Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 417 | The Self & The Sexual Revolution | Guest: Dr. Carl Trueman

Episode Date: May 10, 2021

We're excited to interview theologian Dr. Carl Trueman about the transgender theory that is quickly gaining support in America. Dr. Trueman has insight on the beginnings of this movement, tracing back to the first half of the 20th century, and the unique position the Christian church is in to protest this growing ideology. You can buy all of Dr. Trueman's books at crossway.org --- Today's Sponsors: StartMail helps you secure your email privacy. Sign up today & save 50% off your first year! Go to StartMail.com/ALLIE to create your account! Freedom Project Academy is dedicated to providing mastery of subject matter, not leftist propaganda & has perfect online learning for more than a decade! Go to FreedomForSchool.com to request your free information packet today. --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Hope everyone is having a wonderful day. I'm so excited for you to listen to this conversation with Dr. Carl Truman. You might have read some of his articles before. He recently wrote a book called The Rise in Triumph of the Modern Self, where he really outlines the philosophical foundations for how we understand who we are in mainstream culture today. That gives us a lot of insight into, for example, transgender ideology. And this is a lot of people. And this is a lot of, entire idea that we are our own gods, that we determine our own truth. Really a lot of stuff that we also talk about in my book as well. But he gives a lot of academic and intellectual and philosophical and theological context for all of this. Just a fascinating book and a fascinating person to speak to. He's also a professor. So I'm just so excited for you to listen to this dialogue. Without further ado, here is Dr. Carl Truman. Dr. Truman, thank you so much for joining me. For those who don't know and haven't been reading your stuff like I have,

can you tell everyone who you are and what you do? I'm a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College in Western Pennsylvania, and I write at First Things and public discourse online, and I teach a variety of historical humanities courses here at Grove City College. Yes, and you recently wrote a book published by Crossway, called The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. It's a hefty book.

About 400 pages. There's a lot that's packed in there. You probably feel like you could have written a lot more. Can you tell everyone why you decided to write this book with so much information and background about the cultural changes that we're experiencing right now? Yeah, it's a book that really arose in some ways quite by accident, A few years ago, Rod Dreher and Justin Taylor, Justin is the editor at Crossway,

approached me and asked if I would write a book introducing the work of the sociologist Philip Reef to a wider audience. And as I was starting to work on that, I came to realize that a more interesting book would be an application of Reef's ideas to contemporary society. And this was round about the time

that Obergefel v. Hodges, the gay marriage, Supreme Court case was being decided, and transgenderism, trans ideology, was being. beginning to grip the popular imagination. So the book really arose out of a desire to try to help people understand why the dramatic change is specifically in the areas of sexual morality and sexual identity

that we're now witnessing are taking place by looking at the long story of Western culture over the last 300 years and applying some of the insights of Philip Reef and a couple of other philosophers, Charles Taylor and Alistair McIntyre to our contemporary situation. Most people feel that a lot of the changes that have happened in the sexual revolution have just been over the past five years. Maybe before that we just weren't paying attention or we didn't notice. I think even six years ago, if you would have said that by the time 2020, 2020, 2021 comes around, we won't be able to, or the government won't be able to objectively define what a woman is or what a man is. most of us would say, we don't see the culture going that direction at all. You sound crazy. And yet, you argue that this has been building up for a very long time, even before the 1960s when a lot of

the sexual revolution started. Can you talk about some of that buildup and the philosophical foundations for where we are? Yes. I mean, you're absolutely correct that the speed of things seems to have been breathtaking over the last few years. And I think that's part of what gives us the clue that what we're witnessing are fast and rapid and dramatic changes, but they have to have come from somewhere for them to have happened with such speed means that other changes in society have to have already taken place and being very deep-seated. And I take as my cue in the book, the statement, I'm a woman trapped in a man's body, or I'm a man trapped in a woman's body. And I ask, what has to be true in broader society for that sort of. And that

sentence to come to make sense. And essentially, a number of things need to be true. One, we need to have authorised our inner feelings in a way that they carry decisive authority for who we think we are. Two, we have to have, in a related sense, downplayed the importance of the physical, downplayed the importance of the body for our identity. In other words, transformed our identity into something that's really connected to our inner desires. And thirdly, we have to have made the move that sees any attempt to curb or corral those desires as being politically oppressive. And that's the narrative I trace.

