On Dignity and Desecration
Modern Western culture excels in grand but shallow pieties. The menu is rich: “love is love,” whatever that means; “science is real,” but religion is, implicitly, not; “no human is illegal,” unless you’re an unwanted, unborn child; and so on. My favorite is the bumper-sticker wisdom of “war is not the answer.” Well, maybe yes; maybe no. It depends on the question and circumstances. Sometimes war is the morally legitimate choice. I’m writing these comments in late March, in the midst of U.S. and Israeli strikes on the Tehran regime. Whether they qualify as “just” is debatable and the meat for a very different column. But two words from Iran’s not-so-distant past are relevant here and now.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the original guiding spirit of Iran’s Islamic revolution, was a thoroughly vile man; a creature oozing with hatred of anything non-Muslim. And yet even a wicked man can say things with a hint of truth. In 1979, he described the United States as the “Great Satan,” the consummate tempter of our species and adversary of all things righteous. This, from the man who inspired a global network of terrorism, and later oversaw the torture and murder of scores of thousands of his own people. This included up to thirty thousand protesters and dissidents in 1988 alone. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which he helped create, serves as a homegrown blend of Waffen SS and Gestapo, compounded by diseased religious zeal.
Still, his words stick in the memory. And they lead, in a winding way, to some thoughts on Carl Trueman’s superb new book, The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity. For those unaware of Trueman’s background, he’s an ordained Presbyterian minister and distinguished Church historian, currently based at Grove City College. His latest work builds naturally on cultural themes he has explored throughout his career, including his 2020 masterwork, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.
Like Trueman’s previous efforts, The Desecration of Man combines rigorous research with an easy style. In this sense it follows a classic C. S. Lewis recipe: serious scholarship, delivered in an appealing way, for a broad general audience. And his subject matter—the impact on our humanity of an intensely materialist culture—couldn’t be more pressing.
Trueman isn’t the first to examine today’s appetite for desecrating the sacred and soiling what it means to be human. The late Roger Scruton resisted the same trends in his books The Face of God and The Soul of the World. But for Trueman, Scruton, despite his brilliant body of work, embodies part of today’s problem. Scruton sees religion as vital to sustaining human dignity. But the content of any specific religion matters, because how we think about God shapes how we think about man. Worse, Scruton makes no firm faith commitment himself. Approving the importance of “religion” as a social good is worthless unless it’s believed and actively lived. And in the biblical tradition, God is personal. He demands more than a high-five or round of applause. He insists on intimate encounter and conversion.
This is a key difference between Islam and Christianity. In Islam, God is an utterly transcendent creator. Humans are, at best, God’s earthly stewards. But they’re just as truly described as God’s slaves, with submission and obedience their central task. For Christians, God is a father, transcendent but also immanent. Humans are his children and free cooperators (not merely servants or slaves) through the redeeming sacrifice of his Son, Jesus Christ. Thus, each of us is a sacred imago Dei; we each bear God’s image. This is the source of our rights and obligations. It’s also the guarantee of our dignity. And even in a “post-Christian” era, it informs how we in the West think about the structure and purpose of society.
Or it did until recently, as Trueman argues early and well. Our Western world today, he writes, “is not characterized by a disillusioned indifference to values once grounded in religious faith. Rather, it often seems to revel in an ecstatic destruction of all that was once considered sacred.” Modern society “glories in transgression, and transgression is exhilarating.” This is so precisely because it makes us feel like gods. We demand to be “creators of our own meanings and our own selves.” Profaning Christian standards of decency and moral behavior is not just fun, but “even compulsory, in order to appear authentic.” And blaming the “disenchantment” of society for our current condition is too vague. The word desecration is far more accurate because it “lies at the very heart of what makes modern man tick.” We delight in blaspheming things once deemed holy.
How did we get to this point? The turmoil of the Reformation set the stage for the Enlightenment. This, in turn, sought to extract the goods of Christianity from its deluded God baggage and bickering. I oversimplify the author’s telling of a complex tale here. But the world-changing fact, as Nietzsche ruthlessly noted, is that the Enlightenment’s self-satisfied architects failed to foresee the consequences of their own project. If God is dead, anything goes. Or to borrow a thought from Dostoyevsky: absent God, everything is permitted. And if that’s so, then moral principles are just useful fictions. The individual has a license to do and be whatever he wants. Technology makes formerly impossible desires possible. Interfering with those personal appetites is the primal modern sin.
