Carl Trueman argues in his new book that modern humanity actively dismantles its own nature through a perverse pursuit of autonomy, defining this "desecration" as the intentional destruction of human dignity rooted in God's image. He contrasts this with passive disenchantment, citing Nietzsche's "Hour of the Madman" to illustrate the terror of creating meaning without divine boundaries, while noting how figures like Richard Dawkins struggle to ground issues of sex and gender without religion. Trueman further critiques technology, such as gene engineering and IVF, for treating children as consumer objects when lacking a normative understanding of humanity, distinguishing between abortifacient methods and natural family planning regarding birth control. Ultimately, he expresses hope that faith will resurge through truth claims about Jesus Christ rather than cultural benefits, suggesting the debate between religion and science persists until judgment day. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Desecration as Freedom00:14:58
Desecration becomes the primary means of realizing our freedom and autonomy.
Ironically, as I make the point in the book, as we assert our freedom and autonomy, as we assert our divine greatness, we have somewhat perversely ended up thinking of ourselves as nothing much in particular.
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Carl Truman, who I believe now is going to set a record for appearances on my interviews.
Maybe Spencer Clavin has beat him out, but I keep having him back because he keeps writing these good books.
Frankly, I'm sick of it, but I think they're just so compelling.
They are so compelling and clear, and he has such a grasp of the way ideas work and how they change how we live.
He teaches at Grove City. College.
He's a professor at Grove City College, though he has been at Notre Dame for the past few months.
And he is the author of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, which is how I first discovered him.
But his new book is called The Desecration of Man How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity.
Carl, it's great to see you again.
How are you doing?
I'm doing very well, Andrew.
Thanks for having me on.
I didn't realize I was a record holder.
I think you may be the record holder.
You've got to just stop writing these good books because every time I read one of them, I think I've got to talk to this guy.
This is a particularly compelling book, and it's actually, in some ways, a continuation of the rise and triumph of the modern self, which Ben Shapiro just thought was the book of the decade.
He just loved that book, and so did I.
But this is taking it to a new step.
I mean, one of the things that is wonderful about reading you is you actually speak English and write in English, and so you use words carefully.
Sacred and mistreating it and dragging it into the dirt.
So let's start with that.
What do you mean by the desecration of man?
Yeah, well, put simply, I mean that man is made in the image of God, and we live in an era where we take a perverse pleasure, really, in dismantling and destroying what it means to be human.
Now, a dominant way of thinking about modernity is summarized in the word disenchantment.
The world has become less magical, the world lacks.
Depth that it once had.
And I think that idea has a lot of plausibility, it carries a lot of weight, but there's more going on than mere disenchantment.
Disenchantment implies that we are sort of the passive victims of a process that's slowly taking things away from us.
But actually, we take something of a perverse pleasure in shattering what it means to be human.
Think of the language that surrounds AI at the moment.
A lot of the AI gurus seem to think that it's going to make human beings redundant.
But it doesn't stop them doing it.
It's almost a motive for doing it that they're taking great delight in, in making humanity mediocre.
So, desecration is really an attempt to get at the active dimension of the dismantling of what it means to be human at our own hands that is going on in the current climate.
Is it, does the disenchantment come before?
Is it a cause of the desecration?
In other words, when you become disenchanted, in some ways, you may lose.
Fantasies that you've had, you may lose illusions that you have, but you also may lose touch with the spiritual level of the world.
You may stop believing that it means anything for us to be made in the image of God.
Yeah, I think so.
I think the two ideas overlap to a significant degree.
If you read Rodrea's work on disenchantment, for example, he doesn't simply see disenchantment as a purely passive thing.
And there's a sort of an intense form of disenchantment that is not dissimilar, I think, to the idea of desecration.
But yes, there is a subtraction story in modernity.
We're losing something.
But there's also an intentional, frenzied delight in removing things as well.
And the two stories, disenchantment and desecration, I think overlap and reinforce each other.
What do you think?
Well, let me, before I get to this, what does it mean to be made in the image of God?
I mean, there's some people who think that means we have reason.
There are people who have different interpretations of that.
But what have we lost when we lose the image of God?
Yeah, I think a couple of things.
First of all, theologians have debated what the image is over the years.
And I think we'd have to say that being made in the image of God is a multifaceted thing.
You referred there to reason.
We're certainly creatures who can use reason logically.
Process ideas in our mind and then act intentionally on the basis of those ideas.
There's also a dimension of the image which makes us persons.
We freely engage with each other in a way that is not paralleled precisely anywhere else in creation.
We're also creatures who appreciate beauty.