I think we find the authorising of inner feelings taking place in the late 18th, 30, 19th century with Rousseau and the romantic movements. We find the sexualizing of those desires taking place with Sigmund Freud, beginning of the 20th century. And then by the middle of the 20th century, we find the idea that sexual codes are politically oppressive, beginning to grip the popular political imagination. And that all lays the foundations for what we're witnessing today, which in some sense is just the last dominoes falling in a chain that goes back for at least 300 years, if not before. most people who hold the view that, for example, someone can declare themselves a woman and suddenly be just as much of a woman as I am would have no idea really of what you're talking about. They might not even know what Rousseau argued for. They might not know the philosophical foundation of their belief system or even that they really have a belief system. They've just kind of come to believe that, sure, this is common sense, this is tolerance, this is love. How does it affect me if my neighbor is a biological man but wants,

to, wants to be a woman. What do you say to that person who is just basically like, who cares where all of this comes from or where all of this going? It doesn't affect me. Yeah. Well, I think there are two strands of an answer to that. First of all, the origins of these ideas are helpful in understanding the, what we might call the dynamics of them, the implications of them. It's very true that the average man and woman in the street might think that the sentence, I'm a woman trapped in a man's body, makes sense, but not be able to articulate the philosophical framework in which that takes place. But it's helpful to study the ideologues. It's helpful to study the philosophers who make that case in order to see

what the implications of it are. As to the second, what difference does it make? There's a sense in which that has a certain plausibility to it. I often think of that statement of Thomas Jefferson. What does it matter if my neighbor believes in one God or 20 gods or no God? It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. Well, we live in a world now where identity is very psychological. And so any attempt to deny my own convictions about my psychological identity may not break my leg so much, but it certainly hurts me as a person, we might say. And that's underlies some of the legislation we're now seeing going into place in the United States.

President Biden, as we're recording just a week or so after President Biden signed a bill, an executive order on trans ideology and public schools. And at that point, we begin to see, well, this identity stuff, it's one thing for my neighbor to identify. He's a man, but he identifies as a woman. But that's going to have implications for bathroom policies for my kids. It's going to have implications for women's sports. It's going to have implications for employment legislation. I might find myself being fined for using the wrong pronouns at some point. So it's interesting that in theory, yes, it shouldn't make any difference, but in practice,

it's becoming rather intrusive and it's being pressed on us now in quite an aggressive way, which I think makes it very useful to understand the dynamics, the deeper philosophical dynamics of what is going on here. which is interesting because a lot of the people that advocate, for example, for an executive order like Biden signed that says, for example, I saw the ACLU. They tweeted just a few days ago that, you know, in all caps, fact number one, trans girls are girls and they have no advantage over biological girls when it comes to sports. None of these things were actually factual. They were their opinions about this. And yet, these kinds of opinions are being stated as fact. informing policy, which affects our real lives. And people that are in the ACLU and advocates of

executive orders and policies like this, they make a big stink about something like the separation of church and state or what they perceive to be the separation of church and state. They certainly don't believe that I, as a conservative Christian, should allow my worldview to influence what I think about policies or if I were a lawmaker to influence the kind of policies that I propose. And yet, it seems like they have a belief system that is very akin to a kind of religion that they are allowing to drive all of their policy positions and policy proposals. Is that intentional? Is that in, did they not realize the duplicity in that? Or is it, you know, like I said, I guess, is it, purposeful? Well, as to the ACLU, I'm the faculty sponsor for the women's rugby team at Grove

