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Cultural Critique Column

This article was published exclusively online in the Christian Research Journal, volume 49, number 03 (2026).

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Book Review

The Desecration of Man:

How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity

Carl R. Trueman

(Sentinel, 2026)

“Man’s inhumanity to man” refers not only to acts of cruelty, but to corrupt conceptions of what it means to be human. We can degrade ourselves through false philosophies that undermine human dignity and exceptionalism (Colossians 2:8). There are philosophical crimes we commit against ourselves. In his short but penetrating and artfully written book, The Desecration of Man (Sentinel, 2026), Professor Carl Trueman builds on his recent works of cultural criticism and explains in patient detail the philosophy behind same-sex marriage, gender ideology, pornography, abortion, surrogate motherhood, drag queen shows for children, doctor-assisted suicide, and in vitro fertilization (IVF) — and how this philosophy is trending toward even normalizing pedophilia and zoophilia.

Trueman’s book continues his trenchant critique of modern culture found in his magisterial The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (Crossway, 2020), Strange New World (Crossway, 2022), and To Destroy All Worlds (Crossway, 2024). Trueman’s thesis is that the rejection of God entails something severe and horrible — the desecration of man after the death of God. But what is desecration? To desecrate means more than to merely devalue or ignore. Desecration is a defacing or denuding of value. To remove a statue from the public square and put it in a storage room is to devalue it. To topple it from its base, to break it into pieces, and to spray paint it with curses is to desecrate it.

The Death of God and Man. Although Trueman does not quote him, the atheist psychologist Erich Fromm (1900–1980), an exponent of critical theory, explains Trueman’s basic thesis in The Sane Society (1955). “In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead; in the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead” (emphasis in original).¹ Fromm did not develop this idea, and he had no answer to the problem. Trueman, however, knows how to explain this tragedy by tracing intellectual and cultural history. While such analysis can be dry, Trueman writes with clarity and a calm urgency about the power of ideas to shape lives and civilizations. His thesis is that the denial of God leads to the desecration of man — a thesis he establishes cogently.

Early on, Trueman disavows any apologetic purpose for his book (xix). His purpose, rather, is to explain and chart the effects of atheism on our account of what it means to be human. As soon as I read this, I knew the reader would be in for an apologetics feast. Trueman was not being disingenuous, and I knew that his historical account would, in itself, be a rich and robust apologetic through the history of ideas — at least for anyone not willing to swallow the poison pill of nihilism. Thoughtful readers will see that accepting atheism leaves no hope of escaping nihilism, and this exemplifies the power of negative apologetics to reduce any non-Christian worldview to absurdity.² Of course, some souls are so far gone, such as Princeton bioethicist and philosopher Peter Singer (who accepts infanticide³ and flirts with bestiality⁴), that they cannot recognize this (1 Timothy 4:2).

What I recognized as a young Christian in 1976 has proven true through all the years of research, writing, teaching, preaching, witnessing, activism, and mentoring. Not only do individuals need to know Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, but Western culture will only decline as it neglects or openly rejects its Christian heritage in philosophy, the arts, politics, and every other area of life. Because the Christian worldview is objectively true, rationally grounded, and existentially germane to the whole of life, when people and cultures deny the Christian perspective and way of life, they lose their hold on reality, on goodness, and on beauty. As God warns in Scripture, when God’s Word and will are not heeded, degradation and destruction must follow.

Where there is no revelation, people cast off restraint; but blessed is the one who heeds wisdom’s instruction. (Proverbs 29:18)

My people are destroyed from lack of knowledge.

Because you have rejected knowledge,
I also reject you as my priests;
because you have ignored the law of your God,
I also will ignore your children. (Hosea 4:6)⁵

The Wisdom of God speaks as well:

Those who find me find life
and receive favor from the Lord.
But those who fail to find me harm themselves;
all who hate me love death. (Proverbs 8:35–36)

Our Post-Christian Society. A post-Christian society can then only sink into delusion, vice, and ugliness. Despite whatever glimmers of revival we may spot today, Western civilization is post-Christian culturally and politically because the rot goes deep into our thought forms and institutions, especially in psychology, the arts, and education. I first recognized this pattern of decline in 1976 when I read Christian philosopher and apologist Francis Schaeffer’s prophetic and profound work, The God Who Is There (1968). He identified America as “post-Christian” in Death in the City in 1969, since we had turned away from God. Our rebellion is no small gesture. It unleashes divine judgment. As Schaeffer (1912–1984) wrote,

The hand of God is down into our culture in judgment, and men are hungry. Unlike Zeus, whom men imagined hurling down great thunderbolts, God has turned away in judgment as our generation turned away from Him, and He is allowing cause and effect to take its course in history.⁶

This “cause and effect” works in the realm of ideas or worldviews and in social practices, such as technologies, and in the general imagination of a culture or what philosopher Charles Taylor calls “a social imaginary,” a concept Trueman often employs. This phrase means what naturally comes to mind and heart concerning emotions, values, and choices. Although Trueman does not cite him, sociologist of religion Peter L. Berger (1929–2017) referred to this taken-for-granted sensibility as a “plausibility structure” in A Rumor of Angels (1969).

