Make Life Sacred Again
A Review of Carl R. Trueman's The Desecration of Man
In recent years, Carl Trueman has emerged as one of the most significant voices in the Christian world. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Crossway, 2020) is a masterful history of what can rightly be called the “identity revolution.” The authority we commonly ascribe to individual identity is, historically speaking, a novel development. Trueman shows us how we got here. I commend it to your reading, though some readers might prefer a more succinct version of the same argument, Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution (Crossway, 2022).
His newest work, The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Humanity (Sentinel, 2026), is equally germane to our current moment, though less technical and more accessible than Rise and Triumph. While many people today talk about “secularization” and “disenchantment,” Trueman provides stronger language for what has happened across the Western world. He describes it as a process of “desecration”: “the denial of sacred boundaries, the profanation of all that is holy” (xii). Desecration has not happened by accident. When Trueman speaks of desecration, he refers to “the active destruction of the sacred” (xv).
Read the full review at Firebrand.
Well said. Here is a simple test, so we can all plainly see the strategy being used to separate us from the life of God:
List the promises God has given mankind, then match each one with the strategy society is using to erase it. For example:
“Male and female, He created them.”
The spirit of Antichrist says no. It tries to make God’s Word appear untrue, as though denying His order could dethrone Him.
It cannot.
Selah.