. Thanks. Great to see you guys. Again.

Glen Scrivener
Gosh, what did you make of that?

Andrew Wilson
Yeah, this is obviously as fascinating as ever. I think you’re always at calls interesting on pretty much anything you hear him on? I think there were a number of things that that struck me. I think I was interested in the thing about complicity. I think I was kind of there. I was interested in in how he would approach that question, because I think one of the things I’ve thought about is, even when thinking through and I specifically asked about the sort of sexual and racial politics of our moment that the way in which the church has been complicit in some of those divides, say no racial injustice being a very obvious example. But to be honest, it’s true section as well. And and I think obviously, I’m not saying he’s denying that, but if that wasn’t the way he took the question and went, so I thought that was that was interesting, just to reflect a little bit. I think the most interesting thing that he that I hadn’t really thought about before was the sort of when he framed the triangle where he’s got Truman and pellier and pinker right. And of course, I thought you could do exactly the same thing. I was thinking in the 18th century. I wish I’d thought of that because actually, that’s just what you would get if you were to get John Newton and Rousseau or Voltaire and then the market Assad and and have a dial you know, in actually Polya is quite a fan of market design in various ways, but We’re not going to try to attribute everything of him to her. But thinking that is actually that that way of when we talk about the darkness of humanity, these two agree against this one, when we talk about is there a God, these two agree against that one that was? That was a really interesting way of framing it. So that was the probably the thing he said, because I’ve read read a lot of his and we’ve talked before, but I found that I’ve not heard him say that and found that a very interesting way of thinking. And then I guess, yeah, the fact that without really being asked to he lent into embodiment as the key apologetic response, you did wasn’t using that language. But if you said, what do you do about this? Before we even asked him, he was really leaning into, you know, bodies, homes, friendship, hospitality church. And I thought much that I would probably expect him to say that and believe it, I thought that was a really interesting answer. And that effectively, the the arguments and the more cerebral side, which we do still need to engage with hence much of what we’re doing in this podcast, and I’m not sure what I’m sure we will talk about later with Rebecca McLachlan, I think, but I think what we’re Cole was going early on, I mentioned she will agree with this as well, is that it’s got it’s got to work in homes and around meal tables and in churches, and I thought that was a great response. What about you pick up?

Glen Scrivener
Oh, lots of great stuff. I mean, hearing how Russo’s anthropology was sort of divergent from the Christian stories, as that’s the new thing. And that’s why he’s interesting as a starting point, I thought, yeah, that that suddenly made sense in terms of because in terms of all the positives of Rousseau, and he was, he was absolutely clear that there are many positives to having a sense of the individual and a sense of your feelings, and all that kind of stuff is great. But yeah, what’s interesting is now what’s different with Rousseau and the denial of original sin, and that that sense of anthropology, that that made a lot of sense, and bringing in the issues of the material, the technology, industrialization, and that that is absolutely part of the story. Even if it’s not a prominent part of the book, it’s absolutely a part of the story. But then I loved the way he was saying that helping people understand the being nature of your sexuality, rather than the behavior, nature of your sexual sexuality and giving people a map on which they can say, Oh, you are here. And this is why it feels the way that it feels. And I just think that’s so important. When I think traditionally Christians, I think it will, this is the Bible and everything that is not biblical is is simply a kind of a full from biblical teaching. Whereas what he’s saying is no hit here is an alternative Cosmos, right. And you can find yourself on the map in this alternative cosmos that actually doesn’t have it’s not just not biblical, yeah, it’s not just fallen from a Christian vision. It has a different center of gravity and orbits around different kinds of, you know, vital values. And when you inhabit that universe, you start to, you start to understand why it feels the way it feels Yes. To be in a sexualized culture that we’re in and, and so that that’s the great value of the genealogy of ideas, I guess.

Andrew Wilson
I wish I’d asked him, you know, but um, because one of the is, you know, like the chapter I do on romanticism and in my 7076 book, I do have for a stop in four cities, basically in towns, and look at Weimar and look at the string there Stillman Tang and look at Rousseau, and talk about the sexual revolution in London taking place, but I also start in Venice, with Jacamo Casanova. And I realized I wish I’d asked him about this because I think he is the first person really to narrate the story of his life with his sexuality as the primary point of interest. I don’t think I mean, clearly, other people have talked about Augustine did. Other people have talked about sexual challenges with but he’s very, very minor, really, as a subset of a much larger even though we quoted a lot. It’s a very small part of the book that’s primarily about other things. Whereas when you read Casanova, and you do get this referred to as a lot, of course, about his sexual struggles, but I feel like Casanova is probably the first person to say the main thing that’s interesting about me, is my sexual escapades and sexuality and reflection on them. And then now as you say, in that, when it comes to the you are here, now going, Wow, 250 years on that farm that was almost unique, like no one had almost ever done that before. Maybe I mean, you could argue whether it’s Casanova, Russa or someone else come first. But whereas now you come forward do you think that is? It’s almost assumed that the most interesting thing you could say about somebody would be the sexuality and if you watch a movie about someone that didn’t explore their sexual side at all, you would think well, that’s just, it would feel even to a Christian probably and certainly to most people who aren’t, would feel like a very strange omission. You’d think something’s missing In what, why didn’t they get into his marriage? Or why didn’t her struggles with this relationship she had in the past come into the story, you’d think it was odd. And it’s just realize that again, as a sort of putting people on the map saying this is not not even necessarily wholeheartedly condemning that fact. I’m simply making you aware of it. So you can know this is why you find it hard to think about identity without reference to sexuality.

