Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, March 13, 2024
Ours is a time of anthropological crisis when we as a society cannot agree on what it means to be human. In such a context, theologians who faced that issue in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s are obvious dialogue partners upon whom we can draw.

Twice in the last ten days my dear friend and colleague Fran Maier has drawn attention to the importance of Dietrich Bonhoeffer for the church in America today. At the Catholic Thing he noted that this year marks the ninetieth anniversary of the Barmen Declaration, in which a number of prominent theologians in Nazi Germany publicly opposed the “German Christians” who were seeking an accommodation with Nazism. Bonhoeffer was one of the signatories. Then, at the launch event for his fascinating new book, True Confessions, he quoted from Bonhoeffer’s letters, that it is “only with gratitude that life becomes rich.”
That Maier, a Catholic, calls on Bonhoeffer is a sign of the times. This is not simply because in the current climate Catholics and Protestants share common cultural concerns. It is also because the great temptation of our day, that of conflating politics with Christianity, is intense. The stakes are not as high as they were in Germany in 1934. But the principal challenge for Christians, that of remaining faithful as witnesses to the gospel rather than enablers of those whose politics resonate with our cultural tastes, is the same.
Bonhoeffer may be the most famous German theologian to oppose Hitler and Nazism, but he was not the only one. Another who speaks to our times is Helmut Thielicke, a Lutheran theologian and pastor. Like Bonhoeffer, Thielicke was hounded by the Nazis, though he survived and was even able to pastor a church for a while in the 1940s. A polymath and a preacher, he wrote a massive theological ethics as well as a critique of Bultmann. Many of his sermons and lectures were collected and published. Also like Bonhoeffer, he was not an entirely reliable guide to traditional Christianity. His historical context was Nazism but his theological context was neo-orthodoxy. The latter was always somewhat more “neo” than “orthodox” at key points.
I first encountered Thielicke when I picked up a copy of Man in God’s World in a used bookstore in the late 1980s. It’s a series of lectures on Luther’s Small Catechism that he delivered in Stuttgart Cathedral in the early 1940s. What caught my attention was the fact that the series continued through the Allied bombings of the city. Thielicke knew that every lecture he gave would be the last gospel message that some members of his audience would ever hear. That gave them an urgency and a relevance I have not encountered elsewhere. Perhaps never has Richard Baxter’s comment about preaching as a dying man to dying men applied to anyone as pointedly as to Thielicke in Stuttgart during the war.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, March 12, 2024
The best scenario for Christians, therefore, is to acknowledge that all of us have creeds and confessions—all of us think the Bible means something and that its teaching can be formulated in a manner that is concise and summarizes the Bible’s position on a whole variety if important. But we should not stop there. We move from such an acknowledgment to look to the great creeds and confessions of the church to see what “forms of sound words” have been useful throughout history to keep the church faithful to the gospel message. Time is no guarantee of truth, but if a creed—say, the Apostles’ or the Nicene—has served the church for over 1,500 years, that says something about the consistency of its content with what the Bible says. Of course, a church today can produce its own statement of faith. But why reinvent the wheel when tried and tested creeds and confessions already exist?

This article is part of the Unpacking Culture series in which we examine a well-known axiom and weigh any true or positive aspects of it against any negative or misleading connotations of the phrase.
An Important Truth
Many Christians from non-denominational evangelical backgrounds may well have heard the phrase “no creed but the Bible” at some point. Perhaps a pastor has used it while preaching or somebody has used it at a Bible study or in conversation about what Christians are supposed to believe. As a statement it is concise and clear. But the key question is, Is it a faithful and useful principle for guiding how we as Christians think about Christian truth and authority?
Before offering some criticism of how the principle of “no creed but the Bible” is sometimes used, it is first useful to understand what important truth those who use it are rightly trying to protect. That truth is the unique authority and sufficiency of the Bible as the source and criterion for Christian doctrine. This scriptural principle is something that is rooted in the Reformation when the Protestant Reformers asserted that many of the claims of the medieval church—for example, purgatory, indulgences, and the elaborate theory of transubstantiation—not only lacked warrant in Scripture but were arguably inconsistent with scriptural teaching. They were inventions or speculations of a church that claimed access to a tradition of Christian truth that was independent of the biblical revelation.
