To regain its reputation, authority, and influence, the church in the world must first be faithful to the gospel message in teaching and practice. But it must also be the place where awe and wonder before a holy God can still captivate even the nonbeliever.

To answer that question, it is first useful to outline the nature of the problems that have brought traditional Christian churches to this moment. There are, of course, the obvious matters of hypocrisy and moral corruption. The child abuse and financial scandals within the Roman Catholic Church, combined with the institutionalized cover-ups of the same, are the most infamous examples of such. Yet Protestantism, too, has its equivalents and the only reason it has perhaps proved less notorious in the public imagination is due to its fragmentation, rendering the scandals more piecemeal and less visible on the national scale. For both expressions of Christianity, however, such corruption renders any public statement that claims the moral high ground on a wide variety of issues implausible, if not downright hypocritical, in the eyes of the public and indeed many Christians.
Beyond the scandals, there is the general tilt against traditional institutional authority. This does not merely affect churches, as attitudes toward political institutions indicate. But it does hit churches particularly hard because, unlike the Senate, for example, they are not necessary for society to function. Churches have a voluntary dimension that has always meant that their authority is highly attenuated. Freedom of religion is a very good thing, but it does shift power toward the congregant, who can easily behave like a customer, and away from the clergy, who may find that they have to behave more like salespeople to attract and keep their flock. And in a world where institutional authority in general is seen as less and less plausible, today even the attenuated church power of the recent past starts to look exceptionally ambitious.
To all this we might add the role of technology. The invention of the automobile might be said to have been the real shattering blow to church authority, as it allowed individuals easy access to an even greater range of churches. Now the internet has more or less abolished geography in its entirety. A person in Florida can, if they wish, be part of a church service in Rome as long as it is streamed on the web. And this can be at a time of the person’s choosing. We might say that technology in the form of the internet has not only further eroded institutional power in practice, but it has also reshaped how we imagine our relationship to the church. The customer now really can be king over space and time. And the time of COVID served to supercharge this because most, if not all, Christians had to worship online for a time, and many priests and pastors have seen their returning congregations diminished as a result.
In light of these problems, how might the church recover its integrity and authority?
The first thing to note is that credibility with the world outside the church is not something to be desired in an unqualified manner. The New Testament makes it clear that the church is not a continuous part of the wider culture. The message of the cross is foolishness to Greeks and an offense to Jews, as Paul argues in 1 Corinthians. That sets limits to the church’s plausibility in the wider culture and indicates that a church that is not at some level offensive to that wider culture is likely not articulating the gospel in a correct manner. Christians are, to use Peter’s language, sojourners and exiles or, in the cliche of earlier generations of believers, in the world but not of it. This is not an excuse for gratuitous offense or implausibility, but it is a reminder that being repudiated by the secular world is not necessarily a sign that the church is at fault.

Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, July 12, 2022
The coming months will be fascinating, and I suspect rather depressing, to watch. When it comes to abortion, especially after Dobbs, Christians face a choice of social respectability or religious fidelity. And the Christian commentariat already seems divided on which way to go.

