Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Thursday, March 24, 2022
The latest form of body dysmorphia—rapid-onset gender dysphoria—is fueled by extremely wealthy lobby groups with a vested interest in identity politics. Backed by a medical establishment for whom ethics is little more than a supine acceptance of technological possibilities, and enabled by a political class that lacks a moral backbone, these groups are shaping the country’s pediatric care. And the cost will be catastrophically high. 

The trans revolution reached new heights of absurdity last week when the BBC asked Anneliese Dodds, the Labour party’s shadow secretary for women and equalities, to define “woman.” Dodds proved singularly incapable of doing so; after saying that “it does depend what the context is,” she equivocated for several minutes and refused to give a direct answer. Her party leader, Sir Keir Starmer, later came to the rescue, telling Pink News that “trans women are women.” That is not, of course, an argument. In fact, by using the term “woman” without offering a definition, Starmer merely begs the question. But arguments and definitions are somewhat passé in our current political climate. Uncritical and obsequious recitation of the liturgical response that the progressive lobby demands is the order of the day. That not even all trans people buy into this mantra is never mentioned. They have, to use trendy progressive jargon, been made “invisible” by the political powers that be.
Dodds made a pitiful spectacle; she is an ironic victim of the anti-culture of endless inclusion that is now consuming the West. To be qualified for a job, one must have a basic understanding of the specific task at hand. The car mechanic needs to know what a car is; the brain surgeon needs to be able to recognize the brain. A politician tasked with safeguarding women’s rights should therefore know what a woman is and be able to articulate that understanding in public statements. “What is a woman?” hardly seems an unexpected or unfair question to ask the shadow secretary for women. And yet she fluffed it.
The rationale for the transgender movement is couched in arcane and rebarbative prose. But its underlying dynamic is nonetheless straightforward. It is based upon negations—denials and repudiations of traditional categories. Such categories, the gender theorists claim, create the illusion of an authority grounded in nature, posit ideological forms as the truth, and thus marginalize and exclude any who do not fit.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, March 8, 2022
There is a clear push to grant LGBTQ+ ideology a favored legal and cultural status that enforces it without compromise. It also labels any and all dissent as morally evil. You don’t have to be an Old Testament prophet to see where this is all heading, or at least where those in power hope it is heading. 

Last week, three news stories threw into sharp relief the ambitions of the sexual revolutionaries who govern the United States. First, there was the predictable outrage from the usual elites concerning Florida’s Parental Right in Education Bill, which would significantly restrict the teaching of LGBTQ+ ideology to schoolchildren. Second, it emerged that Washington State has a policy preventing teachers from revealing a child’s gender transition to parents. And third, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki condemned a directive from Texas governor Greg Abbott that calls on state agencies to protect Texas minors by investigating cases of children receiving “abusive gender-transitioning procedures.”
Each story reveals a particular aspect of the current sexual revolution. The criticism of Florida shows just how deeply the progressive elites have imbibed the notion of expressive individualism. Actress Kerry Washington condemned the Florida law, declaring that “Children deserve to be who they want to be. To be their true selves.” That such a statement makes sense to her and presumably to many of her 5.5 million Twitter followers testifies to how the notion of authenticity, tied to a sexualized notion of childhood, is now unquestioned orthodoxy in our culture.
Washington State’s policy is a reminder of how deeply government agencies have bought into trans ideology, and how they are using it to drive a wedge between parents and children. By the state’s own philosophy, the child is the gender he or she claims to be. So the state holds that the child defines who he truly is, but that the child’s parents have no right to know. That is disturbing in the extreme.
