Note: From, The Desecration of Man (Sentinel, 2026). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
The origins of this book lie in countless conversations I have had with colleagues and friends over recent years concerning the state of modern culture. These have typically started with discussion of some particular question – such as the role of technology, the rise of pornography or the heated debates about gender – but then moved to focus on the general question that really lies behind each of these: What does it mean to be a human being today? Or more succinctly, “What is man?”
Once upon a time in the West, the answer would have been easy: Man is a creature, made in the image of God who created him, and his life is to be ordered to those ends that this involves. The book of Genesis, the origin of this idea, defines these as: going forth and reproducing, subduing the earth and living life under the authority of God the Creator. We now live in a world that no longer agrees on that definition. We often experience our world as one that is disenchanted, one that finds implausible the idea that there is anything transcendent to which we can point to find meaning and significance in the immanent. The reason for this, as sociologists in the wake of Max Weber claim, is that the industrialization and bureaucratization of society over the last two hundred years have stripped the world – and the men and women who inhabit it – of its magic and mystery. Man has been reduced to the latest random entity cast up by a process of evolution that is heading nowhere in particular. The sense we have today that everything is falling apart is simply the logical conclusion of this process of disenchantment.
I find this interpretation of our culture to be inadequate. Certainly the rise of industry and bureaucracy has changed the experience of life; Karl Marx saw this in the nineteenth century when he noted that the advent of factory labor changed the relationship between the worker and that which he produced. Novelists as different as Thomas Hardy and Franz Kafka gave literary expression to the angst created by the birth pangs of the modern world. But the idea that man is disenchanted does not explain some of the most notable features of our current cultural climate. As Tara Isabella Burton has reported, our age is not marked by the disappearance of belief in the supernatural, the weird and the wonderful. In fact, there is an efflorescence of new religions. Religious belief has not disappeared; we simply have more religions to choose from – indeed, we can even invent our own today.
Repudiating the Holy
Our world is not characterized by a disillusioned indifference to values originally grounded in religious faith. Rather, it often seems to revel in an ecstatic destruction of all that was once considered sacred. For example, Northern Ireland was until recently a bastion of religious conservatism, but in May 2025, the Lord Mayor of Belfast unveiled a new “Pride” window in City Hall. The stained glass depicts a young man with a T-shirt onwhich the words “Save Sodomy from Ulster” appear. In his tweet about the event, the Lord Mayor declared the window sent a powerful message that Belfast is a “welcoming and inclusive city.” But the window does a lot more than that. It is one thing to promote a civic culture where people do not live in fear because of their sexuality. It is quite another to gloat in a public space about anal sex and then gush enthusiastically about this online. Setting aside any moral concerns, it is surely a strange world where movies from the 1940s now come with trigger warnings because they contain scenes where people smoke cigarettes, presumably because of the health risks, and yet there is a window in a city hall that promotes a sexual practice whose dangerous side effects are well-documented.
Deification by Transgression
What explains this? It is that modern society glories in transgression, and transgression is exhilarating. Dostoevsky, the prophetic analyst of the pathologies of modern culture, points to this in his prison memoir, Notes from a Dead House. Reflecting on why an apparently nondescript, ordinary man becomes a serial killer, he comments as follows:
The first man he killed was an oppressor, an enemy; that is a crime, but understandable; he had a reason; but then he kills not an enemy but the first man he meets, kills him for fun, for a rude word, for a glance, for a trifle, or simply “Out of my way, don’t cross me, I’m coming.” It’s as if the man is drunk, as if he’s in a feverish delirium. As if, having leaped over a line that was sacred to him, he begins to admire the fact that nothing is holy for him anymore; as if he feels an urge to leap over all legality and authority at once, and to revel in the most boundless and unbridled freedom, to revel in this thrill of horror, which it is impossible for him not to feel.
Of note here is the language of desecration: It is the denial of sacred boundaries, the profanation of all that is holy, that the murderer finds so exhilarating and that makes his crimes so addictive. That surge of power he feels in breaking the rules – in this case, the greatest rule of all – explains his behavior. It is not rational. Dostoevsky continues the passage by pointing out that the murderer knows a terrible punishment awaits him. But even that risk adds to the thrill of his acts.
Of course, few of us are serial killers, yet that note of transgression is a deep part of the culture of the modern world. In Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, Claudia Chauchat gives voice to this when she declares that morality should not be sought in virtue but rather in sin. In so doing, she represents a dominant cultural pathology that is particularly notable in today’s cultural elites: Transgression of that once considered sacred has become their primary task. And transgression of the sacred is exhilarating precisely because it makes us feel like gods, the creators of our own meanings and our own selves. All we need to do is cross lines previously enforced by the idea of God and we thereby assume the role of being gods.