Against this background, “no creed but the Bible” highlights an important truth: the Bible provides the content of Christian doctrine and the principles for judging whether a doctrinal claim is true or not. Is justification by faith? Yes, for Paul teaches that in Romans. Can someone buy God’s favor through the purchase of an indulgence? No. Not only does the Bible never teach that, it teaches against it, as in the case of Simon the Magician in Acts 8. The desire to protect scriptural sufficiency is therefore something to be commended.
But does this mean that creeds and confessions—statements of faith that summarize biblical teaching—are problematic and should have no place in the church? Does the use of a creed or confession necessarily mean that the unique authority of Scripture has been compromised? Not at all. And it is important to understand why.
First, we all need to acknowledge that no Christian has no creed but the Bible in a comprehensive and exhaustive sense. To understand why, one need only reflect on the fact that nobody simply believes the Bible.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, March 6, 2024
Human history indicates that the self-evident nonsense of an idea is seldom a barrier to it becoming the dominant philosophy of its age. That man is born free and is everywhere in chains is one. That sex is a cost-free, light recreation is another. 

According to a recent CDC report, cases of syphilis are rising in the United States. The report offers an interesting window on contemporary American culture.
First, it features the usual exceptionalism for health issues that are a part of the progressive remaking of society. Just as smoking a cigar is bad but puffing on a joint is OK, so spreading illnesses by being unvaccinated is evil while spreading disease through sexual indulgence is a mere technical problem. And it cannot be addressed in terms of any broader moral framework beyond that provided by “experts”—typically not moral philosophers or theologians but scientists. The CDC is calling for a “whole-of-nation” response to the syphilis phenomenon—a vague phrase, but one likely to be fleshed out with condoms and antibiotics rather than government funding for teaching about chastity and personal moral responsibility. For chastity and responsibility are concepts that assume a moral framework for sex, the very thing our culture has now spent many decades repudiating.
There is a real but simple lesson here for Western culture: While there is a cure for STDs, there is no cure for stupidity. The sexual revolution is one of the most obviously failed experiments ever attempted in human history and yet, rather than reject it, society keeps forging ahead. All the evidence of its failure—the urban scourge of single parenthood, the elaborate menu of diseases, the rates of abortion, the falling birth rates, the objectification and exploitation of women—is regarded as a bug of the system, a set of technical problems to be addressed with technical solutions. Then there is the development of a linguistic culture designed to render any criticism illegitimate. Children from homes where mum and dad stayed together are “privileged,” as if the love, self-discipline, and fidelity of their parents was somehow bought at the unjust cost of denying that to some other child. To point out that certain patterns of sexual behavior greatly increase the chances of catching STDs, or that a life of promiscuity might be setting the stage for twilight years of loneliness, is to be judgmental or self-righteous. Strange to tell, the same is not typically applied to those who advise that it is dangerous to cross a busy road at rush hour without waiting for a break in the traffic.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, February 28, 2024
As the Christian transformation of the Roman Empire was marked by the emergence of the liturgical calendar and the turning of pagan temples into churches, so we can expect the reverse to take place when a culture paganizes….Time and space are reimagined in ways that directly confront and annihilate that once deemed sacred.

The controversy surrounding the recent funeral for Cecilia Gentili at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York has been well-documented in the press. Gentili was a transgender prostitute, an atheist, and a misogynist who denied that women’s bodies were of any real relevance. The service has been decried by Catholic conservatives as blasphemous—among other things, it featured prayers for transgender rights and a eulogy that praised Gentili as “Saint Cecilia, the mother of all whores”—and celebrated by Catholic progressives. The priest in charge of the cathedral has issued an apology, claiming that when he agreed to host the service he had no idea of what was to transpire. A Mass has even been offered by way of atonement.