I live in a house, a beaver lives in a dam, a rabbit lives in a hole.
They make those things instinctively and they're purely functional.
I live in a house that my wife has filled with paintings and beautiful things.
There's an excess to our lives that speaks of a spiritual dimension that other creatures lack.
So, all of those things I think feature in the idea of the image.
But of course, there's also a dimension of the image is something over which we have no control.
We are made in the image of God.
It is God's stamp upon us.
And in an era where we're increasingly, Impatient with any form of external authority, the stamping of us as made in the image of God, that's in some ways the final, the ultimate boundary that we have to break through in order to establish ourselves as free and autonomous agents.
So the image also carries with it the idea of an external authority, determining who we are, determining what should constitute a good and happy life for us.
So, is that the reason?
I mean, I think you're absolutely right about this idea that there's some compulsion to desecrate man, which is, when you think about it, it's kind of odd.
It's self destructive.
But is that the point?
Is there a motive to it that we just want to be free ourselves of those?
Yes.
And I think this is where this book ties in with my earlier book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, where really, as I look back, that book was tracing out how the idea of human beings as free, autonomous self creators emerged.
Desecration asks, well, does that take a specific shape?
And the answer I think that I've come to is this yes.
How do we prove to ourselves that we're free and autonomous?
We have to transgress the sacred boundaries that previous generations have passed on to us.
So, desecration becomes the primary means of realizing, at least in our own minds, realizing our freedom and autonomy.
Ironically, as I make the point in the book, as we As we assert our freedom and autonomy, as we assert our divine greatness as self creators, we have somewhat perversely ended up thinking of ourselves as nothing much in particular.
It's so reminiscent of that passage, that sequence in Paradise Lost, where Satan says, My mind can turn heaven into hell and hell into heaven, and then ends by crying out, Myself am hell.
There's no place to go.
Once you leave God, you're doomed.
And it does seem like that, even as we do that to ourselves, we can't stop.
I mean, we can't, there seems to be no way to turn back.
I mean, even if we only knew, as we do know, that religion made people happier, it would seem like that would be a good idea to follow it, even just if you did it for that reason.
I mean, obviously, it's not a good theological reason, but it seems a good self interested reason, but we don't do it.
No, and that's the sort of crazy psychology of the situation.
Think about the biblical account of the fall, Genesis 3, how the idea when Eve eats the fruit, what's the immediate result?
Well, the serpent has promised her, you know, if you eat the fruit, you'll be like God.
She eats the fruit.
Maybe she feels like God for a split second.
But the very next moment is she's ashamed.
Her relationship with the husband is disrupted.
Her relationship with God is disrupted.
They run and hide in the woods, frightened of each other, ashamed of who they are.
That reductive dimension that comes, that flows from rebellion is right there at the start.
And you've cited Paradise Lost.
There is that perverse, I would say delight in it, but we'd rather do anything other than admit we were wrong.
Satan in Paradise Lost declares, you know, it's better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He would rather be in hell, but in charge of a nothingness than actually having to follow orders from the one who created him.
Yeah.
It's like the mayor of New York is like that.
You didn't say that.
I was there last week.
Yeah.
Yes.
It's very reminiscent, I would say, of the first circle of Dante's inferno.
They could put those in the ads.
You know, you, you, you.
Connect this to Nietzsche, who is such a fascinating person because, on the one hand, he was anti religion and he also went insane.
I think he went insane much earlier than people think he did.
But his diagnosis of what it meant to lose religion was incredibly precise.
And you call it the Hour of the Madman, great chapter title.
Can you describe what the Hour of the Madman is exactly?
Yes.
The chapter refers to this parable that Nietzsche writes in his book, The Gay Science.
And the, you know, the 30 second version is it's a little story about how a madman runs into a town square in the middle of the day and starts haranguing the atheists who have gathered there that God is dead.
And they all laugh at him.
And then he makes the point, no, no, you need to realize God is dead.
You've killed him.
This was very intentional.
And having done that, you can't carry on as if nothing had changed.
And he's really getting at the Enlightenment philosophers who.
Dispatched God to the margins, but wanted to maintain the Christian morality and the culture that flowed from Christianity in a fairly stable form.
And Nietzsche is saying, No, you can't do that.
If you get rid of God, guess what?
You have to become gods yourselves.
You have to create meaning.
And the language he uses there indicates that this is both very exhilarating what more exciting thing can there be than to slay God and replace him with yourself?
But he also points out it's a terrifying thing as well.
What festivals of atonement, he says, will we have to invent to appear worthy of the deed?