As to the Biden administration’s attitude toward the Texas directive, the president and his entourage seem to believe it is inappropriate, and indeed morally disgusting, to investigate institutions involved in gender transition to see if they conform to current Texas law. Psaki said that Abbott’s guidance was “designed to target and attack the kids who need support the most.” Our administration believes that loving and caring for trans kids apparently means enabling them to do irreparable damage to their bodies at an age when they have no idea what the consequences will be later in life. The lobbyists have so perverted the narrative, and the current administration has so enabled that perversion, that yes, evil is called good and good is called evil.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, February 28, 2022
To be fair to them, the #NeverTrumpers are probably the victims of an honest misunderstanding. When elected, Joe Biden claimed that the adults were back in charge. My guess is that the #NeverTrumpers naively assumed he meant “adult” as in “grown-ups.” The Brinton appointment indicates that he likely meant “adult” as in “bookstore” and “videos.” It’s a mistake anyone could have made

The appointment of Sam Brinton, a very public “queer” activist, to the U.S. Department of Energy is merely the latest sign of decadence in the dying culture of the West. Brinton, a man of such exotic and public perversions that I cannot in good conscience describe them here, is a sign of the times. It is, of course, not his perversions that are problematic with regard to his basic competence as a public official. It is the fact that he is an exhibitionist who uses his twisted sexuality to bully others in the workplace with the specific intention of “educating” the public, as Rod Dreher documents with a notable lack of squeamishness (you have been warned).
What is interesting, of course, is that this is yet another sign of how the Biden presidency seems not simply mortgaged to the radical extremists of the left but positively committed to promoting their causes. And that raises interesting questions about the #NeverTrump evangelicals.
One of the interesting aspects of #NeverTrump evangelicals was the absolute refusal to allow for any legitimate reason to vote for Donald Trump. Joe Biden, they claimed, was going to restore some dignity to the office of president of the United States. Character counts. And so it does.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Friday, February 25, 2022
Out of love for human beings made in the image of God, we Christians must oppose the well-funded political lobbyists determined to prevent trans people from having the care and help they need. And we need to take back the rhetoric of love, and in our attitudes and our actions toward those struggling with his pernicious form of politicized body dysmorphia, show that it is we who truly desire their safety and well-being.

Various LGBTQ+ groups have expressed outrage (is there any other idiom for expressing disagreement today?) over the British Equality and Human Rights Commission’s calls for Scotland to delay its move to “simplify” its criteria for gender recognition (i.e., make it easier for men and women to identify as the opposite sex and to enjoy legal protection thereof) and for England and Wales to slow down legislation outlawing “conversion therapy.”
Stonewall, the U.K.’s most prominent LGBTQ+ outfit could not contain its anger at this “attack on trans equality” and human rights. The LGBT Foundation went further, immediately cutting all ties with the EHRC. That Stonewall did not go quite that far might have something to do with the money that flows into its coffers from the British Conservative Party’s government.
In amidst the usual huffing and puffing about human rights, the LGBT Foundation statement contained the following paragraph:
“EHRC has ignored the experiences of trans and non-binary individuals who have undergone unnecessary trauma. They suggest that LGBTQ+ lives are up for debate and medical scrutiny. They disregard expert opinion and lived experience—a humiliating and dehumanizing action against our community with real-world consequences.”
Now, anyone who has ever reflected on the LGBTQ+ alliance knows that it is at best a case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” a confected political mirage designed for one thing and one thing only: the displacement of the normative status of traditional sexual mores and notions of human identity. Other than that, the L, the G, and the B have next to nothing in common with the T and the Q (which does not even have a stable definition). The former all assume that biological sex is critical to identity. The latter repudiate that. And as the near-total cultural triumph of the movement approaches, it is not surprising that cracks in the edifice are starting to appear. We now find that even the EHRC is having doubts about the validity of lumping together matters of sexual orientation and gender identity in the campaign against the catch-all category of conversion therapy. Indeed, it should be patently obvious to anyone—gay or straight—that outlawing any attempt to change the mind of someone who thinks they are born in the wrong body is not following the science. Rather it is to force queer and gender theory on the medical profession under penalty of law.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, February 9, 2022
In modern America, morality is nothing more than the sum total of the tastes of the moment. When free love and throwing off the sexual restraints of earlier generations was hip, Hef was a godlike figure who was the public face of a family restaurant chain. Now that the human cost of this revolution has become clear, Hef is a demon, denounced even by those who owe their livelihoods to him and to the capital acquired by his peddling of sleaze.