Glen Scrivener
So that’s, that’s the art in your weirder, secondary and your weirder So Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic is the Joseph Henrich thing. You’ve added e and e is ex Christian in your book and our is romantic. So just give it give us a sense of who the Romantics are.

Andrew Wilson
Well, so I probably the way of the way I would introduce it, and I mentioned those four places, the four cities I visited in the chapter on it, because I’m starting in 70s, only six. But really the that’s the sort of the beginnings of the beginning of the stirrings, I think romanticism in its full blown sense really kicks in, in the 1790s. And it’s, it’s very, it’s incredibly hard to describe, you know, Isaiah Berlin writes 800 words on it and goes, I’m not going to, I’m still not going to tell you exactly how to define it. But I’m still going to tell you what I think it is that just, and so I think was this is foolhardy to try and do it myself. But there is a combination of different emphases that are often not just expressed philosophically, but particularly artistically, musically, and the visual arts and in poetry, and literature, things like I use a lot of alliteration for it but in witness and interiority a sense of innocence of a very high, you know, something like William Blake very high, almost a fetishization of childhood innocence, a sense of ineffability and infinity, which I think the idea that you just can’t the greatest things in life can’t be owned or held are described, they need to be sort of conjured up imagination, the idea that what we’re really trying to do is to sort of dream and pull that things from within us. And that art is basically the overflow of powerful feelings is that that sort of idea that there’s a sort of intensity of emotion and feeling which ought to be expressed. And it’s really a reaction as many other things we could say about it. But it’s basically a reaction to the fear that it’s interesting. Now you think of the French has been very romantic and experimental. But at the time, it was actually the Germans really saying of the French, in the early years, the French have sort of the Enlightenment, of dividing everything up categorizing, everything isn’t encyclopedias, and the sort of structures and actually, it’s there, just destroying that which makes life passionate and powerful. I suppose a modern, you know, it’s Robin Williams is character and Dead Poets Society is this is not contemporary, but contemporary ish movie that’s trying to go That’s what romantic is, is someone who’s saying, you can’t boil everything down and tidy everything up. But describing it is very difficult. That’s part of the point. But obviously, it’s been massively influential in the way we understand the relationship between the self and the the inner person and where truth is found. So obviously, cold goes into this in his book, but I do mind that the idea that really what comes within needs to be brought out, rather than you need to align yourself to the constraints provided by the world, the romantic instinct is impulses, more of a no, I’m going to come up bubble up from within, and I’m going to take on that world and I’m going to, you know, wrestle with it. And of course, many of them, I’m going to valorize suicide or another way of escaping, I’m going to do something completely out there and just leave the world and go and become an oddball, which is what Rousseau does, or I’m going to write about suicide, or perhaps even kill myself would be one way of saying, Oh, it’s me against the world, and the world might not like it, in which case catastrophic consequences may follow and was almost quite a Yeah, a sort of an A holding up of that as an ideal. So it’s a very strange movement, but it has you just see it everywhere in in Disney story, ultimately, is I’ve got to find out who I am in here. Yep. And then project that out into the world and break free. Yeah. Because the body’s very resourced idea that the the world is providing societies is corrupt. And it’s shackling, me. And the true mean is to break out. Yeah, and, and that is pretty much the plot of most novels and movies.

Glen Scrivener
Yes. And it resonates so strongly with the human heart nowadays. That’s, of course, my identity is found by looking in here. Yeah, rather than to looking around at culture and family, or looking up to what God or the gods might say, and it’s second nature to us. Now you

Andrew Wilson
do you be who you are, you just got to look at you know, lit follow your heart, all those sorts of things, which are trite, but they do reflect the way not just our generation, but have for multiple generations think about what is good and what self actualization is and where happiness is found. And it’s very foundational to who we are. And I just think we need to track that. So I want to tell that story as well as telling the post Christian story that we’ve been exploring in more detail because I think the two running parallel tracks and And the fusion between them is catalyzed by the technological and sort of material developments we talked about as well. So they’re all happening together, which makes it very difficult to separate out just the romantic ideals and say, oh, we’ll deal with those on their own. So no, that’s, that’s bled into the way we understand Christianity, which has bled into the what those values are in the first place. And they both been banded together with right intentions and the house and stuff.

Glen Scrivener
And one interesting interplay of the two, on our podcast here at speak life, we once played a game. And it was can you guess whether this is a coming out story or a Christian testimony? We went online and Thomas said he would just take a couple of sentences from somebody’s testimony. And like he would read out the sentences from a Christian testimony and myself and make Morgan Lockwood have to think is, is that a coming out story about you know, I used to be repressed, and I used to be like this, and I used to be in the darkness. And now I’m coming into the light. It was an impossible game to play we. We couldn’t quite believe it. We got it as wrong as we did rights and and romanticism and the church. Yeah, it’s a two way street. Can

Andrew Wilson
we come back to that in another episode, because I want to talk about John Newton, and hymns and the response of the church and how much of what you’ve just described as a good thing and how much of it is a bad thing? And yes, how much of it is contextual? And how much is just as capitulating and I would really like to talk a bit about that

Glen Scrivener
I love a cliffhanger I love a cliffhanger. So if you want more, if you want John Newton and the both the opportunities and the threats of that sort of inward turn and come back for more of post Christianity. So please do give us a rating and review on your pod catcher of choice. Please do share us around on social media sharing is caring and do come back as we talk more about catch. They just come out I don’t know if you prick me. I bleed inanity. That’s that’s me. But that’ll do us for now. You come for the Truman you stay for the inanity. We will see you next time on post Christianity. Bye bye