College, any member of the ACLU is welcome to come down to one of our training sessions any time. And we will easily demonstrate to that person that there is a tremendous difference between biological males and biological females on the rugby field such that it would be insane to allow a team of men identifying as women, play against a team of women identifying as men. It would be carnage on the field. Secondly, as to whether they genuinely believe this or not, well, the history of human society

indicates that just because an idea is self-evident nonsense doesn't stop a lot of people believing it, forming public policies and building civilizations upon it, unfortunately. Whether these people are cynical liars or whether they are so captivated and mesmerized by modern expressive individualist ideology. I don't know. Maybe it's a mix of the two. But certainly this is a complete, errant nonsense. And it's kind of ironic when you hear people talking about, you know,

the Democrats are going to govern with science. One of the first things the Democrat administration has done is signing to law trans ideology, which is very much counter science, I would suggest. So, you know, it's, yeah, it's, it is a mess. It's built, I think, upon capitulation to, to lobby groups. It's not built on a recognition of reality at this point. You know, this whole thing, I would say this part of the sexual revolution, this latter part of the sexual revolution, in addition to a lot of postmodern nonsense, like all kinds of critical theory, including critical race theory, has really made strange bedfellows between, for examples, for example, Christians and atheists. who both see the logic of maybe transgender ideology or radical feminists and a conservative traditional, you know, Christian woman like me who both say, hey, the eraser of women probably isn't going to be a good thing.

And yet these people, a lot of people who identify as atheists, we still disagree on the fundamentals of what the self is and how the self is defined. You talk about this in your book, how the romantic philosophers were some of the first people to try to assert that the self can be defined outside of theistic origins or a theistic understanding. To me, even though I find myself in common cause with a lot of atheists and agnostics today politically and ideologically in some ways, this confusion really starts from that kind of atheistic worldview that says that we are all self-defining. basically kind of replacing the God of Scripture with the God of self. Would you agree with that? Yes. I mean, I would want to preface that by saying I'm very grateful for some of the very courageous feminists who've taken pretty firm stands on this. J.K. Rowling, bless her. Yes. And it's great that somebody like her who has the public persona and the money to be able to be able to hold the line on this. I'm very grateful

of J.K. Rowling. Never thought I'd say I'm very grateful for J. M. I'm a big fan of Jermaine Korea these days on this issue. Very, very grateful for Jermaine Greer. But I think you're correct that as a Christian, I'd want to say the bottom line is to properly assert the distinction of male and female. To probably assert the moral structure of humanity and of reality. One really needs some kind of theistic framework. Nietzsche really calls the bluff in the 19th century on the Enlightenment and says, you know, if you get rid of God, you get rid of metaphysics, everything's up for grabs.

There are no facts, only interpretations. It becomes then a matter of you making your truth that works for you. And I do think that though we stand shoulder to shoulder with radical feminists on this issue, there are some deep philosophical differences. I don't think that should stop us from standing shoulder to shoulder with them. There is a common good here that we share and desire to see maintain. We want to see young girls. women protect it from this kind of nonsense. So it's important, I think, that we find common

cause of them. But it shouldn't blind us to the fact that at root, there are serious philosophical differences between us. It's almost the enemy of my enemy is my friend, if you like, at this point. Definitely. I couldn't agree more. I'm just wondering if you can kind of explain a little bit more why that theistic framework for the understanding of the self is so important to being able to analyze from a Christian perspective, everything that's going on, that just seems haphazard. What you argue is that it actually comes from a philosophical place. It actually comes from a consistent, logical place. If you understand its origins, tell us how it competes against what we as Christians understand about the self, where we come from, why we're here, and whose

authority we're under. That's a very good question. And this is, This is to set it in somewhat simple oppositional terms. But I think the big difference, the dividing line down through humanities, if you like those of us who think that we are merely the material we're made of, and those of us who think that we have some larger purpose beyond the material that we are made of. And Christianity is very much in that latter camp. And if you were to ask me, well, what is a human being? I would default straight away to saying human being is made in the image of God.

That means we reflect the image of God. We reflect the being of God in key ways. We're intentional beings. We have a moral structure. There is a morality to the world and to ourselves, to which we are accountable. We have to use our bodies in certain ways if we are to flourish. I think if you reject that position, if you want to be a secular feminist, let's say, then you find yourself in the position of saying, well, really, we ultimately are no more than what we're made of.

