Trueman recalls the biblical Jonah. Jonah preached his message to covenant Israel, and his reward was to be sent to Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian empire, with a message of doom. “In three days, God will destroy your city.” Something unexpected happened—the people of Nineveh obeyed their king’s command to repent in sackcloth and ashes. And God relented. Trueman’s argument, that a civilization cannot survive without God, is now going forth to a watching, rational, secular world. And just maybe they will read his words and turn to the Living God.

Carl Trueman is a prophet of late modernity. Not a prophet in the predictive sense but in the biblical sense: one called to remind Israel of who their God is and why their only hope of flourishing lies within, rather than without, the covenant He made with them. In The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity, Trueman establishes the stakes of modernity’s rejection of God.

Trueman has crafted The Desecration of Man with academic clarity, yet the book remains highly approachable for the non-academic reader. His previous two books were aimed at two different audiences: The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (2020) was written for professors, while 2022’s Strange New World was a version of Rise for Christian laymen. In Desecration, Trueman has written a philosophically nuanced book for the secular reader. He frames his argument in stark terms: “We can be Nietzscheans or we can be Christians. There is no stable third option. We must choose today whom we will follow: Christianity’s Messiah or Nietzsche’s Madman. All else is nihilism.” Trueman defines his terms, offers examples, and builds a careful argument.

He begins with modernity, by which Trueman means the contemporary post-WWII global order, as a culture centered not on the sacred but on the process of “desecration,” which implies “the intentional abuse or destruction of something holy, something of more than ordinary significance.” What is sacred within a culture shapes the people’s vision of human nature. Trueman explores Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultures to show that at their center lies a conception of human dignity related to God. Modernity is defined by the death of God and replacement of him with a technologized approach to conquering nature; instead of living in light of the imago Dei, modern man forms himself as an “expressive individual” through courageous acts of desecration.

If the problem in our society is not one between conservatives and progressives but between different kinds of desecreter, then the issue so many conservatives are worried about—the future of Western civilization—becomes immediately more complicated. How does one “save” Western civilization when one plays by essentially the same rules of desecration as those who are accused of trying to destroy it?

Trueman offers desecration as a way of distinguishing realities currently obscured by ambiguous terms: Rather than “left/right” or “liberal/conservative,” American politics can be measured by how far a party is willing to go in desecration.

To the idea of desecration Trueman adds Phillip Rieff’s concept of the deathwork. “A deathwork is a cultural assault on the sacred when the culture itself has lost its foundations and stability.” (Rieff is a difficult but important 20th-century Jewish thinker; see this volume for a helpful introduction to his work.) Trueman offers the painting Piss Christ as an example of a deathwork. Rather than art conveying culture, it is an assault on the sacred. A culture filled with deathworks is a culture lacking a center; rather than affirmation, such a culture is filled with the “spirit of negation.” Trueman argues that in pursuit of freedom from nature, freedom from God, and freedom to form an autonomous self, modernity has rejected everything sacred and written a narrative of the courageous transgressor forging anew what it means to be human.

Having established his theoretical foundations, Trueman proceeds to demonstrate desecration in three areas key to Jewish, Christian, and Islamic conceptions of what it means to be human: sex, birth, and death. “Desecration of all that was once considered holy became a hallmark of that authenticity that expressive individualism craved.”

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