The Dobbs decision has revealed fault lines in American Christianity. These fault lines lay just below the surface for a long while, but are now clearly exposed. As long as abortion was legal by Supreme Court decree, it was possible to identify as pro-life but keep that commitment at the level of theory; one could hold pro-life views but not be perceived as a threat. All that has now changed. To identify as pro-life post-Dobbs is not simply to hold an opinion many regard as wrong; it is to be part of an act of political and social “oppression.” And predictably, many Christians are feeling the need to “nuance” their relationship to the overturning of Roe.
The National Catholic Reporter has excelled itself in this regard. The strangest argument in its pages was made by Fr. Thomas Reese. He studiously avoided any expression of gratitude for the decision, and said it is a result of America’s domination by big corporations. The response of big business to Dobbs would seem to indicate his case is, to put it charitably, a little overstated.
Then, in an article attributed to “editorial staff,” the Reporter revealed the real reason for its nuance about Dobbs: Donald Trump appointed the Supreme Court justices who made it possible, and Trump was “arguably the most corrupt and morally degenerate president in history.” That claim may or may not be true—the competition for the title is a little stronger than the Reporter acknowledges—but the argument is specious at best. As to the article’s later assertion that “women will die without Roe’s protection,” one wonders whether the editorial staff of this prominent Catholic magazine are as familiar with their own church’s teaching on life and personhood as they are with Twitter (which has clearly had a baneful effect on otherwise intelligent people’s ability to construct an argument). It would seem not. By the standards of Catholic teaching, women have been dying by the millions for decades thanks to Roe.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, July 5, 2022
Hanks is not motivated by a fear that gay actors are not getting roles in Hollywood movies. He is motivated by the desire to avoid, in his words, “inauthenticity”—presumably a critical comment on the dramatic representation of the suffering of gay men by a straight actor.  

Tom Hanks recently declared that if Philadelphia, the movie that earned him one of his Oscars, were made today, it would no longer be acceptable for him, as a straight man, to play the gay lead. This comment has provided low-hanging fruit for conservative critics. It is, after all, ridiculous that a profession predicated on its members earning their livings while pretending to be people they are not should become prissy about certain types of role-playing.
Hanks has likely not reflected at any great depth on the significance of his statement. He is simply engaging in some well-intentioned pandering to current political tastes, doing little more than reciting the liturgy of the powers, a public performance that reflects and reinforces the cultural and political priorities of the day. Hanks is not motivated by a fear that gay actors are not getting roles in Hollywood movies. He is motivated by the desire to avoid, in his words, “inauthenticity”—presumably a critical comment on the dramatic representation of the suffering of gay men by a straight actor.
To respond to Hanks simply by pointing to the absurdity of requiring actors to have personally experienced what they represent on the screen is legitimate, but it also misses the broader significance of his assertion. His comment is not simply absurd; it is also very revealing about our current cultural politics.
Hanks’s comment is a function of the fact that perceived victims of the old norms for sex and sexual behavior now enjoy a privileged status in our culture. As a result, even a straight man playing a gay man in a piece of fictional drama risks being seen as indulging in an act of imperialist aggression, an appropriation and subversion of another’s victimhood. And Hanks is far from innovative in his liturgical response. Eddie Redmayne has offered similar repentance for playing the lead role in The Danish Girl. And other storms—for example, Laurence Olivier’s portrayal of Othello—indicate a similar squeamishness with actors and roles that touch on the current nature of racial politics. So far, so predictable. But Hanks’s comment reveals not simply the priorities but also the contradictions of our culture’s politics.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, June 13, 2022
For a flag to be a powerful, sacred symbol of unity and purpose, it has to symbolize a real common sense of unity—a unified moral vision around which individuals can rally as part of a larger imagined community. That the Pride flag already has so many variations reveals the lack of unity that has always marked the LGBTQ+ movement when the cameras were not rolling. This disunity has only become more obvious with the advent of intersectionality and the triumph of queerness and transgenderism.