And yes, our bodies may appear, for example, to point in certain directions and to require us to behave in certain ways to flourish. But, hey, somebody's going to come along and say, well, science can help us get around that with its drugs, with its surgery, et cetera, et cetera. So I think when you're dealing with a radical atheist feminist, who agrees with us on the trans question, there's still at root a big difference, that they are ultimately committed to what we might call an imminent view of humanity. Humanity is simply what it's made of.

And that really tilts towards us being able to determine our own purpose in a way that Christian operates within a transcendent view of humanity. We are who we are precisely because we stand against the background of a sacred order established by God and reflecting God's own character. So, yes, there's a big difference at that point. Can you talk about what Christians what can we do in the midst of all of this craziness? A lot of people are worried about their kids, the kind of ideologies with which they're being

indoctrinated, either at school or just among their friends or on social media. It almost feels like we're Winston in 1984 having to daily convince ourselves, okay, two plus two does actually equal four. A man really is a man. A woman really is a woman. No, Christianity isn't a domestic tank. terrorist threat. No, I'm not racist just because, you know, I don't believe in all of the ideology of Ibermax Kendi or whatever it is. We're constantly having to convince ourselves of

that, which we knew, was common sense. It seems like just a few years ago. And there's a lot of people who are just discouraged. They're worn down by the bullying. They're worn down by what seems like constant propaganda. What can Christians do to arm themselves against this kind of delusional view of the self, and how can we have some optimism in the midst of what seems like just a train that's going a thousand miles an hour and doesn't care who it takes out on the way? Yeah. Well, first, I agree with my friend Rod Dreher that optimism isn't the way to look at it. I think hope is the way to look at it. Optimism always has that feeling, that polyanerish, well, it's all going to turn out okay. I think hope is what Christians are in the business.

of. So the first thing I would say that all Christians need to do at this particular moment time is remember the promises that the gates of hell will not prevail. The Lord is very, very clear that the church is going to win. The historical process is going to be won by the church. That doesn't mean your denomination necessarily, or my denomination or my congregation. But it does mean the church as a whole is going to win. So the first thing is there's no place in the Christian life or despair. Chase and hope, yes, but there's no place for despair. Secondly, I think there's no place for passivity. We are charged with certain tasks as Christians.

And I think probably the most critical one facing us at the moment is thinking about how to train the next generation, how to teach the next generation. One of the things I have the privilege of at Grove is I teach classes full of young people, many of whom are Christians, and many of whom take the Bible very, very seriously. But I've noticed that sometimes they wonder why the Bible says some things it does. Bible opposes homosexuality, but is that just because God doesn't want people to be happy? And there I think there's a place for teaching young people. I refer to it as natural law in the book, but are using the term very broadly there, teaching young people that actually God's rules make a kind of sense, given the structure of our bodies, given the structure of the created world in which we find ourselves. So teaching our young people to think and to understand the coherence and the sensible nature of the Christian faith and of Christian ethics is important.

I think also we need to remember that our identities are often community formed. We all belong to various communities. We have a workplace. We have family. We have friends. We have church. Our strongest identities are always going to be formed by the strongest community to which we belong. and therefore I think the church needs to work very hard at being a strong and tight-knit community.

Why has the LGBTQ Plus movement been so successful? Well, humanly speaking, a lot of its success comes down to it was a tight-knit community. People genuinely cared for each other, looked after each other. If you read the testimony of Rosaria Butterfield, former lesbian professor, now married to a reformed Presbyterian pastor, she talks about the power of the community when she was part of the LGBTQ Plus movement. I think the church really needs to start thinking about what does it mean to be a loving community,

not just people who gather together for an hour on Sunday to read the Bible, sing hymns, and hear somebody deliver a homily or sermon. What does it mean to be a community that really cares for each other? And when we think about that, we start doing that, I would say the church becomes not so much an institution that's at war with the wider culture. it becomes an institution that is protesting the wider culture, a culture that is falling apart at the moment.

