“I am a woman trapped in a man’s body.” Whether you believe such a statement makes sense, it cannot be denied that it does to a lot of people today. Yet, if you made this statement a few decades ago, people would have looked at you like you had two heads. The cultural climate of today is dramatically different from the past as we see the dominance of the effects of the sexual revolution, the LGBTQ+ movement, and “woke” ideology that has shaped the thinking of many today.

How did we get here? This is where Trueman’s book comes in. His book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, argues that the sexual revolution is really part of a larger revolution in the West about how the self is understood: Who am I? What is my identity? The foundations for this revolution were laid by thinkers in the past and culminated in the modern self. Trueman traces this history in his book.

While this is not a work primarily about responding to the sexual revolution, Trueman believes that his book gives the necessary groundwork for Christians to understand it. He does this in four parts: In the first part, he introduces the conceptual tools that will help frame the discussion. In the second part, he discusses the rise of the psychological self. In the third part, he deals with how the psychological self is sexualized and how this sexualized self is then politicized. In the fourth part, he discusses how these intellectual revolutions broke into popular culture. Finally, he offers some reflections on what the church can do in this current cultural climate.

This first helpful concept is that of the social imaginary. This refers to the way people intuitively think about the world and themselves without necessarily having come to these conclusions through a conscious process of rationalization. The social imaginary of today sees biological sex and a person’s real gender as separate, but few who confess as much can articulate why. The ideas of thinkers shape the social imaginary without having been read by everyone.

Another crucial concept is that of expressive individualism, which refers to the modern idea that one's core identity is found by looking inward, and the expression of that inner self is essential to being who one is. Probably something most of us intuitively believe.

With these helpful concepts, Trueman discusses Rousseau, Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin in the second part. Rousseau lays the foundation for expressive individualism with his idea that man is born good but corrupted and forced to live inauthentically by society (sound familiar?), while Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin assault the sacred order (Christianity) which undergirded societal norms. What is left is a psychological self, untethered from the moral codes imposed by a sacred order.