Some years ago Playboy declared that it would no longer feature photographs of nude women. While this may sound like progress, it was unfortunately less a sign of morality than a sign of the times—an indication that the static and (by later standards) tame photographic fodder that the magazine promoted was incapable of competing with internet pornography. And of course, Playboy‘s new policy was short-lived. It did not last even two years, for Playboy without nudes would be rather like Model Train Monthly without pictures of diminutive toy trains. Playboy exists to profit from making it socially tolerable, if not exactly respectable, to gawp at pictures of nude women. Only a fool would believe otherwise. The interviews and articles offer nothing more than a pretext for purchasing a copy.
Well, it seems that Playboy is once again trying to clean up its image and, in the process, contradict its own reasons for existence. This time the move comes in advance of an A&E documentary series that will reveal in detail the perversions and sleaze of its founder, Hugh Hefner. In an open letter last week, the organization variously declared itself to be “a brand with sex positivity at its core,” a workforce that is 80 percent female, and a company that continues to “fight harassment and discrimination in all its forms, support healing and education, redefine tired and sexist definitions of beauty and advocate for inclusivity across gender, sexuality, race, age, ability and zip codes.”
It is hard to see how a magazine that helped make pornography mainstream through its combination of titillating photographs of starlets and interviews with serious cultural figures should do anything but voluntarily close itself down at this point. Perhaps more than any other media outlet, it is responsible for the paradoxical equation of “sex positivity” with a trivialized notion of sex and indeed what it means to be a woman. And the fact its workforce is 80 percent female is surely irrelevant. When I was a postgraduate student and lived next to the docks in Aberdeen, 100 percent of the “workforce” standing under the streetlights that I passed on my way back from college each day were women. That was no sign of their liberation.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Thursday, February 3, 2022
Preaching will only gain in practical importance as the aggressive myths of this present age are preached at us from every soap opera, commercial, and TikTok video. If the church is (humanly speaking) to survive, she needs to confront these falsehoods with the truth proclaimed in the preached Word. Chrysostom’s legacy is not just sacramental. It is also prophetic. And if we are to carry out the church’s prophetic calling, we too must make sure that our preaching is powerful and central. That is one important way to honor Chrysostom’s legacy.

Years ago, when teaching at a seminary, I was responsible for the course on the ancient church. In every class I have ever taught, I have regarded it as my chief task to introduce students to the great primary texts on the subject at hand; in this course, I made sure that they became acquainted with John Chrysostom’s On the Priesthood. Of course, any book with the word “priesthood” in the title was not an obvious choice for the Presbyterians who generally populated my classes, but it was nonetheless a text that proved popular and, if emails from graduates are any basis for judgment, useful to those who went on to ordained ministry.
Orthodox and Catholics may be surprised by that. Chrysostom’s conception of the ministry is, after all, highly sacramental, with baptism and the eucharist at its heart. But it is not just the sacraments that are at the heart of Chrysostom’s understanding of ministry. As his nickname indicates, he was an outstanding preacher. On the Priesthood demonstrates that the proclamation of the Word was a vital part of his conception of the ministry.
His chapter on the ministry of the Word is, perhaps unintentionally, one of the most amusing. In a section on how to handle responses to sermons, he advises preachers to pay no attention to criticism from laypeople as, untrained as they are, they are incompetent to offer such. The sting in the tale, of course, is that the same principle applies to praise. The admirer is no more competent than the critic; and just as criticism should not cause the preacher to be despondent, so praise should not tempt him to pride.
Amusing pearls of wisdom aside, Chrysostom’s greatest lesson for the church today is arguably the importance he ascribes to the preached Word in his account of the priesthood and in his own ministry. In our day, secular indifference to religion is rapidly changing to positive hostility throughout much of the West.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, January 26, 2022
Contemporary Christians need to remember that our hands are not so clean. Anyone who uses a computer or smartphone to decry racism or call for reparations for American slavery can only do so because of contemporary slave labor in China. Does the fact that others own the slaves who make the goods we buy make us less guilty than Luther or Edwards? Are the past sins of long ago, committed by others, more heinous than the contemporary sins of far away to which we are all now connected?