And I think if the church can be a powerful community and a powerful culture, that gives us some grounds for practical hope in the future. And not just protesting against the wider culture, which I absolutely agree with, but a refuge from the wider culture. I think something that's not advertised very often is just the chaos and confusion and unrest and dissatisfaction. that a lot of people are finding both in themselves and in the world, that this illusory pursuit of self-defined happiness is actually very exhausting, this constant pursuit of self-empowerment and self-fulfillment and self-actualization is actually very burdensome, as liberating as it sounds, as freeing as it sounds. It's actually very exhausting. You're on this hamster wheel of being told simultaneously that the self is the problem and the solution. And so you're trying and

failing to find the answers to your self-made problems inside of yourself. And we just end up being more disappointed and more deflated than we were before. The church can and should offer something different. That the answers to the problems that you're facing or the insecurity that you feel the inadequacy, that you feel the confusion that you feel, the confusion that you feel or that you're finding in the culture, the answers to those things aren't going to be found inside yourself, but they can be found in someone else. And for Christianity and for the church to be a refuge from that exhausting and burdensome elevation of the self, I think, is where we can thrive. I remember hearing a pastor a few years ago say that the church actually thrives on the margins.

It doesn't die on the margins. And I think that is also a reason for our hope, not just in the ultimate coming of Jesus Christ, of course, but also in the here and the now, even as the church and Christianity may be pushed out of mainstream culture, there's a very significant place for us on the margins of society. Would you agree? Absolutely. And in the book, towards the end, I say, you know, if we're looking for an analogy of the present with the past, then perhaps the second century. Now, there are some differences. The second century was a world that had never been Christian. It was a pagan world by geneal. Our world is a world that is de-Christianizing at a rapid pace.

But the church was on the margins, and marginal communities tend to be strong communities and tend to punch well above their weight. You see this with the Jews in Europe in the Middle Ages right down to the 20th century. And I think there's no reason to not to believe that when the church has pushed the margins, this might not be an opportunity. At the moment we're in that, we're in the, we're transfixed. by the rapidity of what's happening. And people are despairing of being shunted to the margins.

I think we need to see this not as so much as an unconditional, unqualified setback, but also to see it as a tremendous opportunity to regroup, to rethink, and become that powerful community that you mentioned. People want to belong, and the world as it is at the moment offers very few strong communities to belong to. The church could step into that vacuum. Yep, absolutely. And we don't have time to get into all of this, but I also think about how social, you talk about Karl Marx in this book and how he is one of the philosophers that kind of contributes to this atheistic view of the self, how we're just kind of formed by class economics, power, and all of that. I think about how socialism seems to thrive and seems to grow right alongside godlessness.

and how it offers that sense of community, that sense of belonging at first. I mean, it advertises itself that way, that it offers a sense of you will be taking care of, you will be a part of something. There is someone who is going to make sure that you are cared for. Of course, we can look throughout history, especially in the past 100 years and see that that's not actually the case. But I would say that that's the political side of this as well, in addition to the cultural side that when people are looking for a place to belong, someone to take care of them,

they won't just look to themselves, but they may also look to the state. Do you think that's true? Yes, and I think one of the things that that model sort of gets wrong, of course, is that the true community can't be declared from the top. I think Edmund Burke is correct, that communities rise from the bottom up. Communities start at the local level. And again, I think that's where the church can really, could really step in at this point. There's no, you can't instruct people to be a community. It doesn't, communities don't work like that. Communities develop from the ground up.

And I think again, yes, that's where the church can step in at this point. Right. And in order to be that refuge, in order to be that place that people run to from confusion into clarity and to Christ, the church has to look very different from the rest of the world. and compromise certainly isn't going to make us that refuge for people who are lost in looking for, looking for answers that they've tried and failed to find inside themselves. Thank you so much for writing your book, for taking the time to talk to me in between teaching your classes. Can you tell people where they can find your book, how they can support you,

and continue to read your articles? Well, the book can be bought from Amazon or from crossway.org. That's the publisher. and there are other publishing outlets out there, I'm sure, that that sell up at Amazon and Crossway would be the two big ones. Most of my writing goes up at First Things, First Things.com, but I also do some work at Public Discourse, which is the online daily e-bulletin of the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton. Awesome. And can they follow? Do you have social media? Can they follow you on social media or anything like that?