In the process, we end up turning ourselves and all creation into raw material drained of any higher meaning. We become objects rather than subjects. The Sexual Revolution is the poster child for our current dysfunctions. It promised liberation from oppressive moral codes and more and better sex. Instead, it produced today’s sexual chaos: a spike in pornography, confused gender identities, a decline in marriage and family, transgender abuse of the body, and the collapse not just of genuine sexual intimacy but also—and most bitterly ironic—a decrease in intercourse frequency among young adults at the height of their fertility.
The decisive question for this and every age, Trueman argues, is Who and what is Man? He writes:
For all of us, theist and atheist alike, the answer to that question is a theological one. Psalm 8 answers it in terms of God’s creative act, which undergirds the old anthropology of men and women made in his image. Which determines the structure of who we are and provides the framework of how we should freely act. If one rejects God’s existence, everything changes. … [Those] who kill God, those who indulge in that great act of desecration, are obliged to become gods themselves and to desecrate his image again and again.
Consider the above with this from Sayyid Qutb, a young, secular, Egyptian intellectual and government official who visited the United States in the 1940s:
All [the Western nations] take their bearings from one source, and that is the materialistic civilization that has no heart and no moral conscience. It is a civilization that does not hear anything except the sound of machines, and does not speak of anything but commerce. … How I hate and disdain those Westerners! All of them, without exception: the British, the French, the Dutch, and now the Americans, who at one time were trusted by many.
Qutb wrote those words in 1946. He later became a major voice in the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.
Which brings us back to a murderous ayatollah and his words we began with from 1979. As the United States nears its 250th birthday, are we the “Great Satan” so poisonously described by Ruhollah Khomeini or the biblical “city on a hill” hoped for by the Puritan John Winthrop and his early colonists?
Carl Trueman would probably say neither. We’re on a road too often traveled—in the wrong direction. Our nation still has a deep well of goodness. We’re a land of extraordinary liberties, laws, and opportunities. Tens of millions of Americans take their Christian faith seriously and live accordingly. But we’re also a land of intense consumerist materialism; a land of inescapable distractions and endless commercial propaganda that anesthetize the soul.
So what do we do now? The future doesn’t yet exist; we make it with our choices. As Trueman notes in his conclusion:
If desecration is the pervasive problem of our day, then nothing less than consecration is the answer. We have imagined ourselves to be gods, and have ironically reduced ourselves to mere dust. That is a moral problem. It cannot be solved by simply “re-enchanting” our world by acknowledging that nature is mysterious or that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our consumerist philosophies of life. Consecration is not a feeling or an emotional response to something; it has a distinct dogmatic, cultic, and moral shape, with all three elements standing in non-negotiable connection to each other. … Only a renovation of the heart, redirecting it toward God, is able to do that. And that only takes place in the context of the church, where humanity by creed, cult, and code can once again realize what being made in the image of God truly means.
In that light, a personal memory may be useful. I staffed an American bishop-delegate at Rome’s 2015 synod on the family. At the end of it, his fellow bishop-delegates elected him to a term on the Synod of Bishops’ permanent council, and he was asked to suggest a few themes for the next synod. At the top of his wish list was a discussion of Psalm 8. In verses 3–5, the Psalmist speaks to God with these words: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and stars which you have established, what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him little less than the angels, and you have crowned him with glory and honor.”
Who and what is man? As the bishop knew, and the author argues skillfully in The Desecration of Man, this is the central, urgent issue we now face as a civilization.
As it turned out, at the next synod (2018), the Holy See chose instead to host a mediocre discussion of youth and the Church, with everyone’s favorite idea—synodality—smuggled onto the agenda at the last moment. There’s an odd but delicious satisfaction in a Calvinist brother’s doing, and doing so well, what the Vatican declined to do. But the world is full of ironies.