Cancel culture shows no signs of abatement. The Spectator in Britain ended the year speculating on whether comedy itself will now be a thing of the past. Cancel culture is incompatible with comedy and humor. Meanwhile, the venomous reactions to those who dare to affirm the importance of biological sex, such as J.K. Rowling, continue unabated. Even the word “mother” is under attack from the highest levels of government. It is hard to imagine that a society can survive long term that denies reality and reinforces its lunacy with an adamant refusal to laugh at itself.
Yet there is a form of cancel culture emerging within the ranks of Christians. It operates with selective pieties drawn from the wider woke culture and reflects, whether by accident or design, the same self-righteousness that marks the secular world. Two obvious examples are current attitudes toward Martin Luther and Jonathan Edwards.
Edwards owned slaves and was thus a part of America’s original sin, the consequences of which we still live with today. Luther is worse. He is notorious for the violently anti-Jewish nature of some of his later works. In a post-Holocaust world, that is highly problematic. Some years ago, while working on a book on historical fallacies, I did considerable research on the Jewish question in Luther and was distressed to find that his anti-Jewish works had been reprinted by the Nazis as part of their own propaganda and were also available today on viciously anti-Semitic websites.
The question—and it is a very legitimate question—is whether we should continue to take seriously such men who failed so signally to conform to moral positions that we now regard as self-evident and, indeed, a consistent application of the Christianity into which they both had such signal insights. Should we cancel them?
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, January 12, 2022
The moral tastes of popular culture are just that: tastes, and thus subject to fashion and, in our social media age, to easy manipulation. Society has no solid foundation on which to build its moral codes. 

Years ago, when teaching at seminary, I used to tell the students that moral relevance in the modern world was a cruel and fickle mistress. However much Christians accommodated themselves to her demands, sooner or later she would want more. Christian morality and the morality of the world simply could not be reconciled in the long term.
Apparently, this no longer applies simply to Christians and other moral traditionalists. It also applies to the artistic class. Last week, Constance Grady at Vox noted how so much pop culture of recent vintage has dated so rapidly. Hamilton, the hit musical of 2015, now appears, in 2021, to glorify “the slave-owning and genocidal Founding Fathers while erasing the lives and legacies of the people of color who were actually alive in the Revolutionary era.” The TV series Parks and Recreation is now considered “an overrated and tunnel-visioned portrait of the failures of Obama-era liberalism.” And the Harry Potter franchise is now “the neo-liberal fantasy of a transphobe.”
While Grady avoids the earnestness of those who regard It’s a Wonderful Life as dangerous or the clichés of those who see Dolly Parton as a tool of systemic racist evil, she misses the deeper significance of the phenomenon she describes. For her, the transformed tastes of pop culture connect to the fading fortunes of Hillary Clinton and the values she represented. That makes sense. But there is a deeper cause of the shifting morals of popular culture and that is that our society has no stable framework for moral reasoning. It is therefore doomed to constant volatility.
Of course, the moral tastes of culture have always changed somewhat over time. What is notable today is the speed at which they change and the dramatic way they repudiate the immediate past. It took forty years for John Cleese’s Hitler impersonation to be deemed offensive (and then, oddly, by a generation for whom Hitler was little more than a name in a history textbook). But now, jokes that were unexceptional five or ten years ago might well cost a comedian his career today. The moral shelf life of pop cultural artifacts seems much shorter now and the criteria by which they might be judged far less predictable.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, January 10, 2022
Thus, here I want to note the thought of three men who, while very different thinkers, helped shape the way we imagine human nature today: Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Charles Darwin. All three in their different ways provided conceptual justification for rejecting the notion of human nature and thus paved the way for the plausibility of the idea that human beings are plastic creatures with no fixed identity founded on an intrinsic and ineradicable essence. While there are others whose thinking also played a role in this shift, these three are arguably the most influential as fountainheads for later developments up to the present day.