The incident is eloquent testimony to the nature of this moment in American, even Western, culture. That actor Billy Porter played a lead role at the funeral is unsurprising: If anyone could be said to represent the real presence of the absolute absence of intellectual or cultural substance, it is he. Only a cultural vacuum could be filled by such a caricature, and his comment on the funeral bears testimony to this: “There’s no right or wrong way to grieve. But just make sure that you do, you allow yourself to do that, so that we can get to the other side of something that feels a little bit like grace.” What exactly that means is anybody’s guess.
One obvious question is why an atheist man convinced that he is a woman and committed to a life of prostitution would wish to have a funeral in a church. One answer is that the struggle for the heart of a culture always takes place in two areas: time and space. As the Christian transformation of the Roman Empire was marked by the emergence of the liturgical calendar and the turning of pagan temples into churches, so we can expect the reverse to take place when a culture paganizes. The pagans will respond in kind. And so we have a month dedicated to Pride and church buildings used for the mockery of Christianity. Time and space are reimagined in ways that directly confront and annihilate that once deemed sacred. A funeral in a Catholic cathedral for an atheist culture warrior is a first-class way of doing this.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, February 13, 2024
The impact of consumerism is one reason why church sessions and elder boards often spend more time than is decent on discussions about worship and programs. Someone will make the point that certain young people have left because the worship is not to their liking and thus the church needs to rethink how it does things. Laying aside the fact that, for most of us, no church gives us everything we want in worship but we are nonetheless happy to attend because the word is truly preached it is interesting to note the session member’s response: we need to do something, to think again about worship.

Losing Respect for the Past
Consumerism can be defined as an overattachment to material goods and possessions, such that one’s meaning or worth is determined by them. This definition is reasonably helpful but misses one key aspect of the phenomenon: it is not just the attachment to material things but also the need for constant acquisition of the same. Life is enriched not simply by possessing goods but by the process of acquiring them; consumerism is as much a function of boredom as it is of crass materialism.
What has this to do with rejection of the past? Simply this: consumerism is predicated on the idea that life can be fulfilling through acquiring something in the future that one does not have in the present. This manifests itself in the whole strategic nature of marketing. For example, every time you switch on your television set, you are bombarded with advertisements that may be for a variety of different goods and services but that all preach basically the same message: what you have now is not enough for happiness; you need something else, something new, in order to find true fulfillment. I believe this reinforces fundamentally negative attitudes toward the past.
Think for a moment: How many readers of this are wearing clothes they bought ten years ago? How many are using computers they bought five years ago? Or driving automobiles more than fifteen years old? With the exception of vintage car collectors, the economically poor, and those with absolutely no fashion sense, most readers will probably respond in the negative to at least one, if not all three, of these questions. Yet when we ask why this is the case, there is no sensible answer. We can put a man on the moon, so we could probably make an automobile that lasts for fifty years; most of us do little on computers that could not have been done on the machines we owned five years ago; and we all get rid of clothes that still fit us and are quite presentable. So why the need for the new?
A number of factors influence this kind of behavior. First, there is the role of built-in obsolescence: it is not in the manufacturer’s best interest to make a washing machine that will last for a hundred years. If that were done, then the manufacturer would likely be out of business within a decade as the market became saturated. Such is a possible but unlikely scenario. Developments in technology mean that longevity will not be the only factor driving the market.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, February 5, 2024
There are also obvious reasons why a Christian should never attend a gay wedding. If marriage is rooted in the complementarity of the sexes, then any marriage that denies that challenges the Christian understanding of creation. It is one thing for the world to do that. It is quite another for Christians to acquiesce in the same. Further, the biblical analogy between Christ and the Church means that fake marriages are a mockery of Christ himself. Of course, that applies beyond the issue of gay marriage. A marriage involving somebody who has not divorced a previous spouse for biblical reasons involves that person entering into an adulterous relationship. No Christian should knowingly attend such a ceremony either.

To update the famous comment of Leon Trotsky, you may not be interested in the sexual revolution, but the sexual revolution is interested in you. Some of us are still privileged enough to be partly sheltered from this revolution. I count myself as one, along with those whose detachment from real-life pastoral situations apparently qualifies them to sell political pedagogy to others. But as the push among the progressive political class to dismantle traditional sexual mores continues apace, it is harder and harder to find a pastor or a priest who has not faced a difficult question from congregants about Christian obedience and their livelihood. Only last week a pastor friend told me of a member of his church who, as a manager of a business, has been ordered to integrate the bathrooms and is now faced with complaints from women staff who feel their safety and privacy have been compromised. It’s easy to decry right-wing scaremongering in the abstract, far more difficult to give advice to real people who have to make decisions that could cost them their careers. 