I'm afraid not. I regard social media as the... anti-Christ. Oh, I don't blame you. I do not blame you at all. That is a wonderful way to be. Well, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to us. I know people are going to gain a lot of insight, not just from this conversation, but from your book and the rest of your writings as well. I highly encourage everyone to go out and buy it. Go to crossway.org, you said, and that's where they'll be able to search and find your book. Thank you so much, Dr. Truman.

Thanks for having me on. Thanks so much for listening to that conversation. Really fascinating. Like I said, he was doing the interview right between classes. So this is a little bit shorter of an episode than we typically have, but hopefully you feel like we packed a lot in. And of course, like he said, if you're interested in hearing more of what he has to say, you can go to first things.com and you can read his consistent articles. He also talks about critical race theory. He talks a lot about Marxism. He talks a lot about the things that we talk about on this podcast, and I wish that we could have gotten into more of it, especially how all of this, how postmodernism and the craziness and the just the disconnect that we are all feeling right now, we're all seeing right now between reality and what people think and the worldviews that they hold have so much to do with godlessness that once you reject the idea of a moral lawgiver, once you reject genesis, once you reject genesis, is 1-1, that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, anything is up for grabs.

Once you no longer have a transcendent authority who says what's right and what's wrong, what's good and what's bad, facts themselves, science itself becomes completely arbitrary. If we all are our own gods, then we then determine our own truth, and we can fit facts, we can fit numbers, we can fit the idea of justice, we can fit biology, we can fit statistics, we can fit absolutely anything that we want into our perspective if that's what makes us feel good. If our entire purpose here on earth is just to feel good and to do what we want to do, then who cares what the rules are? But God calls us to something bigger than that, more substantial than that, more grounded than that. And I think a lot of people don't realize that, say, for example, they've got a traditional

worldview. They do believe in a right and a wrong. They do believe in maybe. traditional marriage, traditional family, being a responsible person, a hard worker. They believe that the state is not where we go to receive our stalas and to receive our caretaking and to receive our morality. And yet they don't realize that that worldview is actually based in something bigger than them. There are plenty of people who do not believe in God and yet hold a lot of similar views as I do. The only, I mean, one of the big differences, of course, between the Christian and a person who may hold similar political and cultural views is that we believe that it comes somewhere. We believe that there's a reason for it, that we're not just material objects

floating about who get to determine what our purpose and what our destiny is. That God has already determined that. And our goal is to submit to his authority in every area of our lives. Don't let anyone bully you out of that. When the church just starts to look like the world, when we adopt the world's language, on things like justice, on things like race, when we adopt the world's language when it comes to gender, when it comes to sexuality, when we borrow the world's definitions of love and hate, when we start to redefine sin according to what culture says it is and redefine righteousness according to what culture says it is, we no longer exist as that refuge on the margins where people can go for clarity in the midst of confusion. This all reminds me as well of Love Thy Body

by Nancy Piercy. She did a really good job. of explaining the philosophies and the mentality behind the sexual revolution and our ideas of the body, this dualistic idea that the physical, our physical body is actually in submission to what we feel, that our true identity is actually what we declare and what we feel in biology and our bodies are just arbitrary. She debunks that very well, Theologically, in her book, Love Thy body. So I also encourage you to get that as well. so much here, so much to talk about, get Carl's book, sorry, Dr. Truman's book, Get Love Thy Body by Nancy Piercy. And if I can plug as well, a much more compact. And I would say probably a little bit

simpler way to understand kind of this false idea of the self is something that I write about in my book as well. You're not enough. And that's okay escaping the toxic culture of self-love. We go through five cultural myths that center on this misunderstanding. the world has of the self, and unfortunately how a lot of Christians have borrowed that misunderstanding of the self, and it has disastrous consequences. So that's all we've got for today. Thank you guys so much for listening. We will be back here soon.