The Plausibility of Self-Creation
The idea that we can be who or whatever we want to be is commonplace today. Consumerism, or late capitalism, fuels this notion with its message of the customer as king and of the goods we consume as being basic to who we are. Commercials communicate this message in the way they present particular products as the key to happiness or life improvement. You have the power to transform yourself by the mere swipe of a credit card. The possession of this thing—that car, that kitchen, that item of clothing—will make you a different, a better, a more fulfilled person. Underwritten by easy credit, consumerist self-creation is the order of the day.
Such self-creation is perhaps more of a myth, or what Freud would have called an illusion, an act of wishful thinking, than a practical reality. Indeed, the underlying dynamic of the consumer marketplace is that desires can never be fully satisfied, at least not in any long-term manner. The consumer may not simply be a hapless dupe of the ruthless capitalist reinventing the market to maintain income streams, as some on the Left would argue, but the negotiation between producer and consumer is ultimately predicated on the fact that the desire for consumption never seems to be met by the act of possession. If the producer creates desires in order to fulfill them, then the consumer seems a willing-enough party in the process. To use Hegelian jargon, the consumer society really does present persons whose being is in their becoming, constantly looking to the next purchase that will bring about that elusive personal wholeness.
This illusion of sovereign self-creation through consumption still has its limitations. All of us are ultimately limited by a variety of factors that are not always susceptible to transubstantiation by credit card. First, there is the range of goods or lifestyles on offer. The marketplace does not have an infinite number of products for sale. The consumer is not an absolute monarch; as noted above, the marketplace involves a negotiation between supplier and consumer.
Second, society is constantly changing its mind about what is and is not fashionable, what is and is not cool, and what is and is not acceptable. We might think that we have the power to create ourselves and our own identities, but we are typically subject to the range of options and the value schemes that society itself sets and over which most individuals, considered as individuals, have very limited power. Consumerism makes us believe we can be whoever we want to be, but the market always places limits on that in reality.
Third, there are always specific individual limitations to our ability to invent ourselves. Physiology, intellectual capacity, income, location in time, and geographical location all play their role. I might truly desire to be Marie Antoinette, queen of France—indeed, I might happily decide to self-identify as such—but my body is male, has a genetic code provided by my English parents, is physically located in Pennsylvania, and exists chronologically in the twenty-first century. Being Marie Antoinette is therefore not a viable option for me. My body, not my psychology, has the last word on whether I am the last queen of France in the eighteenth century.
Nevertheless, the idea of self-creation, that we can shape our essences by acts of will, is deeply embedded in the way we now think, to the point that, while I may not be able to overcome the genetic and chronological issues that prevent me from being an eighteenth-century Austrian-born queen of France, I can at least deny the decisive say that my chromosomes might wish to have over my maleness. As Bruce became Caitlyn and was recognized as such by society, so Carl might now become Caroline, if I so wished.
The world in which this way of thinking has become plausible has both intellectual and material roots. Streams of philosophical thought from the nineteenth century have exerted a powerful effect in weakening and even abolishing the idea that human nature is a given, something that has an intrinsic, nonnegotiable authority over who we are. And changes in our material circumstances have enabled the underlying, antiessentialist principles of these philosophies to become plausible and, indeed, perhaps even the default of the way we think about selfhood today; however, I cannot address these material factors but will focus rather on intellectual developments.
Thus, here I want to note the thought of three men who, while very different thinkers, helped shape the way we imagine human nature today: Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Charles Darwin. All three in their different ways provided conceptual justification for rejecting the notion of human nature and thus paved the way for the plausibility of the idea that human beings are plastic creatures with no fixed identity founded on an intrinsic and ineradicable essence. While there are others whose thinking also played a role in this shift, these three are arguably the most influential as fountainheads for later developments up to the present day.
Charles Darwin
Darwin is likely the most influential. Setting aside the question whether evolution—or, to be more precise, one of the numerous forms of evolutionary theory that looks back to Darwin’s work as an initial inspiration—is true, there is no doubt that vast numbers of people in the West simply assume that it is so.
Whether evolution can be argued from the evidence is actually irrelevant to the reason most people believe it. Few of us are qualified to opine on the science. But evolution draws on the authority that science possesses in modern society. Like priests of old who were trusted by the community at large and therefore had significant social authority, so scientists today often carry similar weight. And when the idea being taught has an intuitive plausibility, it is persuasive.
