OUR MODERN CULTURE

There are few books that I agree with 100 percent but this is one. THE DESECRATION OF MAN: HOW THE REJECTION OF GOD DEGRADES OUR HUMANITY by Carl R. Trueman, is a unflinching exposé of our secular society from the perspective of the biblical faith. It confronts the nature of the human condition that is at the roots of all our moral ills. Instead of humanity being marked by personal responsibility, moral limits, moral obligations, and specific moral ends today’s we see the ways in which godlessness manifests itself.

First, desecration is involved in any move to eliminate human exceptionalism and turn human beings into merely one animal among others. Man is just another species randomly cast up on the shores of existence.

Second, desecration happens when one human being treats another as a thing or an object, as a commodity to be used or destroyed for one’s own selfish benefit.

Third, there is desecration in any belief that human beings are capable of creating their own ends in any absolute or final sense so setting ourselves up as personal gods without regard for the well-being of others.

Today the struggle in the world is over our definition of what is man and why he or she exists. This is called anthropology. What does it mean that we are created in the image and God and what for? What is our purpose and meaning? “What is man?” is the question of our time. The modern myth is that we are autonomous, unencumbered by any transcendent belief in God to do with our lives what we will regardless of the consequences. What responsibilities does our belief place upon us? What does it mean for our bodies. How should our beliefs shape the way we interact with other? The major questions of our day are ethical, and ethics rest upon that deeper question of what it means to be human.

Trueman deals with our culture of endless sex, mechanical reproduction and the denial and trivialization of death.

What we saw in Germany during World War II and decried as barbarous is now enshrined in our culture. Well educated Germans from good homes engaged in the most bestial acts of violence against those he had been taught to regard as subhuman vermin. This was because of the loss of the sacred about human life. As the poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote:

Without religious and metaphysical underpinning, the word man is too ambiguous a term, is it not? From the moment it is deprived of traits such as an immortal soul and redemption through Christ, does it not disintegrate into a vast number of possibilities, of which some are better, others worse, some deserving of protection and cultivation, and others of absolute extinction.

Genetic science, artificial reproduction, abortion of unwanted, or disabled children, IVF and surrogacy deliver bespoke babies made to order. Euthanasia practiced by the Nazi has now become lawful with assisted suicide. Sex as recreation only and the prevalence of digital pornography has degraded the intimacy of relationships. Gender as a social construction rather than a biological reality has confused adolescents.

We are not free-floating selves of the modern cultural imagination but rather beings who are made to exist in relationships with others who are persons, not objects or things. As with sex, so with death: the modern attitude that seeks to trivialize it crashes up against the reality of our experience of it. The incoherent approaches to death in the modern world – by turns, marginalizing it, ignoring it, medicalizing it, and trivializing it – all indicate a basic inability to come to terms with it. Like the traditional sacredness of sex, death’s loss of this sense of the sacred is not a trivial cultural matter but something of great importance. The lie that sits at the heart of the desecration of man is the idea that we have neither given limits nor ends, that we are obliged to nobody, and that we can live this way with impunity.

This book needs to be chosen for study groups in all sections of our society to inform and alert ourselves to the disease of our age and its cure.