One of the fundamental propositions of the sociology of knowledge is that the plausibility, in the sense of what people actually find credible, of views of reality depends upon the social support these receive. Put more simply, we obtain our notions about the world originally from other human beings, and these notions continue to be plausible to us in a very large measure because others continue to affirm them.⁷

Godlessness can be thought out and self-conscious, as with someone like Richard Dawkins, or it can be something you pick up in the cultural atmosphere, through films, advertisements, Facebook and X posts, and elsewhere.

The Madman’s Judgment. Trueman draws from Friedrich Nietzsche’s parable of “The Madman,” which depicts a man who is looking for God but cannot find Him since “God is dead.” “We have killed him,” he says, and then poetically elucidates the philosophical and psychological effects of a godless world.⁸ Nietzsche, unlike many of his day, knew that when we deny the Christian God’s existence, all the values, morals, and customs that depended on God must eventually die with Him. He lets loose a torrent of images to illustrate this inevitable catastrophe, which is worth quoting at length.

How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.⁹

The madman then says that he has “come too early.”¹⁰ It will take time for the implications of the death of God to be demonstrated in history. He was right, and Nietzsche (1844–1900) did not live to see much of it. But we have, and we are responsible for what we see.

When God and the sacred are expunged from their rightful and normative role in the institutions of society, we are left with only evolved animals who function according to instinct and social conditioning, who are unaccountable to any objective standard for good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice. Neither humans — nor anything else — have a given telos, a purpose, a goal for their lives. Rather, all meaning is posited by the autonomous self, which is now governed more by hedonic and erotic desire than anything else. Trueman calls this “expressive individualism,” a thesis he develops at length in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.¹¹

On this view, personal identity is flexible, fungible, and fluid, untethered to any moral authority outside of the self. The very idea of self-denial becomes incomprehensible, since the self is the center and source of meaning. Jesus’ invitation to deny self in order to follow Him into the venture of the Kingdom of God (Luke 9:23–26) is taken to have no grounding in reality. Sin dissolves as a category, since sin obtains only if there is a God to sin against.

The sexual revolution began as the outgrowth of atheistic sexual ethics by the likes of Alfred Kinsey, Wilhelm Reich, and John Money. Kinsey’s bogus research was used to justify perversity as widespread and normal. In turn, this produced a devolution into gender ideology, which opposed any sense of a created order making sexual identity (and not just behavior) a matter of arbitrary choice. Without a moral standard and without a creational telos, humans are animals to be manipulated as desired and as possible by medical technologies. Men can become women. Women can become men. Marriage is expanded to include same-sex unions, and there is no reason to limit marriage to couples, either. So, polyamory becomes an option.

Sexuality is shorn from its sacred context of being a one-flesh union between a man and a woman, which is ordered toward child-bearing and child-rearing. The biblical model is jettisoned, since there is no God to authorize norms for sexuality and reproduction. Contraception and abortion can eliminate the unwanted burdens of children resulting from sex, and children can be produced without sex through IVF. This procedure produces more fertilized ova than are implanted, thus ensuring their termination or indefinite storage. Humans at the earliest stage of their identity are thus made commodities whose existence depends on people’s amoral desires. This desecrates the image of God, since all human beings have the right not to be murdered. Similarly, surrogacy removes pregnancy from motherhood by implanting a fertilized ovum into a third-party woman. Even good intentions — when they are present — cannot justify this endeavor, since it violates the natural order of pregnancy and childbearing through technology and an alien woman who serves as a womb for another person’s child. Even Nietzsche’s madman might have been nonplussed by today’s moral landscape (or wasteland).

In a godless world, just as fetuses can be created and destroyed at will by technology detached from morality, so too can older people be killed if they so desire. Trueman notes that doctor-assisted suicide is now an institution in Canada through Medical Assistance in Dying (or MAiD). Since 2016, over fifty thousand people have been legally murdered through this macabre “service.” The state now offers this to non-terminal patients, and even recommends it. In September of 2025, the ultra-liberal magazine The Atlantic ran an article mildly critical of MAiD called “Canada Is Killing Itself.” In America, many states have followed suit, including, most recently, New York. Ancient medicine’s maxim, “Do no harm,” has been reversed and desecrated. Since we do not belong to God, we may do with our lives what we will, including ending it when we will. Historic Christian teaching is that if it is wrong to murder another image bearer of God, then it is wrong to murder oneself through suicide.¹²

Trueman’s reflections on death in the wake of God’s death are profound and eloquently written. Drawing on Pascal, Tolstoy, and others, he observes that we try to escape death through diversion, amusement, and oblivion. We avoid the realities of aging through various means — from Botox to Viagra — and we engage in sexual experience to divert us from thoughts of death. From a Christian viewpoint, both sex and death are sacred realities that must be informed by biblical truth, lived out in Christian community, and guided by the Holy Spirit.