Flags typically serve as rallying points for unity. They point to something a culture considers sacred. The Stars and Stripes was, for many generations, precisely such a rallying point in America. The fact that flag burning, while protected by the Constitution, was deemed by both its opponents and proponents to be remarkably serious, speaks to this: One cannot desecrate that which is not considered sacred.
This is just one reason why it is interesting that the American Embassy to the Vatican is flying the rainbow flag for Pride month. Commentators have pointed out the obvious intent to cause offense to the Catholic Church. But the embassy’s decision also sends a message to the American people: Another flag has government endorsement. The message of “inclusion” that it represents signals to those Americans who might dissent from the LGBTQ+ movement that in these interesting times their membership in the republic for which the real national flag stands is more a matter of tolerance than full-blooded affirmation.
The problems with LGBTQ+ inclusion are, of course, manifold. First, there is the logical problem that any movement deploying the rhetoric of inclusion has to face: If everyone is included and nobody is excluded, then the movement is meaningless. Thus, the language of “inclusion” here is really a code word for precisely the opposite: It actually means exclusion and the delegitimizing of any person or group that dissents from what the movement’s movers and shakers deem to be acceptable opinion. Acceptable thought will typically tend toward a view of reality that regards such dissenters as mentally deficient, sub-human, or simply evil.
Second, the emphasis on inclusion must inevitably default to queerness. It is interesting how the word “queer” and its cognates is beginning to supplant the old taxonomy of “gay,” “lesbian,” and even “bisexual” in common LGBTQ+ parlance. The reason speaks to the central incoherence of the movement. Gay men and lesbian women have identities predicated upon a sex binary rooted in biology. That is rather “transphobic,” to use the psychologized terminology typically used to discredit any pushback on the transgender movement. Indeed, in the wonderful world of intersectional mythology, white gay men and white lesbian women rank little higher in the political hierarchy than their straight counterparts.
In fact, the LGBTQ+ movement has always been a marriage of political convenience. Prior to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, lesbian women generally regarded gay men with deep suspicion, as those who enjoyed male privilege and whose sexual desires and experiences differed in fundamental ways from those of females.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Friday, June 3, 2022
And so surely the Christian cause of this month should be opposing Pride Month and its flag in as public and strident a way as many have opposed racism and its symbols. Let us have many blog posts and tweets on the topic. And may we even have pointed op-eds and major articles slamming Pride by those Christians privileged enough to have access to the pages of The Atlantic and The New York Times. Social justice surely demands it. And I, for one, am looking forward to reading them all.

If anybody wants to understand what is happening to the public square in America—indeed, if anyone wants to know how America, or at least her ruling class, wishes to understand itself, they need look no further than Pride Month. If the arrival of the Pilgrims, the founding of the nation, and even the contribution of Martin Luther King Jr. receive no more than 24 hours on the national calendar, the LGBTQ+ alliance has an entire month to party in the streets. And this street party is enabled by the countless commercial ventures that post rainbow flags in their windows and on their websites.
For anyone not completely hoodwinked by the erotic obsessions of our day, taking pride in one’s sexual identity—indeed, even considering sexual desire to be an identity—would seem at best pitiful and at worst a deep perversion of what it means to be human. Yet, here we are. And we should not underestimate the power of what it signifies.
It is a basic fact of history that if you control time and space, you also control the culture. The early Christians of the fourth century knew that as they slowly but surely claimed space in pagan Roman culture for churches and marked the rhythm of time with the development of the liturgical calendar.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, May 30, 2022
I would anticipate that within five years we will witness a significant disruption across all major representatives of the Christian faith. The fault lines will run between those who find a way to accommodate to the world’s terms of good citizenship and those whose fidelity to Christ will lead to varying degrees of internal exile within this earthly city. The former will ultimately accept the collapse of biblical anthropology, repudiating its implications for sexual morality, for human identity, and for addressing the various socially constructed problems we now face, such as those of race and gender. The latter will maintain Christian teaching and be decried as being at best naïve, at worst bigoted.