The sexual revolution has revolutionized everything, to the point where questions that once had simple answers have become complicated. For instance, the question “Can I attend a gay wedding?” comes up with increasing frequency and is proving less and less easy to answer, as Bethel McGrew’s closing paragraphs in her recent World column indicate. It is not hard to guess what reasons a Christian might give for attending a gay wedding: a desire to indicate to the couple that one does not hate them, or a wish to avoid causing offense or hurt. But if either carries decisive weight in the decision, then something has gone awry. A refusal to attend might well be motivated by hatred of the couple (though in such circumstances, an invitation would seem an unlikely event) but it does not have to be so. To consider a declined invitation necessarily a sign of hatred is to adopt the notion of “hate” as a mere refusal to affirm.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, January 17, 2024
Lutheranism has much to offer the church catholic at this moment in time. Like all confessional Christianity, it is anchored in realities that transcend the political particularities of our day; and it also reminds us of the church’s true task and realistic expectations in a time such as this.

This week I had the privilege of speaking at a seminar for the Collegium Fellows of Doxology, a group of Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod pastors committed to spiritual care and counsel. There are serious theological differences between the Lutheran tradition and my own Reformed tradition, most obviously in the area of the Lord’s Supper. But there is an ethos that binds confessional Protestants together in a world where Catholics are in frequent turmoil over the actions of the present pope and where evangelicals are tearing themselves apart over attitudes to the current political malaise that has enveloped American public life.
Toward the end of the seminar, one pastor asked what I thought confessional Lutheranism could offer to the church catholic at this moment in time. My answer was threefold.
First, confessional Protestantism in general, when faithful to its defining documents, focuses the minds of believers upon the great truths of the Christian faith that take no account of the vicissitudes of the age. God, Trinity, Fall, Incarnation, redemption, and grace: These are truths that feed the mind and the soul, regardless of which side wins and which side loses elections. And they are the central concerns of the great confessional documents of Protestantism. Whether the Book of Concord for Lutherans; the Westminster Standards for Presbyterians; the Three Forms of Unity for the Reformed; or the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Homilies for Anglicans—all speak of the eternal weight of glory that is to come and thereby relativize the slings and arrows of this world as so many light, momentary afflictions. The implications of this are liturgical: The church goes about its ordinary work of proclaiming Christ in Word and Sacrament even as earthly regimes come and go. Thus it was in the time of Nero. So it is today.
I went on to say that confessional Lutheranism, more specifically, has two particularly important contributions for the church catholic today. First, the Lutheran distinction (echoing Augustine), between the heavenly kingdom and the earthly kingdom. This distinction is vital, especially in a time of deep political division and seductive political temptation. Much has been made of Christian nationalism as an “existential threat” to the nation and to democracy. Setting aside the rather fluid definitions of Christian nationalism, even in its most extreme form it is unlikely to pose a significant threat to society at large. But it may well prove to be a threat in the much smaller world of our congregations and denominations, where a confusion between church and world and between the power of the Word and the power of the sword would devastate the gospel.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Thursday, January 4, 2024
There are two kinds of leaders: those who see their role as remaking their organizations in their own image, regardless of the collateral damage done to those further down the totem pole; and those who seek to protect the interests of the weakest and most vulnerable of those dependent upon them. Throughout his papacy, Francis has presented himself as the latter, but now it would seem that this has been no more than a specious cover for being the former. A good leader speaks with clarity. Francis seems incapable of doing so. And unfortunately, given the high profile of the Catholic Church, the chaos in Rome has implications for Wittenberg and Geneva, too.

