Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 02:2 (Fall 2020)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

Eikon 2.2 (Fall 2020) p. 155

Book Reviews

The Rise And Triumph Of The Modern Self:
Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism,
And The Road To Sexual Revolution.

REVIEWED BY Bobby Jamieson

Bobby Jamieson (PhD, University of Cambridge) is an associate pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC. He is the author, most recently, of The Paradox of Sonship: Christology in the Epistle to the Hebrews (IVP Academic, forthcoming).

Carl R. Trueman. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020.

“Born this way.” “Love is love.” “Equality is not a sin.”

The LGBTQ+ vanguard of the sexual revolution has an aura of normalcy and inevitability. Who could object to love? And who wants to be found on the wrong side of history? This aura of normalcy and inevitability is a powerful cultural force — one could even say weapon.

For those who want to resist this revolution, the question is how. Carl Trueman’s outstanding new book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, offers one essential piece of the answer. Postmodern deconstructionists learned from Nietzsche to undermine dominant moral paradigms by unveiling their genealogy: showing where they came from and whose interests they serve. In this thorough, measured, perceptive, and crisply-written work of intellectual history, Trueman offers a genealogy of his own.

Eikon 2.2 (Fall 2020) p. 156

In essence, this book is a genealogy of a single sentence: “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body.” Even a couple generations ago, such a statement would have been widely regarded as nonsense. “And yet today it is a sentence that many in our society regard as not only meaningful but so significant that to deny it or question it in some way is to reveal oneself as stupid, immoral, or subject to yet another irrational phobia” (19). In order for this statement to become widely plausible, a series of key shifts had to take place in popular beliefs regarding the relation of mind to body and gender to sex, as well as in applying notions of civil rights and individual liberty to newly conceived identities and orientations. Trueman’s book tells the story of those shifts.

The two chapters of Part 1 set out basic concepts that Trueman uses in his historical narrative. These are drawn principally from Philip Rieff, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre. Trueman compares and coordinates Rieff’s description of modern “psychological man” with Taylor’s analysis of the “expressive individualism” that defines our modern “social imaginary.” In both conceptions, the key to a meaningful life ...