So many Christians are puzzled at how our culture has deteriorated so drastically and so quickly. Trueman’s task in this book is to explain how this has happened, making the point that current assumptions in Western culture have “deep historical roots and a coherent genealogy” (29). In other words, when you hear about a woman claiming to be trapped in a man’s body, we should know that the roots of such a statement did not begin with the sexual revolution in the 1960s, but in philosophical ideas that circulated centuries ago, and are just now trickling down into the social imaginary of the common person. In response, the task of the Christian is not to “whine about the moment in which he or she lives but to understand its problems and respond appropriately to them.” (30).
When human identity becomes primarily psychological or therapeutic, and when the psychological then becomes primarily sexual, and when sexual identity eventually becomes political (250), and when “expressive individualism” is assumed as the highest good and obvious default setting for every human being, you can very easily see how a woman can not only claim to be trapped in a man’s body, but also demand that the rest of society acknowledge and affirm this.
This is one of those books that you feel like you need to read again right away, not just because the ideas It’s not light reading, but it is essential reading for anyone wanting to make sense of the strange world in which we live.