It puts huge responsibility on human shoulders as well.
And he captures there, I think, that dual aspect of desecration and modernity.
On the one hand, there's an ecstatic joy taken in trampling on the sacred.
On the other hand, every now and then, there are gasps of horror when we realize what we've done.
And I would point to.
Somebody like Richard Dawkins in this context, suddenly he realizes his atheism gives him no solid place to stand on the sex and gender question.
And he doesn't like it.
And I find myself with Nietzsche.
If we met Richard Dawkins in a bar, the two of us would look at him and say, Well, you made your bed, man.
Now you've got a lie on it.
Yeah.
You know, it always amuses me, if that's the word I want.
You know, there's a theory that trauma, that we repeat traumas over and over again.
So if you're abused, you abuse, you're getting yourself abused again and again.
And it always gets me that Nietzsche's, that man man scene, Is a description of the fall.
It is a description of Eden.
It is, you know, it's all a description.
Everything you're talking about is a description of someone saying to you, you can be like gods if you determine what's right and wrong.
And that nobody seems to notice this, like nobody seems to notice that even if you want that to happen, even if you think that's the right thing to happen, it was described there in the Bible.
So the Bible has this truth to it that's kind of, I don't know, it's kind of a coincidence, I guess.
So now, this idea of taking control of the world, it has at least been coeval with it.
It has happened at the same time as this technological and medical explosion.
And it certainly feels like some of that, at least, is progress.
I'm happy babies don't die anymore.
I think we're all happy about that, right?
I'm happy to be able to call somebody on the phone, talk to somebody far away, and even see people when they're far away now.
And yet, you do connect this in the book.
And we're talking about this as.
Carl Truman's new book, The Desecration of Man How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity.
But you connect even some of these benefits to a sense of desecration.
Am I reading that correctly?
Yeah.
I mean, I think technology is key here.
There's a sense in which desecration has been the problem throughout human history.
What makes the current age so different is that we now have technological powers that allow us to redefine what it means to be human at the most basic level.
We can even.
Engineer our genes now.
We can even engineer conception now in ways that grant us powers that previously would have been mysterious, unattainable.
That then raises the question of well, Truman, are you just a Luddite?
Just to inform the viewers, when I go to get a root canal done at the dentist, very happy to be living in an era of anesthetics.
Technology Redefining Humanity00:02:14
It's not a question of hating technology.
The problem today with technology is we don't have a prior normative understanding of what it means to be human.
That would allow us to refract technology.
I think about it, I live not far from an Amish community in Pennsylvania, and people think the Amish are anti technology.
They're not anti technology so much as very careful and critical in how they appropriate technology.
When a technological development emerges, they ask themselves does this enhance what we believe our community is or does it detract from it?
Does it contradict it?
How might we be able to use this technology in a way that doesn't disrupt who we are?
So I see Amish guys getting rides in trucks to fulfill their roofing contracts, for example, roundabout.
The problem with most of us today, of course, is we don't have a strong sense of what it means to be human beyond, hey, we just need to be psychologically happy or fulfilled.
And therefore, when technology is developed that, hey, we think allows us to be that.
We jump on it straight away when somebody comes up with a scheme that allows us to overcome some human limit, and we think that'd be a cool thing to do.
We just do it without ever really thinking about the long term consequences.
You know, cell phones might be a good example.
You know, you mentioned it's great being able to see people at a distance.
I love being able to Zoom with my granddaughter who lives, you know, the other side of the state.
It's great to be able to see her regularly.
But of course, the internet brings problems with it, it creates the possibility of the transmission of vicious pornography very, very easily.
We need ways of being able to think about how we use technology.
That are not driven simply by technological possibilities, but are actually brought under the authority of what it means to be human.
And that's the real problem we face today.
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Family Planning and Faith00:14:02
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Do you?
Do you?
Do you really?
Are you just saying you do?
You're just saying it.
It's K L A V A N.
So much of this, and you've mentioned it a couple of times as you're speaking, you write about it a lot.
So much of this seems to come down to sex and sexuality, or seems to implant itself and express itself through sex and sexuality.
In the rise and triumph of the modern self, you trace that idea as an idea and as a political idea, really, but a natural idea growing out of the disenchantment of the world.
In this book, it seems almost inevitable that it's going to end up in the sexual world.
Am I reading that rightly?
No, I think you're putting your finger on something there.
I've thought about this a lot over the years.
The centrality of the sexual revolution to modernity.
Was it something that was going to happen at some point anyway?
And I'm inclined to think yes, because we know from world literature that sexual desire.