Archbishop Chaput recently wrote that holiness, above and beyond all other things, should mark the church and her members. It was an encouraging reminder that, in an age when church leadership is often characterized by bureaucratic skills rather than piety, the Lord has yet a few who have not bowed their knee to the various Baals of efficiency, wokeism, and wonkery. And though the archbishop did not make this point explicit, it is clear that holiness is a corollary of a high and orthodox doctrine of God.
At this moment in time, Christian churches face an unprecedented challenge. Western nations have (with few exceptions) experienced the collapse of the broad moral vision that made them coherent entities. This collapse means that even the most basic terms of membership in wider society are increasingly antithetical to the most basic terms of membership in the church. Some deny that this is happening, but they tend to be those who enjoy what we might term “progressive privilege”—temporary protection from the left’s culture warriors because they engage in ritual acts of Christian self-loathing and focus only on the doctrines that comport nicely with whatever is the bien-pensant penchant of the day. But the changeling morality of the secular elite is a fickle mistress. Progressive Christians will learn, as did the liberal Christians of a previous generation, that conceding too much is never enough for Christianity’s enemies.
I would anticipate that within five years we will witness a significant disruption across all major representatives of the Christian faith. The fault lines will run between those who find a way to accommodate to the world’s terms of good citizenship and those whose fidelity to Christ will lead to varying degrees of internal exile within this earthly city. The former will ultimately accept the collapse of biblical anthropology, repudiating its implications for sexual morality, for human identity, and for addressing the various socially constructed problems we now face, such as those of race and gender. The latter will maintain Christian teaching and be decried as being at best naïve, at worst bigoted.
How should we prepare to stand in the face of what is to come? I agree with Archbishop Chaput that holiness and devotion must mark the church’s witness. After all, if we do not take the faith seriously, how can we expect others to do the same? Furthermore, holiness is not simply, or even primarily, an apologetic strategy. It is in part a response to the doctrine of God. Only when we grasp this can we truly place our own lives in perspective and anchor our faith so as to resist the cultural moment. If our imaginations are not fired by the greatness of the eternal communion with our glorious God that will be consummated at the end of time, then the problems of this present age will loom large and always threaten to overwhelm us.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, May 2, 2022
In the same month that Baylor announced the chartering of its LGBT group, Notre Dame announced the launch of a pro-LGBT alumni group. Anyone interested in how safe space thinking can develop, and how it can be used to disembowel an institution’s own religious commitments and marginalize those who actually adhere to those commitments, should consider this recent example: When a priest wore a rainbow pride stole to an event sponsored by a Notre Dame LGBT organization, one student expressed concerns, and was subject to all manner of unpleasantness for doing so.

The news that Baylor University has officially chartered Prism, an LGBT student organization on campus, marks an important moment in Christian higher education in the USA.
To be fair to Baylor, Christian colleges and universities have a very difficult task in the current climate. Institutions of higher education are meant to be places for free discussion and exchange of ideas. With sexual identity politics now a central component of wider public discourse, freedom of discussion inevitably means that sexual identity discourse will take place on campuses. But there is a difference between students discussing these issues in the context of, say, a debating society or a mainstream political club, and discussing these ideas in an official LGBT group. To receive an official charter is to receive a formal imprimatur.
The charter itself is interesting. It contains no reference to Christ or Christianity, an odd lacuna for a group at a Christian university. Especially for a group whose stated mission is to “help students gain deeper understanding of their own and others [sic] complex and intersectional identities, including gender and sexuality and faith and spirituality” and to “provide resources to navigate essential services including physical, mental, or spiritual well-being at Baylor and beyond.” We are all now familiar with spirituality Hollywood-style, which lacks objective content and represents little more than self-affirmation. It is unfortunate that a Christian school would endorse such language without requiring some explicit reference to the Christian faith.
Significant too is the group’s desire “to create a safe and respectful environment for LGBTQ+ community.” On one level, this is laudable: Campuses should be places where all students are safe from physical harm and from verbal abuse. The problem, of course, is that the language of safe environments is today remarkably flexible. It often means a place where ideas that a given group finds uncomfortable or offensive are not tolerated. The danger of this kind of charter is that it might easily come to be used as an instrument for the kind of conceptual and linguistic cleansing that now grips the culture of other universities. In effect, it begins to establish a rightward boundary on what is deemed acceptable to think and to say on campus—conservative views on sexuality start to be deemed offensive and intolerable, and outside the bounds of acceptability. Baylor is scarcely unique in this. Progressive pieties are disenfranchising conservative views and more throughout higher education. Examples abound, but the recent case of the radical feminist disinvited from Harvard for her rejection of transgender ideology is a case in point.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, April 26, 2022
When the intellectual elites of our culture allow sentiment to supplant reason, then the discourse of public life is in grave trouble. We should know this from seeing what happens when sentiment comes to dominate other branches of our culture. Art becomes kitsch. And ethics becomes a matter of responding to the latest sob story and the immediate appetites of the moment without reflection on broader social needs, goods, or consequences.