The obvious implications of this situation are, first, that the sacred account of human origins given in Genesis is undermined and, second, that human beings are therefore relativized in relation to other creatures. Descent from a prior species excludes special creation of man and woman, and natural selection renders teleology unnecessary as a hypothesis. In short, human nature as a significant foundational category for understanding human purpose is annihilated. And in a world in which belief in evolution is the default position, the implications for how people imagine that world, and their place within it, are dramatic.
Friedrich Nietzshe
The influence of Nietzsche is perhaps less obvious in terms of it being a source—I suspect many more have heard of Darwin—but no less pervasive. As we noted, he, too, attacks the idea of human nature, though from the perspective of his assault on metaphysics. Nevertheless, the result is much the same: neither human nature nor human destiny any longer have any transcendent or objective foundation; in fact, they were never anything more than manipulative concepts developed by one group, most notoriously the Christian church, to subjugate another.
This points to two further pathologies of this present age that can be seen as finding some inspiration in the work of Nietzsche. First, his genealogical approach to morals carries with it a basic historicist relativism and a deep suspicion of any claims to traditional authority. Both of these are now basic to our contemporary world. From the casual iconoclasm of pop culture to the dethroning of traditional historical narratives, from the distrust of traditional institutions such as the church to iconoclastic attitudes to sex and gender, we can see the anarchic outworking of the challenge posed by Nietzsche’s madman and the ruthless critical spirit of On the Genealogy of Morals. The average twelve-year-old girl attending an Ariana Grande concert may never even have heard of Nietzsche, but the amoral sexuality of the lyrics she hears preach a form of (albeit unwitting) Nietzscheanism.
And that leads to the second area where Nietzsche’s thinking is reflected in current social attitudes: living for the present. When teleology is dead and self-creation is the name of the game, then the present moment and the pleasure it can contain become the keys to eternal life. While Nietzsche himself may have had a view of hedonism that was different from that which grips the popular imagination today (he understood the pleasure to be gained from struggle and from triumphing over adversity), the idea that personal satisfaction is to be the hallmark of the life—or perhaps better, moment—well lived is basic to our present age. Again, Nietzsche’s books may not be widely read, but his central priorities have become common currency.
Karl Marx
That brings us to Marx. As with Darwin and Nietzsche, he assaults the metaphysics on which traditional religions and philosophies have built their views of the moral universe. Again, as with Nietzsche, he not only relativizes ethics via a form of historicism, he also presents moral codes as manipulative, as reflecting the economic and political status quo and therefore designed to justify and maintain the same. Modern suspicion of traditional authority owes a debt to Marx, as to Nietzsche, for its theoretical foundations.
Marx also makes another major contribution that is now basic to how we think about society: he abolishes the prepolitical, that notion that there can be forms of social organization that stand apart from, and prior to, the political nature of society. For Marx—and even more for later Marxists—all forms of social organization are political because all of them connect to the economic structure of society. By Marx’s account, the family and the church exist to cultivate, reinforce, and perpetuate bourgeois values. In today’s world, this thinking helps explain why everything—from the Boy Scouts to Hollywood movies to cake baking—has become politicized. And one does not need to be an ideological Marxist to be pulled into this tussle, for once one side gives a particular issue or organization political significance, then all sides, left, right, and center, have to do the same.
Iconoclastic Influence
Finally, the cultural iconoclasm of all three thinkers is notable. Darwin is perhaps the least culpable in this regard: his thought relativizes culture but is not directly iconoclastic. For Nietzsche and for Marx, however, history and culture are tales of oppression that need to be overthrown and overcome. If ever the Rieffian deathworker of today needed a philosophical rationale, then the thought of Marx and Nietzsche and the traditions of cultural and political reflection they helped birth certainly provide it. These men shattered the metaphysics for the sacred order that underlay the Rieffian second world of nineteenth-century Europe and thus challenged the culture to maintain itself purely on the basis of an immanent frame of reference—something that Rieff declares to be impossible. In light of this, the words that Nietzsche applied to himself in his autobiography, Ecce Homo, might easily be applied to all three:
I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous—a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.1
Notes:

Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 326.