Has a perennial power that transcends cultures.
There's a reason why I could teach a class at Grove City College where I refer to the Iliad.
And my students can read the Iliad today, over two and a half thousand years after it was written, and understand what's going on because they understand the power of sexual desire.
They understand the traumatic power of sexual betrayal.
I jokingly say the thing about the Iliad is it's actually the plot of every American soap opera.
Just with gods and heroes rather than very good looking actors and actresses.
Sex is very powerful in shaping human society and human identity.
And so the transformation of sex into mere recreation and the destruction of sexual taboos seems to me to be, yeah, that's going to, you know, if it's humanity that's at question, if we're redefining humanity, sooner or later, that stuff is going to be directly in the firing line.
So let me ask you a difficult question, but it does kind of connect to what you're talking about.
Not long ago, I was talking to a Roman Catholic.
Who said, he said in a meeting that all birth control was evil.
And so I went up to him and I challenged him in my irritating way.
And I said, you know, well, if you use the rhythm method to avoid having children, what's the difference?
The intention is the same.
And he had a fairly good answer, which was he said, at least it's still connected to the act.
You're still connecting sexuality to the act.
And yet, you know, you can't help but think about Jude the Obscure, the children killing themselves because there are too many of them.
What a novel.
Yeah, what a novel.
But And so, I guess I want to ask: do you share that belief that birth control is inherently evil?
No, I don't.
But I'm a work in progress on it.
I do think that the Catholic arguments have a strength that Protestants typically do not acknowledge.
I think in Monty Python's movie, The Meaning of Life, where the wife asks the husband, Why are we Protestants?
And he says, Well, we use birth control.
I think birth control in Protestantism has been one of those identity markers that we've assumed and not thought about.
I do think the Catholic arguments about the need to combine or to hold tightly together the unitive and the procreative aspects of sex have a power that Protestants need to consider.
So I'm certainly very comfortable in saying abortifacient methods of birth control are wrong.
I'm increasingly persuaded by somebody like Mary Harrington that the birth control pill is.
Kind of transhumanist technology.
It's an attempt to biologically alter and eliminate a natural process and change what the woman is relative to sex.
But I'm not as yet prepared to say all forms of birth control are illegitimate for two reasons.
One reason that you've mentioned, and that is the natural forms of family planning seem to me to be susceptible to the kind of criticisms you were making.
And secondly, we know that.
Sex goes on in the Bible past the age of childbearing.
That's why Sarah is so amused when the Lord says, You know, you're going to have a baby, and she bursts out laughing.
She doesn't burst out laughing because she and Abraham are not sleeping together anymore.
She bursts out laughing because of her age.
So I do think the Catholic case is strong, but I'm not yet persuaded that it's completely unanswerable.
So this is the thing, I mean, that's exactly the way I feel too.
But this is the thing that every time technology comes to us, It comes to us with a sad story.
I mean, it's like, you know, here's a woman who can't have a child, but if I use this procedure, she can have a child.
What would you propose as the standard for judging these things?
What should we be talking about when we talk about IVF and all these other things?
Yeah.
I mean, interesting.
You're pointing out that when I did the audio recording of the book and I did, I read the chapter on IVF and surrogacy.
At the end of that chapter, I turned to the guy managing the recording and I said, That's the chapter I'll get the hate mail on.
That's the controversial one.
Think the issue there is.
You know, pastorally speaking, you know we want young couples to have children.
When a young couple come and say, you know we, if a young couple, when I was a pastor, walked into my office and said you know, Janet's pregnant uh, but it's going to interfere with her career, can we have an abortion?
My answer would be easy, no, that's you.
You desire something.
That's wrong.
If the same couple had come to my room and said, we, we're desperately trying to have children, children that we would love, is it legitimate for us to use ivf or surrogacy?
That's a different question.
Because they desire a good thing.
They're not driven by sinful motives.
They're not desiring an evil.
They desire a good thing.
I think the questions that I would want to raise with them would be Is the solution to your problem, the immediate solution to your problem, does it have consequences, perhaps unforeseen consequences, that will do damage to society at large?
And in the book, I make the case that the move towards IVF and surrogacy really does.
I don't think it starts the process, but it accelerates the process of treating children like consumer objects.
It raises all kinds of moral challenges, but also tilts us towards thinking of children as things.
Now, as I say, it doesn't start the process.
I think, you know, no fault divorce does that.
You know, who gets the couch?
Who gets the dog?
Who gets the kids?
You know, these are questions that the law courts have to decide.
So they have to treat the children as pieces of property.
So it's certainly not.
Purely a technological problem.