The confusion surrounding the pope’s recent statement Fiducia Supplicans, a document that is ambiguous about whether Catholic clergy can bless those in same-sex relationships, says much about the times in which we live. Catholic theologians will argue that Rome has not changed, that the fog of distinctions contained in this latest statement means that it does not affect core Roman dogma. But that is not the point: The watching world cares nothing for such sophistry and sees here a fundamental cultural shift. And it seems naive to think that a fundamental change in pastoral practice will not lead to a significant transformation of attitudes. Such compromises—and this is most surely a compromise—always end up being far more sympathetic to the position they are moving toward than that from which they are moving away. When the pope sows chaos within his church on the matter of gay blessings, it is likely to affect us all—Catholic clergy and laity, certainly, but also us Protestants.
For Protestants (and likely many Catholics), this is a reminder that the papacy is not a cure-all for the alleged problems surrounding Protestant notions of scriptural sufficiency and clarity. Saint Paul promoted both the importance of Scripture and a church marked by ordained office for the preservation and transmission of the faith. Neither on its own can do the task by itself, and if Protestantism is vulnerable to not taking the church seriously enough, then a strong and hierarchical ecclesiology is vulnerable to generating its own forms of chaos. The system only has the competence and integrity of its leadership.
It would be easy in such circumstances to indulge in a certain Protestant triumphalism, as many Catholics now seem to face a conflict of conscience akin to that which Luther faced. Yet the problem is that the woes of contemporary Catholicism are not so easily separated from those of contemporary conservative Protestants at this point. Catholicism has for many years given us an umbrella under which we can shelter from the worst excesses of the broader culture.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Thursday, December 28, 2023
The real issue is not the technocrats at the top. It is the culture that sees leadership in higher education not as a moral calling, but as a technocratic one. That type of leadership suits a broader academic culture that lacks positive moral content, that revels in the spirit of negation, and that cultivates a moral imagination infused with ressentiment among its students. Such leadership cares little for what happens in the classroom unless it affects the bottom line. And until that cultural issue is addressed, changes at the top will likely be accurately described in terms of “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss,” to quote The Who.

When is a crime victimless? When its perpetrators enjoy the status of victims, at least according to the nihilistic tastes of the West in our day. That is the lesson of reactions to various events in recent years, from the looting that accompanied many of the “mostly peaceful” BLM protests of 2020 to the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 this year. The response to the violence in Gaza was especially chilling. While there is always room for debating whether a response is proportionate to the act of aggression, the jubilation and exhilaration expressed by American academics, students, and some politicians over the Hamas attacks started before the Israeli counter-attack.
The contradictions at the heart of the modern morality of victimhood have now been exposed to all with eyes to see, even to many who have been pressing it in the political sphere. When members of the LGBTQ lobby express support for Hamas, it is another reminder that many progressives have lost any sense of a moral compass. But this was predictable. When oppressor and oppressed, victimizer and victim are the decisive categories by which to understand the world with no broader moral framework for defining those terms, political morality defaults to that of ressentiment, a reactive stance that simply opposes on principle whatever is. It is the spirit of negation.
Lacking any real framework for ethical discussion beyond this spirit of negation, the moral register is flattened and the language of moral outrage inflated. For example, the word “genocidal,” once reserved for real ethnic slaughter, is now used (apparently with a straight face) to describe legislation that seeks to protect children from bogus “science” placed in the service of progressive transgender ideology. Not only does the West now lack a sophisticated moral register, it lacks any vocabulary in which such could be expressed.
Much has been made this week of the resignation of Liz Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania. Congress had called her to a hearing on Capitol Hill to investigate her handling of recent anti-Semitic incidents on the Penn campus.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Friday, December 15, 2023
Our fundamental problem today is not that man is disenchanted or turned into liquid, but that he has been desecrated, in part by the impersonal forces of modernity, but largely by his own hand. The answer, therefore, must have consecration at its core. This cannot be legislated. Politicians have no authority over the spiritual imagination, to which the language of consecration speaks. The modern crisis of anthropology must find its solution among religious communities worshiping in local contexts. The answer is first and foremost a theologically informed liturgical one, for it is in worship that human beings are brought into the presence of the God, in whose image they are made and who grounds their common human nature.

This year marks the eightieth anniversary of the lectures that became C. S. Lewis’s book The Abolition of Man. Speaking to an audience at the height of the Second World War, Lewis identified the central problem of the modern age: The world was losing its sense of what it meant to be human. As man’s technological achievements were once again being used to destroy human life on an industrial scale, Lewis pointed to the dehumanization that was occurring all around. And as the war continued, the Final Solution and the atomic bomb served to reinforce his claims. Yet modern warfare was not the only problem. As Lewis argued, the intellectual and cultural currents of modernity were also culpable. The war was as much a symptom of the problem as a cause. Modernity was abolishing man. It represented nothing less than a crisis of anthropology.
Sociologists have proposed a number of concepts that characterize the modern age. These provide a useful backdrop to Lewis’s observations. Perhaps the most influential is the Weberian thesis of disenchantment. Whereas once the local god or saint kept the water supply fresh and sweet, now the local water purification plant does the same. Village life has been replaced by the anonymity of the city. People have come to be valued not for themselves but for their earning potential or their consumption. And disenchantment has worked its way into every corner of life: Whereas once love was a serendipitous force that culminated in a lifelong bond between two people, now we swipe left or right on our apps for the next hookup.
These changes bring with them a sense of loss. Modernity has shunted religion and the supernatural to the margins, at the cost of stripping the world of its mystery. The sea of faith recedes, Matthew Arnold wrote in a great poem, and we hear only its “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.”
The problem is not merely that the world has become prosaic. It is also that man has lost his sense of his own significance. The more we understand and control nature, the more we realize our own contingency and smallness amid the vastness of an impersonal universe. The unique intellectual brilliance of our species has, ironically, deprived us of any sense that we have special significance. As Pascal observed, the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens those who reflect upon it. This is the ethos that haunts the work of many modern and postmodern writers: Kafka, Beckett, Sartre, Pinter. With no God-given human nature and no God-ordained human end, the question “What is man?” is easily answered: He is nothing much. His nature too is disenchanted.
A second facet of modernity, identified by Zygmunt Bauman, is its liquidity. We live in a world that is in constant flux. This observation is not original to Bauman. Both Marx and Nietzsche voiced it in the nineteenth century. The Communist Manifesto famously declared that the bourgeois era required a constant revolutionizing of production and of markets and thus of all social relations. Constant disturbance was a hallmark of modernity; as Marx put it, “all that is sold melts into air.” Likewise, Nietzsche’s madman, reflecting on the death of God, described the earth as unhitched from the sun, turning all old certainties into chaos. Both men spoke truth: The modern West is indeed in state of endless flux and offers us no place to stand, no firm grasp of who we are.
More recently, the flux has been intensified by what Hartmut Rosa calls social acceleration. If Marx was correct that industrial production was a source of constant change in society, it was so in large part because it depended on technology that was itself constantly changing. We too live in an era of constant technological change, but it no longer affects merely industrial production. Technology shapes how we live in every area, from education to romance. Our lives are technologically shaped in public and in private, and the technology changes so fast that we are unable to assimilate one development before another overtakes it. The result is a dizzy feeling that our ability to control even our personal worlds is constantly slipping further away. In such a context, the questions of who we are and what we are meant for become impossible to answer. Indeed, to borrow from Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” things seem constantly falling apart, and that includes the consensus on who or what man is and what he is for.
The abolition of man as Lewis describes it takes place against the background of two aspects of modernity: its disenchantment and its accelerating liquidity. Yet I want to suggest that we need to add a third category, that of desecration. Man is made in God’s image. That means that the abolition of man is a theological act with theological consequences. Neither disenchantment nor liquidity by itself adequately expresses this aspect of the problem. Desecration, a theological concept, does so.
We can see this more clearly when we reflect on the limitations of disenchantment and liquidity as explanatory schemes. The first is that these concepts speak only to a loss of that which once was. Disenchantment, of course, points to the loss of enchantment. Whereas once the supernatural pervaded the natural, and the transcendent set the terms for the immanent, now only the natural and the immanent remain. Likewise with liquidity: We no longer have, in Marx’s phrase, fixed, frozen relations. All true—but, as will be seen, there is more to our modern condition than these losses.
The second problem is that disenchantment and liquidity connote a lack of human agency. Both are the result of impersonal social processes: industrialization, bureaucratization, technologization, globalization. Connected to these processes is the reification in common language of the phenomena to which they refer: industry, bureaucracy, technology, the global economy. Each takes on a life of its own in our imaginations, and we humans feature within these processes as interchangeable objects, not as active subjects or persons. Yet the processes themselves are the result of human activity. If we have become cogs in the machine, it is because we built the machine.
Further, we must not ignore the agency of the cultural elites—the legal, educational, technological, artistic, managerial, and political classes. In the past, such elites saw themselves as tasked with continuity, with the transmission of values from generation to generation and the careful cultivation of the institutions and social practices that were necessary for this task. Today, the dominant impulse of our elites is toward disruption, destruction, and discontinuity. The abolition of man is a conscious project of our culture’s officer class, not merely the outcome of impersonal social and technological forces. Disenchantment and liquidity simply cannot do justice to this project.
The third problem is that neither disenchantment nor liquidity takes account of the theological significance of the transformations that modernity has wrought upon the understanding of what it means to be human. One need not be a Christian or even a theist to grasp that these transformations have theological significance. Both Marx and Nietzsche connect their understandings of the modern world to desecration. In the same passage that pronounces that all that is solid melts into air, The Communist Manifesto declares that all that is holy is profaned. And Nietzsche’s madman makes very clear that God has not simply ceased to exist in the moral imagination, but is dead—more than that, we have killed him. This slaying of God is surely the ultimate act of active desecration.
Both Nietzsche and Marx view this desecration as good. For Marx, religion is an opiate that prevents the proletariat from feeling the full pain caused by capitalism. Criticism of religion is therefore central to the revolutionary project. Desecration is a precondition for the coming of the communist utopia. For Nietzsche, the death of God, though placing a terrifying responsibility on the shoulders of human beings, is a necessary precondition for man’s self-transcendence. The only question is whether we are up to the task.
It is true that in modernity, desecration is not always the result of intentional agency. Mechanized warfare intensified modern problems surrounding theodicy and inflicted serious damage on traditional religion. Wilfred Owen’s great poem “Anthem for Doomed Youth” transposes the language of Christian liturgy to the slaughter of the Great War’s trenches. The faith is desecrated, but not by the actions of any particular individual—rather, by the chaos of a war supercharged by the power of industry, the fruit of a coincidental confluence of numerous aspects of modernity.
Desecration, however, is more often an intentional act. I noted earlier the impulse of modern elites toward disruption and discontinuity. Nowhere is this more obvious than in their preoccupation with desecration. From Algernon Charles Swinburne to Francis Bacon and beyond, the conscious profaning of the holy has been a constant theme. Take, for example, the opening lines of James Joyce’s Ulysses:
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:               — Introibo ad altare Dei.
So begins the greatest masterpiece of modernism, with the first line of the Mass, intoned by a man about to shave, with his genitals flapping in the breeze for all to see. Though Joyce’s conscious intention is presumably not to abolish man—by instantiating Homeric epic in the everyday life of modern Dublin, he ennobles man no less than he ironizes him—Ulysses opens with a moment of desecration that has implications for anthropology. To mock religion is in effect to mock the understanding of God and humanity that religion represents.
Much could be said about the anti-religious tendency of much of high modernism. What is important to note, however, is that intentional desecration has migrated to the popular culture of our own time. As the sophisticated Joyce in the 1920s mocked the Latin Mass, so the talented Billy Joel reminded us in the 1970s that Catholic girls wait far too long to lose their virginity, and now the buffoonish Lil Nas X performs songs as blasphemous as they are banal. Desecration is today mainstream, the preoccupation of even the lowest forms of cultural pond life.
Though further evidence that desecration has gone mainstream may be sought in many areas, I will focus on sex and death. Both have traditionally been matters of deep religious significance. Sex is the mysterious origin of life, death the mysterious end of life. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that a large part of the laws of the Pentateuch is preoccupied with the implications of sex and death for ritual purity.
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