This article is adapted from The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution by Carl R. Trueman. This article is used with permission.

Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, December 15, 2021
Even in the last three weeks, I have taught classes on campus criticizing the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision and Bruce Jenner’s gender transition—career-damaging lectures at almost any other institution of higher education in the United States. And I have for many years been one of the most vocal opponents of the way in which identity politics, particularly that of the LGBTQ+ movement, has damaged our culture and public life. I have received nothing but support from the college administration as I have continued to speak up on such matters.

“Do I teach at a woke school?” was not a question I seriously considered until one evening last week when I received an email from a friend assuring me of his prayers for me in my workplace. The reason was an article he had just read on a website, The American Reformer, entitled “Wide Awoke at Grove City College?”  The background to the article was a petition launched some weeks ago by parents of Grove City College (GCC) students and alumni concerning what they perceived as a woke drift on campus. The GCC president had responded to the petition in a way that I myself had thought was solid but American Reformer dismissed as “limp” and, by implication, disingenuous. I do not know if the author of the article has ever set foot on the campus which he writes about, but I confess that had he not told me he was writing about GCC, I might have struggled to recognize the ethos of my institution in the way he described it.
Now, wokeness is surely a serious problem in American higher education. Parents and alumni of all schools are right to be concerned about how various institutions are responding. I am not persuaded that petitions are ever the best way to address such problems but I can certainly sympathize with those anxious about their children or about their beloved alma maters. I myself am passionately committed to saving education from wokeness. I am a member of the James Madison Society at Princeton University and the National Association of Scholars, both of which have a keen interest in maintaining the importance of academic freedom and excellence on campuses. I am a contributing editor at the decidedly anti-woke First Things and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, one of the best-known conservative think-tanks in Washington, D.C. I am acutely aware of the struggle many friends face at this difficult time and I understand why parents and alumni are disturbed when they hear stories (or, in this case, mostly misguided rumors) about their institution. They are right to ask questions and raise concerns. They need to know if the colleges that take their money are providing the education they claim to be doing.
At the heart of academic institutional excellence is, of course, academic freedom. That can be tricky at a school that holds a stated religious position, such as a Christian college like Grove City College, but it can be done. The way a Christian school can hold to its beliefs yet give students a good education is to hold faculty to a standard of belief but then ensure that they engage other viewpoints in the classroom, host speakers from a variety of political and philosophical traditions, and encourage students to wrestle honestly with the great ideas and the hard questions of the past and the present. For example, as I recently told the Religious News Service, I declare my classes to be free-speech zones (something none of the more progressive figures interviewed said about their classes). I do not require students to agree with me in order to get a good grade. But if they dissent from my view they need to do so respectfully and give me an argument as to why I am wrong. For me, education is not about cloning myself intellectually in the classroom (as it is becoming at so many woke schools); it is about giving the students the skills to think for themselves.
At the center of the storm surrounding GCC was an invitation to Jemar Tisby to speak in chapel. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and in retrospect inviting Tisby to give a chapel address may have been a mistake. A chapel address carries a certain institutional imprimatur that a simple guest lecture does not, though inviting guest lecturers to campus to engage our students on critical topics such as race, in this current culture, is an important role of any college or university. But that is not a criticism of my colleagues who invited Tisby to speak in chapel. One of the hallmarks of wokeness is cultural amnesia—the swift forgetting of what was true the day before yesterday in order to demonize those who still hold, say, to the importance of biological sex for gender. Conservatives need to be careful not to play their own version of the woke-amnesia game when it suits them. Tisby is a good example. He was first given a platform by Reformed Theological Seminary where he had been a student on its Jackson, Mississippi campus. That is a flagship conservative reformed institution. Indeed, as recently as 2015, he was appointed director of the African-American Leadership Initiative at RTS. He was described at the time by the RTS Chancellor, Ligon Duncan, as follows: “a man I trust … a dear friend … an educator and a churchman…. His commitment to the inerrancy of Scripture, the Reformed faith and the gospel ground all his efforts towards our honoring the image of God in all people.” Ligon Duncan is no woke progressive, as anyone who knows him will attest.
Duncan’s eulogy is a reminder that Tisby has been on a long journey, from RTS poster child in 2015 to working for Ibram Kendi’s outfit in 2021. Indeed, even The Color of Compromise, a book with which I have some stated disagreements, is surely not representative of where he is today. The fact is, the summer of 2020 appears to have been a radicalizing watershed for Tisby as for many others on both sides of the political divide. The college can hardly be blamed for failing in 2019 to predict the radicalization of the RTS graduate who had recently been seen as the emerging African American bridge-builder in conservative reformed Presbyterianism.
In an email exchange, the editor of The American Reformer expressed concern to me that Grove City College was platforming Tisby while not platforming faculty like me on woke issues. Well, Tisby came to campus for one day and (I believe) spoke twice. Then he left and has not returned. As for me, I lecture for several hours every day on campus to classes that are full. I speak in chapel every year. I write things almost weekly at places like First Things and World that whack wokeness. The college launched its Great Lectures series by showcasing me on identity issues as they culminate in today’s identity politics. The college arranged for me to speak to a Washington D.C. group of Capitol Hill staffers twice in the last 18 months—once on sexual-identity issues, once on race. Even in the last three weeks, I have taught classes on campus criticizing the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision and Bruce Jenner’s gender transition—career-damaging lectures at almost any other institution of higher education in the United States. And I have for many years been one of the most vocal opponents of the way in which identity politics, particularly that of the LGBTQ+ movement, has damaged our culture and public life. I have received nothing but support from the college administration as I have continued to speak up on such matters. And from my vantage point, the same could be said of my colleagues who share my support of GCC’s Christ-centered mission, but do not come down on every hard issue where I do.
That makes Grove City College, even with all of its mortal failings and human flaws, a remarkable place. My wife and I recently hosted students at our house for a dessert evening. One of them asked if I hoped to stay at Grove City College until I retire. I responded yes, because I love the college and, more significantly, because my writings and lecturing have made me likely unemployable almost anywhere else in this age of the woke. As evidence, I told them about a Christian college where I gave a lecture by Zoom in the last year. The professor who invited me to speak asked if he could record the session because he expected to be the subject of a complaint that he had created an unsafe learning environment by having someone of my views speak. And that was a Christian college. A Christian college. That would not happen at Grove City College.
Is Grove City College perfect?  No more than I am. But I am a conservative and a Christian and that means that I believe certain things are true. For example, I believe that no institution can ever make no mistakes and do the right thing every time. And the larger the institution, the more likely it is that issues will arise. With nearly 200 faculty, a large staff, a student body of more than 2,000, and more than 800 courses taught each semester, GCC is too big for even the most perfect administration to micromanage. Built from the crooked timber of fallen humanity, Grove City College, like all institutions, reflects our own failings and weaknesses. But if the test of people’s character is not whether they live a perfect life but how they handle their mistakes and failings, then the test of an institution’s integrity is how it addresses those things which have not gone as planned or have proved unexpectedly counter-productive. GCC’s management of this continuing challenge is smart and effective. It strives to hire excellent scholars with solid Christian convictions. There is no tenure; everyone gets a one-year contract requiring affirmation of the college’s mission and values. When occasional issues arise, direct and constructive conversations take place with the expectation of missional alignment. That is why it is sad that the college’s recent statement about its commitment to addressing the matters raised by the petition has met with such cynicism from an ostensibly conservative Christian source.
I do appreciate my friend praying for me. I hope that he prays that all of us at Grove City College will stand firm for God’s truth, academic freedom, and intellectual integrity in this storm of wokeness that surrounds us. But above all, I hope that he gives thanks that I and my colleagues work at a place where we have the freedom to be faithful in our callings, a freedom that exists in few other institutions of higher education today.
Carl R. Trueman is professor of Biblical and Religious Studies at Grove City College. This article is used with permission.