But I would want to raise with the young couple think about the broader consequences for the culture of the action you're taking.
And there are other ways, of course, of pursuing parenthood that don't involve IVF or surrogacy, adoption being the most obvious one.
Would you say that our lawmakers should be thinking like that?
Or do you think that that's too much to ask?
I think lawmakers should be thinking about that because clearly they have to.
The lawmakers have got to decide, for example, what is the status of the surrogate mother in the current climate we have.
There are all kinds of loose ends legally.
I think the problem we face is that my stand on IVF and surrogacy, certainly my stand on IVF, perhaps less on surrogacy, but on IVF, would be very unpopular, even within church circles.
Catholics, perhaps an exception, but in Protestantism, I think few people would have an objection to IVF.
And so I think lawmakers always have to have half an eye on who's going to vote.
For them at the election.
And I don't think strong objections, opposition to IVF is going to be a big vote winner at elections.
So, yes, lawmakers should consider these things, but whether they practically will, that I'm less sanguine about.
Well, this brings me to my final issue.
We're talking to Carl Truman about his new book, The Desecration of Man, how the rejection of God degrades our humanity.
Like all of Carl's books, it really does help.
Explain the place that we're in that sometimes seems just an insane chaos, but it actually does come from ideas and things that have happened in history.
And the desecration of man describes a lot of it.
Now, there are movements now toward faith again.
I mean, one big advantage God has is that he exists.
So that I think.
Yes.
It's just helpful.
It's incidental to the world.
It's like gravity.
It's like not believing in gravity.
But what do you see that makes you hopeful?
And what do you see that you just think is.
A wrong road, and maybe you don't see anything like that.
What makes me concerned is that people would terminate with cultural questions.
Christianity is useful because people respect each other.
It makes people hospitable, those sort of questions.
That, to me, would be the thing that one would want to be wary of.
But I'm overall greatly encouraged.
I was chatting to somebody this morning and really making the point that there's a sense of which I don't care why somebody comes to church.
If they come to church, they're going to hear the truth.
We've had people coming to church because they're lonely in the past.
We've had people coming to church because they're struggling with addictions.
The key thing is that the church doesn't simply stop.
At saying, okay, well, here's a friend for you, or here's some support in fighting your addiction, that the church points people to Christ.
So I think this is a time of tremendous opportunity when you're getting, for the first time in my life, very serious intellectuals taking Christianity very seriously.
What I want to make sure they realize is that Christianity isn't just about its cultural benefits, it's actually about truth claims relative to God, the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, et cetera, et cetera.
And do you think that that idea?
I mean, one of the things about technology and science is that it does give you this sense that things don't happen the way the Bible says they do.
You know, it doesn't show that, but it gives you that sense of that.
It is the same.
Yeah, that's.
Yeah.
To an extent, that's true.
But on the other hand, I was having lunch just the other day with a professor of quantum physics at Notre Dame.
You know, I've never felt more like an.
Intellectual pygmy than chatting to a quantum physicist and a devout believer, very devout believer.
So, there is a sense of it, you know, science and technology seem to work and that gives them a coherence, but they don't address the bigger metaphysical questions.
And that's where religion and the Bible step in.
And that's, of course, the problem that Richard Dawkins has at the moment.
On the one hand, yeah, his science works.
On the other hand, he seems to be intuitively beginning to grasp that.
It can't answer some of the most foundational questions of existence.
Why does science work, for example?
So I think the debate between religion and science will continue until the day of judgment.
It's not going to end in my lifetime.
But I do think that more and more scientists seem to be realizing that a closed materialistic view of the universe has its problems too.
Yeah.
Yeah, no question about it.
I've never heard Dawkins ask the one question that always occurs to me is that if he's wrong, that evolution is random, how would he know?
How would he ever find this?
But anyway, Carl Truman, the author of The Desecration of Man How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity, and many other very concise books that explain a lot of what's going on.
Religion Versus Science00:00:47
Carl, it's always good to see you and talk to you.
Thank you so much for coming on.
I know we'll do it again.
Thanks very much, Andrew.
Good to see you again.
I wish there were more writers doing what Carl is doing, which is piecing together the idea chains that extend almost inevitably from the long, slow, withdrawing roar of faith.
But good for Carl that at least now he has no competition.
I just highly recommend his books.
Very readable.
They're brief because he writes very concisely.
This one, The Desecration of Man, but all of them are really good.
You know what else is great?
The Andrew Clavin Show, which is on Friday.
Come there, and I would say I'll say a personal hello to you in my mind, or possibly just in your imagination.