The Deaths of Mystery and Morality
We see this all around us. It is there in the way in which our society has become “pornified.” Sex has simply been shorn of its mystery and of any limits but those imposed by the need for the parties’ consent. Porn stars who would once have been regarded as deviants or freaks are now celebrated as mainstream celebrities. Christian morality is restrictive; only by breaking its taboos can we have the exhilaration of realizing ourselves as free. Advocates for abortion once wanted it to be safe, legal and rare, language that avoided the idea that it was a good or desirable thing in itself but rather an unfortunate necessity in an imperfect world. Now they celebrate – even “shout” – their abortions and insist upon them as a basic right. And this exultation in transgression is not restricted to any political group. The recent rise in popularity of Holocaust denial and Hitler rehabilitation among the very online right functions along similar lines, as its advocates delight in parading their ideological transgression before the world and mocking their opponents. More mainstream conservative politics has also proved susceptible: It is one thing to believe that illegal immigrants should be deported; it is quite another to use social media accounts to rejoice and celebrate the pain and distress of the children involved. Even the White House’s X account has demonstrated that it is not above such exuberant nastiness. Smashing old standards of decency and kindness rooted in the Christian ethic is fun, even compulsory, in order to appear authentic. On both right and left the playbook is the same when dealing with those found ideologically wanting: No critic’s character goes unsmeared, no criticism goes unmocked. And of course, all such behavior enables us to feel superior to them. It makes us godlike, at least in our own eyes.
Indeed, with social media, modern man has the perfect vehicle for indulging in this kind of transgressive behavior. Not only does social media make mockery and vitriol comparatively risk-free, it incentivizes such behavior. If you want clicks, you need to be outrageous or nasty. Kindness and truth are somewhat less sexy when it comes to building your platform.
To the question “What is man?” our world has apparently given the answer: the one who transgresses what was formerly considered sacred and thereby demonstrates his own godlike status. But a project that defaults to such transgression looks increasingly bankrupt. Interestingly, and perhaps inevitably, this has led a number of high-profile intellectuals and cultural figures to reconsider the Christianity that so much of modern culture regards as the enemy.
The Question of God
It is worth noting that this is not unprecedented. In 1950, Partisan Review ran a series of articles by leading cultural figures, entitled Religion and the Intellectuals. The authors included Hannah Arendt, W. H. Auden, I. A. Richards, John Dewey, Robert Graves, A. J. Ayer, Sidney Hook, and Paul Tillich. This revival of interest in religion did not last but it is significant that it occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when the realities of Auschwitz and the A-bomb raised questions about human existence that had never been faced before. The intellectuals involved understood that the question of man was also a question of God. His existence – or nonexistence – was foundational to how the world should respond to the anthropological challenges of a post-Holocaust nuclear age that could bring about humanity’s complete destruction.
There were other voices in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that saw the connection between the loss of religious faith and the pending bankruptcy of Western culture. Sir Roger Scruton spent decades making the case for understanding the importance of a sense of the sacred to a healthy civilization. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn made a similar plea for the importance of Christianity. In a speech in Moscow in 1997, entitled “The Depletion of Culture,” he noted that “the fundamental, intrinsic reason for culture’s ongoing decline, its petering out, is its secularization.” I would only add that this imminent cultural indigence has been fueled by the active destruction of the sacred, not merely its fading away.
While the revival of interest in religion among cultural elites is welcome, I believe it will prove as ephemeral as that of the mid-twentieth century unless it grapples not simply with the perceived cultural benefits of Christianity but also with its truth claims. It may be a captivating aesthetic experience to attend a Latin Mass where the choir sings the words to the polyphonic compositions of Palestrina. The Book of Common Prayer might give a certain pleasure on a Sunday morning. The great architecture and art that Christianity inspired might enrich one’s life. But if one does not believe that the religious dogmas that are the basis of these things are true and not merely inspiring fictions, then that is not a faith that will prove durable as the wider culture exhausts itself. Indeed, it merely perpetuates one of the most distinctive and problematic aspects of modern culture: the confusion of taste for truth.
Excerpted from The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity by Carl R. Trueman, in agreement with Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Carl R. Trueman, 2026.
Carl Trueman, professor of biblical and religious studies, Grove City College