In his concluding chapter, Trueman exposes the unsuccessful attempts of Richard Dawkins and Sir Roger Scruton to address desecration. Dawkins wants to dismantle gender ideology by simple biology: humans are male or female and do not decide such things. But Dawkins’s atheism robs biology of teleology so rings hollow on sexual norms. Scruton esteems the sacred traditions of Christianity, including its rituals and morals, but never affirms the objective truth of the faith. This stance alone will not reverse the desecration of man. In Trueman’s words, only a return to the Christian creeds (basic theology), cult (church practices),¹³ and code (moral standards) can restore humanity. Only a consecration to Christianity on these terms can answer the great anthropological crisis of our day. We must know who we are and what we are for in Christian terms. Trueman offers sagacious and specific advice on these matters pertaining to church music, liturgy, hospitality, and more.

The God-Man or the Madman. Only the God-man can undo and restore what Nietzsche’s madman saw as inevitable in the wake of the death of God. As theologian-philosopher Carl Henry (1913–2003) wrote, the ultimate dichotomy is this: “Taken long-range, the only options are either nihilism or the Nazarene. The Logos of supernatural revelation towers as the only effective barricade against the meaninglessness of the world and human life.”¹⁴

As the madman said, we would have to be as gods to be worthy of killing God. But man as substitute and simulated god can only desecrate his humanity in the pathetic quest for godless godhood. The atheist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was honest enough to admit this when he said that man was “the desire to be God,” and was, as such, “a useless passion.”¹⁵ God deems such God-imposters worthy of condemnation and damnation (Ezekiel 28:1–10; Isaiah 14:12–20). However, they are, by God’s grace, capable of awakening from their godless delirium, of repenting of their foolish pride, and being restored to right standing with a holy God through Jesus Christ. Trueman’s telling analysis of the ideas driving society can awaken us to the sources of our present darkness and to find a way from darkness into the light of God’s truth (Ephesians 6:12).

I will give Professor Trueman the last word. “Only by the true consecration of man can his desecration be overcome. And that requires a return not simply to the alleged cultural benefits of Christian belief and practice but to actual Christian belief and practice” (xvi).

Douglas Groothuis, PhD, is Distinguished Professor of Apologetics and Christian Worldview at Cornerstone University and Cornerstone Theological Seminary and the author of Taking Back Truth: A Biblical Response to Common Cultural Lies (Baker, 2026).

NOTES

1. Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (Owl Books, 1990, orig. pub. in 1955), 360.
2. On negative apologetics, see Douglas Groothuis, Christian Apologetics, 2nd ed. (InterVarsity-Academic, 2022), 44 and employed throughout.
3. Scott Klusendorf, “Death with a Happy Face: Peter Singer’s Bold Defense of Infanticide,” Christian Research Journal 23, no. 3 (2001), https://www.equip.org/articles/peter-singers-bold-defense-of-infanticide/.
4. Peter Singer, “Heavy Petting,” Nerve, 2001, archived December 28, 2005, at Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20051228141000/http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/2001—-.htm.
5. Bible quotations are taken from the NIV.
6. Francis A. Schaeffer, Death in the City (Crossway, 2002; orig. pub. 1969), 38, Kindle ed.
7. Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (Open Road Media, 2011; orig. pub. 1969), 34, Kindle ed.
8. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §125, “The Madman,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (Penguin Books, 1977; The Gay Science orig. pub. 1882), 95–96, Kindle ed.
9. Nietzsche, “The Madman,” 95.
10. Nietzsche, “The Madman,” 96.
11. Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Crossway, 2020).
12. See Douglas Groothuis, “Murder by Medicine in Canada and the Threat to America,” Christian Research Journal 46, no. 03 (2023), https://www.equip.org/articles/murder-by-medicine-in-canada-and-the-threat-to-america/.
13. Trueman means nothing negative by the word “cult” here; it is a technical term in religion for a committed group with specific practices.
14. Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, vol. 3, God Who Speaks and Shows: Fifteen Theses, Part Two (Crossway, 1999; orig. pub. 1979), 192.
15. Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Desire to Be God (cont.)” and “The Hole,” in Existentialism and Human Emotions, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (Citadel Press, 1987; selections orig. pub. in Being and Nothingness, 1943), 63, 90.