“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.

In the third part, Trueman explores how this psychological self is then given a sexual dimension in the work of Freud, and politicized by Reich and Marcuse. Sexual desire and identity thus became a prominent aspect of the expressive individual. Existing societal norms and institutions that inhibit certain forms of sexual expression are thus repressive and must be torn down.

How often do we Christians live our lives as expressive individuals in this problematic way, even if we do not engage in sexual immorality?

Finally, these ideas break into the popular culture and define the social imaginary through cultural media, of which Trueman picks out surrealism and pornography to discuss in the fourth part of his book. Surrealist art gave artistic expression to the psychological, sexualized self. The artists sought to bring about a revolution through their work. And this helped, according to Trueman, lead to the acceptance of pornography, not as something abominable, but as something good and healthy, and to the overall sexualization of pop culture.

This sexualized culture we live in is the result of a long line of thinkers and ideas, as Trueman has shown. We may reject the LGBTQ+ movement, but we are soaked in the same social imaginary as they. We are all expressive individuals. This is something Trueman sombrely reminds his readers of. This is why this book is important. We cannot effectively understand their rhetoric and engage with them if we do not first understand expressive individualism and how we take part in it as well. The problem is not expressive individualism, but expressive individualism untethered from any sacred order. How often do we Christians live our lives as expressive individuals in this problematic way, even if we do not engage in sexual immorality?

Trueman offers hope and advice. First, the church must think hard about the connection between aesthetics and their beliefs and practices. Much of modern moral reasoning comes down to “it feels good”, a result of the psychological self, and the church may easily fall into that trap. Secondly, in the face of expressive individualism, the church must be a strong community. Thirdly, he calls specifically on Protestants to a recovery of natural law and a higher view of the body.

Trueman’s work is scholarly and erudite, weaving a very persuasive narrative of intellectual history. It is, however, a challenge. Trueman himself was made aware of this and so has released an abridged version of this book under the title Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution.