Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, August 16, 2023
Our God, our New Testament God, is a consuming fire and to be approached with awe and reverence, as the book of Hebrews teaches. And those incapable of acting in accordance with that have no place in the pastoral ministry. And the SBC is certainly not poorer for their departure.

The recent parting of ways between the Southern Baptist Convention and Saddleback Church focused on the status of women with regard to pastoral leadership and ministry, but a recent video clip of the Southern California church’s senior pastors, Andy and Stacie Wood, suggests that the problem is much deeper than the presenting issue. Leading worship while dressed as characters from the Toy Story franchise suggests theological problems that go way beyond debates about the nature of Paul’s teaching on eldership.
At the heart of the Saddleback project is the idea of seeker sensitivity, of making the church a relaxed and comfortable place for outsiders. The underlying motivation is no doubt a good one. We do not want churches to be unfriendly and unpleasant places. If God is a hospitable God, one who loves the widow, the orphan, and the sojourner, then the people who bear His name today, as in the days of the desert wanderings, should be so too. And yet there are a number of very real dangers here, of which the short video clip is emblematic.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Friday, July 28, 2023
It is not enough for the LGB community to distance itself from the T and the Q. It has to disband itself if it is to be consistent on this. Biological sex is either significant or it isn’t. It really is that simple. There is no third way. And so trans-rejecting gays and lesbians need to decide one way or the other.

The recent legal victory in the United Kingdom for the LGB Alliance is most interesting, both from a general political perspective and a more narrow Christian viewpoint. The case was instigated by Mermaids, a British organization committed to promoting transgender children’s rights. Mermaid’s objection to the group was that it rejects the ideology of gender that underlies the transgender movement, specifically as this is being used to promote transgender treatments for children. Mermaids was therefore challenging the action of the U.K. government in granting charitable status to the LGB Alliance, the British equivalent of being a tax-exempt not-for-profit in the USA.
Loss of such status would have been devastating for the group’s fundraising, and the legal move by Mermaids was an attempt to shut down the LGB Alliance. A victory for Mermaids would have been a significant triumph for transgender activists. Their defeat is a heavy blow, and one more sign that the heyday of transgender power in British culture may have peaked and may now be in decline.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Thursday, June 29, 2023
Despite this latest lunacy, I remain confident that the trans madness will come to an end, though sadly not without significant human carnage. Those responsible for this child abuse—the doctors, the clinics, and the pharmaceutical companies—are going to be sued and will pay a heavy price. This is America, folks: The establishment’s ideology is ultimately only plausible as long as it is making, not costing, money. Once those groups start paying out to settle such suits, as if by magic their beliefs will change overnight. 

In a strange but eloquent example of irony, the news that the U.K.’s National Health Service is banning hormone treatment and transgender surgeries for minors arrived just as I was reading the text of a proposed California bill that would make refusal to affirm a child’s transgender confusion an offense for which a parent could lose custody. The bill, called the Transgender, Gender-Diverse, and Intersex Youth Empowerment Act, would require courts to consider a parent’s acceptance of his or her child’s gender identity when deciding custody and visitation cases.
One lesson to be drawn from this is that America is once again determined to be exceptional. As Europe apparently becomes a tad more sane on the trans issue, America’s gender dementia only deepens, with the full weight of the law behind it. The political leadership of the U.S. is committed to the transgender cause, though it is likely that few in the White House or Congress have bothered to read any of the gender theory that legitimates it. And it apparently has the kind of backing from sections of the medical establishment that would make Trofim Lysenko drool with envy. Apparently we must follow the science—but only where the demands of our anarchic identity politics lead. Both bode ill for the nation’s future: Politicians mortgaged to the latest therapeutic fad and scientific knowledge based on lobby groups do not inspire confidence.
Yet while the trans issue is the presenting problem, the California bill points toward something of much broader significance: the rise of the notion that parents are defined by function rather than biology. Now, according to the Oxford Dictionary, “parent” as a verb existed as early as the sixteenth century, but it did not gain currency until the twentieth. And its prominence today is likely significant, reflecting a world where “parent” is primarily something you do rather than something you are.
In one sense, parents have always “done” things. They care for and protect their children, nurture them, raise them to be adults. That we can talk of “good parents” and “bad parents” indicates that parenthood involves functions. But the assumption has always been that the biological relationship is basic and that the judgment of “good” or “bad” is understood relative to the moral obligations that relationship necessarily implies.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, June 14, 2023
Pride Month is not about civil rights, it is about ownership of space and time. It is a demonstration of cultural and political power and an opportunity to erase from public view those who refuse to acknowledge that power.

How do you take over an empire? That is a question that I used as a title for a lecture I gave each year in my Ancient Christianity class. The answer is simple to state but somewhat more difficult to achieve in practice: You simply need to control time and space.
Christianity achieved this in the Roman empire during the fourth century, a century that opened with the last great imperial persecution of the church and ended with Christians firmly established as the dominant religion officially sanctioned by the state and privileged above all pagan rivals. By no coincidence, it was also the century that saw struggles where the deployment of martyr relics was used as a means of claiming ownership of land for sacred purposes and the development of liturgical calendars for marking the rhythm of the year in distinctly Christian terms.
In our modern days, the same principles are deployed by those who seek to control our world. And Pride Month is surely the most ostentatious, annoying, and egregious of them all. June has been taken over by the avant-garde of the sexual revolution. It is the high feast of the progressive liturgical calendar and almost as long as Lent—though committed of course to self-indulgence, not self-denial. Pride parades pass through the streets, flaunting ever more exotic forms of explicit sexuality, often cheered on by parents with small children.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, June 7, 2023
What we are up against is a generation transfixed by the allure of desire, the delight and satisfaction of destruction which lets loose the forces held in check by civilization. Any effort to respond in a persuasive manner must come with an appeal to the heart—one that offers to satisfy not only material needs but spiritual longings for beauty, for meaning, for devotion. Evil is not banal, so good cannot be either if it hopes to triumph. 

If the Holocaust is the 20th century’s most infamous example of evil, then perhaps the most famous reflection on the nature of evil is Hannah Arendt’s contribution to Holocaust literature, Eichmann in Jerusalem. It is a work remembered above all for its striking and influential subtitle: A Study in the Banality of Evil. Fascinated by Nazi official Adolf Eichmann’s apparent lack of moral depth, amazed at his seeming inability to understand the wickedness of the Final Solution or the role he had played in pursuing it, Arendt concluded that Eichmann and the bureaucratized evil he represented were “banal.”
In the decades since Arendt’s work was published, the idea that evil is banal has become a virtual cliché. It has been reinforced by the steady stream of news about evil that appears in the press. Reports of shooting, murders, massacres, and war crimes are regular occurrences. Clothed in a certain routine familiarity, they come to look even more banal.
And yet there are very serious grounds for rejecting Arendt’s thesis—even in Eichmann’s own case. Subsequent research has revealed that he was very much active in Nazi circles as an emigrant in Argentina. He was fully committed to a ferocious anti-Semitism, well aware—and proud—of his own role in the Final Solution. The Eichmann on trial in the glass box in Jerusalem was an act, a character he was playing for the audience, and Arendt fell for it. He may not have been an intellectual, but he was no mere manager of railway timetables either. In short, he was anything but a case study in the banality of bureaucratic evil.
But even if we were to allow for the sake of argument that Eichmann himself was as banal as Arendt thought, it is surely implausible to see this as a key to understanding Nazi evil. How and why does a mediocrity become such a monster? And moving beyond Eichmann, we have to face that other problem of evil—not the typical question of its origin, meaning and significance, but rather that of its apparent appeal. Evil is often exhilarating and exciting. And one does not need to be evil to provide evidence of this. Serial killers are truly evil. But what of those who pore over books and flock to movies based around serial killer plotlines? They are not evil, but they are nonetheless fascinated by it. True banality—as represented in the lives that most of us lead most of the time—makes for neither good television nor bestselling pulp fiction.
A Beautiful Madness
And so if the foot soldiers of the Holocaust cannot be identified with mere banality, what might help to shed light on them? Surely part of the explanation has to lie with the aesthetics of evil. Take, for example, Leni Riefenstahl’s notorious film of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally. The opening sequence begins with a statement about Germany’s wartime humiliation and then her rebirth with the election of Hitler. This is followed by a view of the medieval German city taken from Hitler’s plane. Then there is the arrival of Hitler and the Nazi elite, greeted by adoring crowds as the Führer’s motorcade drives through the streets. Then there are the speeches, the torchlight parades, the scenes of joy, and, of course, the carefully choreographed marches of the rally itself, culminating in Hitler’s ascent to the rostrum. Countless images draw upon the mythical medieval glories of the German people, and the whole production speaks of the returning significance and power that the Third Reich represents. Everything is designed to stimulate a seductive desire in the audience to belong to something that gives meaning to life.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, May 30, 2023
Many on right and left today choose to be marked by the Mephistophelean metaphysic. They embody the spirit that negates, an easy, lazy option that carries with it the instant gratification that destruction always brings with it. Thankfully, however, there is still hope. 

I am the spirit that negates.” So Mephistopheles describes his calling to Faust in their first encounter in Goethe’s great version of the medieval legend. And the calling of Mephistopheles has become the very spirit of the age in which we now find ourselves. Whether on the left or the right, the spirit of negation, of nay-saying, of tearing down that which is, has become our default setting. For this reason, it should really be no surprise that critical theory, the most intellectually impressive articulation of the Mephistophelean metaphysic, has found a home at both ends of the political spectrum.
In such a culture, despair can become a chic temptation, especially when, to quote the hymn writer, change and decay in all around we see. There is, however, an antidote: hope. But where is hope, in an allegedly hopeless age, to be found?
I am privileged to be a teacher. I am paid to read, write, and talk about things I love, things I consider to be important. And I do that full-time, for my living. Those who are blessed with such a calling but who feel no gratitude for it have small souls and little grasp of the lives many others lead that are not marked by such good fortune.
But more than being paid full-time to pursue what would otherwise be my hobbies, it is the students that bring me joy and hope. Contra so many stereotypical media accounts of “snowflakes” and over-privileged, hyper-sensitive, entitled troublemakers, my students are respectful, keen to learn, and hungry for truth. They do not simply assume as truth everything I tell them, thankfully, but they are eager to use class as a context in which they pursue it to the best of their ability.
I was reminded of this at commencement last Saturday. Grove City College, like many schools, has a tradition of a student giving a speech during the ceremony to the graduating class. If what a college is really doing is best demonstrated by what its best students say and think, then I found real hope—real, joyful hope—on Saturday as a young woman, Meredith Johnson, spoke about the true nature of home. That she is both a student of mine and the daughter of a former student of mine made her speech even more powerful to me. Here is proof positive that teaching is a joy and a privilege whose significance goes beyond the momentary classroom encounters.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, May 16, 2023
Nietzsche noted it takes a long time for societies to grasp the significance of the death of God. But we are surely at that point now. Our artistic class makes that very clear, and so it is time to put these artists in the dock: We get it. You hate Christianity and the Western cultures that it informed.

One of the hallmarks of the modern age has been the death of the sacred. Nietzsche’s Madman understood that this was one of the central consequences of the death of God. But he, unlike the polite atheists he berated in the town square, knew that this was both an exhilarating and a terrifying matter: Now human beings would themselves have to rise to be gods, to create their own systems of value, their own sacred rites, their own meaning of life.
This was never going to be either easy or stable. Nor has it ultimately led human beings to transcend themselves and ascend to some higher, übermenschlich plane. Today we witness merely the desecration of all that was once held to be sacred. Our culture remains trapped by the sacred idioms of the past and doomed to the constant and increasingly conformist transgression of old boundaries.
Take, for example, the latest “art” promoted by the European Union: A series of photographs, currently on display at the European Parliament building, taken by lesbian artist Elisabeth Ohlson. The images depict, among other things, scenes of Jesus surrounded by gay men dressed in leather bondage gear. Now, if Jesus were alive today he would certainly be speaking to such people, as he spoke to prostitutes and tax collectors in first-century Palestine. But Ohlson claims that her work represents Christ “loving LGBT rights.” Whether all gay people like to see themselves caricatured in bondage gear might itself be an interesting question to ask. The left’s favored word “fetishization” came to my mind as I looked at the pictures. What is not interesting, however, is the artwork itself.
The display represents both the bankruptcy of modern culture and its inability to offer anything even approximating a positive vision for humanity. For generations now the artistic establishment has been in thrall to the notion of transgression. But transgression is only significant if there is something—some rule, some custom, something sacred—to transgress. Without such, transgression itself rapidly degenerates into a series of empty gestures that tend to become both more extreme and more vacuous at the same time. Art then ceases to be about embodying and transmitting cultural value and is instead a momentary iconoclastic performance that parasitically and paradoxically depends upon resurrecting icons that have long since fallen. Only because there is a folk memory of religion does the general public have some notion that these banal photographs are meant to be shocking. And only to the increasingly marginal numbers of actual Christians are they truly so.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Thursday, May 11, 2023
Many aspects of Prager’s comment are disturbing, not least his failure to address the dark nature of the pornography industry itself. But it is also instructive, because it exposes the superficiality of some of what passes for conservative thought today. Prager’s statement reveals that he lacks a real grasp of what is causing the social and political problems that he claims to abhor: We live in a time of anthropological chaos, where the very notion of what it means to be human is no longer a matter of broad social and political consensus. 

Anyone who has been involved in pastoral ministry during the last decade will be acutely aware that internet pornography is one of the great scourges of contemporary society. And one does not need to be religious to believe that. In her recent book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Louise Perry includes a chapter summarizing pornography’s effects on relationships, sexuality, and physical health. She also points out the obvious connections to sex trafficking and exploitation. And yet voices that claim to be conservative still make crass and ill-informed comments on the topic.
The most recent one of note is Dennis Prager. In conversation with Jordan Peterson, he claimed that pornography is “not awful” when used by husbands in tandem with, rather than in place of, a normal sexual relationship with their wives. Thankfully, Denny Burk has provided a clear refutation of Prager’s take in a column at World Opinions.
Many aspects of Prager’s comment are disturbing, not least his failure to address the dark nature of the pornography industry itself. But it is also instructive, because it exposes the superficiality of some of what passes for conservative thought today. Prager’s statement reveals that he lacks a real grasp of what is causing the social and political problems that he claims to abhor: We live in a time of anthropological chaos, where the very notion of what it means to be human is no longer a matter of broad social and political consensus.
Pornography is a great example of this. Behind the problems that should have been obvious to Prager—the objectification of other people, the human trafficking, the transformation of sex into something that is self- rather than other-directed, the reduction of the participants to instruments of pleasure for the spectators—lies a basic philosophy of life that sees me, my desires, and my fulfillment at the core of what it means to be human. Pornography is thus part of an anthropological shift that manifests itself most obviously in sexual mores but is far more comprehensive in its significance.
Everyday language hints at this. There has been an interesting shift in English idiom over recent years from the language of “making love” to that of “having sex.”
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, May 2, 2023
That a man is now the public face of sports bras is not simply ridiculous. It is part of a concerted cultural erasure of women as a whole. Feminists, from J. K. Rowling to Kathleen Stock, have pointed this out, at great cost to their reputations and even at some personal risk to themselves. That the big corporations are colluding in this misogyny is disgusting. 

The last week has made obvious to all but the most willfully blind the depth and power of the culture industry’s commitment to normalizing transgenderism.
From the odd way in which media reports both downplayed the trans identity of the killer in the Nashville school shooting while playing up the danger of a backlash against those claiming trans identities. Then Budweiser announced that it was appointing “trans influencer” Dylan Mulvaney as a spokesman for Bud Lite and (most bizarrely, though the bar for “most bizarre” is set very, very high these days) Nike announced that he would also do the same for its range of sports bras. And then there is the ongoing trans opposition to the passage of legislation in various states to stop minors confused about their gender identity from receiving hormonal and surgical treatment. This opposition is armed with an arsenal of aesthetically persuasive rhetoric, from talk about the denial of gender-affirming care to demands that legislators follow the science.
The culture industry, from those who make beer to those who report the news to those who sell us the “science,” is requiring us all to believe the transgender nonsense or to keep quiet.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, April 17, 2023
Traditional, orthodox Anglicans are about to meet in Rwanda in order to assess the global situation and further attenuate, perhaps even completely sever, links with the Church of England. One reason is that the African bishops see the West’s attempt to foist this liquefied anthropology upon the global church as yet another act of Western colonialism. As I argued in my last column, LGBTQ-affirming churches are simply doing what the pro-slavery churches of the nineteenth century did: giving specious blessing to the values of the world in which they find themselves. It is depressingly gratifying that Theo Hobson seems to have proved my point with almost indecent haste.

Does the Church of England need evangelicals? The question is now a pressing one, given that the last few months of chaos over the issue of gay marriage seem finally to have done what decades of doctrinal indifferentism and even the advent of women priests failed to achieve: an evangelical rebellion among the Church of England’s most committed evangelical congregations.
Theo Hobson in The Spectator is confident of the answer: No, the C of E does not need evangelicals. To quote his reasoning:
Evangelical dynamism cannot renew the Church as a whole. Its energy is too counter-cultural; it presents Christianity as an identity in sharp contrast to the surrounding culture, it insists that a true Christian is marked out by brave dissent from liberal views on sexual morality…. An established Church cannot foreground such energy.
The argument is interesting: An established national church cannot ultimately oppose the culture of her nation. Some (including myself) would argue that this is precisely why no church should be established, since such politically motivated alliances always have a dominant partner, and history makes it very clear who the dominant partner always is. Hobson’s vision, while short on details, shows no concern for this particular outcome and seems to envisage the church as the rightly submissive handmaiden of the cultural Zeitgeist, existing to offer a religious and liturgical gloss that legitimates the liberal state and whatever its current moral tastes happen to be. In short, the church is there to express in religious idiom the values of the dominant class, in this case urban progressives. Since evangelicals will not do this, they are now surplus to requirements.
Hobson’s article stands in stark contrast to another article published last week at the dissident website UnHerd by the feminist writer Mary Harrington. In “The Death of Christian Privilege,” she raises a far more significant question than Hobson: Does the decline of Christianity also signify the liquefaction of meaning and the descent into the kind of moral chaos into which the West has descended, with its demolition of sexual taboos and its long war against the authority of the body? Her answer is yes, it does.
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