Today, as in the days of Plato, rhetoric is what moves the crowd. But as Plato knew, truth, not rhetoric, is the task of philosophy and philosophers. That is why the latter are so important. Sadly, many in today’s philosopher class—the intellectuals—seem to have forgotten Plato. They now find rhetoric more attractive than truth. Last week provided yet another example of this when a number of British religious leaders signed a letter to the prime minister, Boris Johnson, calling for transgender people to receive the same protection from “conversion therapy” as other LGBTQ+ individuals.
The letter is a good example of how sentimental mush has come to replace careful moral reasoning in the minds of so many. The usual therapeutic patois is on full display. The language of becoming whole, of safe place, of affirmation, is strewn throughout the piece, and the postmodern ethicist’s empty-but-persuasive word of choice, “journey,” appears twice, once even qualified with the adjective “sacred.”
The letter is light on actual theology but does make peculiar comment on conversion therapy and prayer: “To allow those discerning this journey to be subject to coercive or undermining practices is to make prayer a means of one person manipulating another.”
The logic of this sentence seems to imply that to pray for a transgender person to become comfortable with his biological sex is a form of “conversion therapy.” As such, prayer is to be equated with coercion and bullying. Do these religious leaders think that prayer changes nothing and that any claim otherwise makes it simply a tool for exercising psychological power over another? Or do they think that the only petitions that should be made on behalf of trans people are those that confirm their self-diagnosis? If the former, then why bother praying for anything at all? If the latter, what about the growing number of de-transitioners, many of whom would no doubt have been grateful if somebody had prayed for them and also intervened in some other way before they permanently mutilated their bodies?
Yet as confused as that sentence is, it is not the most disturbing aspect of the letter. That honor must be given to the presence of Rowan Williams’s signature.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Friday, April 15, 2022
We have abortion bills that flip-flop on fetal personhood and candidates for the Supreme Court who defer to biologists while trying to avoid gender essentialism. This conceptual chaos, rooted in a denial of reality and responsibility, can only lead to chaos. To quote Sir Walter Scott, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.

Confusion over what it means to be human continues to dog public life in the West. Soon after Anneliese Dodds, the Labour party shadow secretary for women, revealed that she does not know what a woman is, U.S. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson deferred the same question to biologists. That move was odd: It was obviously an attempt to play to the progressive trans lobby, but it actually revealed Jackson’s lack of understanding of the current debates surrounding gender. Jackson implied that she sees the issue as one of biological essentialism. Contra de Beauvoir, it would appear that she believes one is born a woman; one does not become one.
It is easy to poke fun at the confusion that ensues when reality is denied in the service of the latest political fads and fakeries. Yet while we laugh at the silliness, we may forget that the real confusion here is not over the political excesses of gender theory and the supine surrender of our leaders in the face of its obfuscations. The deeper issue is the confusion over what constitutes a human person. And that has tragic consequences for the most vulnerable in our society.
As a case in point, consider two bills currently under consideration in the Maryland House of Delegates. Both deal with abortion and are clearly meant to be preemptive strikes in case Roe is overturned by the Supreme Court. House Bill 1171 (Declaration of Rights – Right to Reproductive Liberty) proposes a change to the state’s constitution so that Article 48 will read as follows:
That every person, as a central component of the individual’s rights to liberty and equality, has the fundamental right to reproductive liberty which includes the right to make and effectuate decisions regarding the individual’s own reproduction, including but not limited to the ability to prevent, continue, or end their pregnancy. The state may not, directly or indirectly, deny, burden, or abridge the right unless justified by a compelling state interest achieved by the least restrictive means.
In many ways this is standard pro-abortion fare, assuming as it does that the baby in the womb lacks personhood and thus has no rights.
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