Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking In Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.
I’m Albert Mohler, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
Carl Trueman is Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. He earned the Master of Arts and Classics at the University of Cambridge and his PhD in Church History from the University of Aberdeen. Professor Trueman has a distinguished and well-known career as both a teacher and an author, having published several books ranging from books on reformation, theology and history to biographies on figures such as John Owen and Martin Luther. He’s the author of the widely esteemed book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, as well as another book To Change All Worlds.
It’s his most recent book, The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity that is the topic of our conversation today.
Carl Trueman, welcome to Thinking in Public.
Carl Trueman:
It’s great to be here, Al. Thanks for having me on.
Albert Mohler:
Oh, just glad to do so. And I feel like we could pick up at just about any place and have a fantastic conversation, but this is about your new book, The Desecration of Man. Tell me about that title because I think I hear something there and what I hear is kind of an updating of the Abolition of Man.
Carl Trueman:
Yes, there was definitely a little homage to C.S. Lewis. Not that I would claim that my book stands on the same plane as his at all, but I think the Abolition of Man is one of those texts that is more true now than when it was first written. It’s a remarkable book. The second aspect is that I’d noticed over the last few years, five or six years, the idea of disenchantment was really starting to grab the imagination of a lot of people as a way of explaining the spiritual malaise of the current world. And I wasn’t sure that went far enough. That implies a kind of ennui or disillusionment with the world. But when you look at, say, the language of abortion moving from safe, legal and rare to shout your abortion, there’s something more exhilarating and exultant going on there. So I wanted to get at that.
Why do we get such a kick out of smashing the image of God? Desecration really is, I think, a light motif of the current cultural climate.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Let me test something with you. What I would call the evangelical left, and I don’t mean to mean that at name calling, but actually descriptive an evangelical left. They seem to keep wanting to say about the secular world, the secular left. There’s not that much distance between us. I think my entire lifetime is predicated upon every day I see greater distance between us. And the book you’ve written makes very, very clear we are at a cultural crisis or turning point.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. When I think of growing up, obviously it was in Britain in the 70s and 80s. The big political issues were by and large economic, mixed economy, racism. The good old days. The good old days. And even though there was something at stake there, there wasn’t a whole lot at stake compared to what’s at stake today. I think the big question today is what does it mean to be a human being? And the left, both the left and the right have their problems on that issue. The tech bros are a problem for the right, I think. But the left has gone out of its way over the last five or 10 years to make the, I would say, the destruction of what it means to be human into a central plank of its policy platform. And that changes everything. We’re not dealing with, should income tax be 20% or 25%.
We’re dealing with what does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to be human?
Albert Mohler:
The first political conversation you and I had was about tax policy.
Carl Trueman:
I don’t remember this, but I’ll take your word.
Albert Mohler:
No, I tell you, it was kind of a U.S.-Britain issue. And it was tied to some other things we were talking about. And by the way, I do remember that conversation. You didn’t like the picture that I have with Margaret Thatcher in my library. That’s how this came up.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. She’s more an ambiguous figure for me, I think.
Albert Mohler:
I understand. I understand. And you understand what I see in her as well.
Carl Trueman:
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
Albert Mohler:
I see in her a titanic moral force against forces of disillusion and totalitarianism.
Carl Trueman:
That’s why. As the years go by. As the years go by, I get more and more sympathetic to her. I mean, she looks better and better with the decades. Yes.
Albert Mohler:
Just to be clear, we’re standing in my study and what people look at in the picture where I’m sitting with Lady Thatcher, some people go, “Oh, Lady Thatcher.” And you went, “Margaret Thatcher.” But a part of that is also the fact that you look at the other way. And so for instance, I would’ve thought of a lot of democratic figures, Democratic Party figures in the United States. And I thought they were very liberal until the modern Democratic Party, the modern political left, which now makes many of those people from the ’60s, ’70s and even the ’80s look. Well, I mean, even a Tony Blair, for example, is nowhere near or was nowhere near where the ideological left is now.
Carl Trueman:
No. And I mean, obviously I wasn’t here at the time, but I would bet that if you looked at the Clinton platform from 1992, it would look remarkably restrained compared to the Democratic platform today.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely. It was the new Democrats and the Democratic Leadership Council, I think they called themselves at the time. And it was a redefinition of the Democratic Party that basically adopted Republican economics.
Carl Trueman:
Right, right.
Albert Mohler:
And I think something very similar happened with New Labor.
Carl Trueman:
Yes. I think that was Tony Blair in some ways was the son of Thatcher. I think he understood the political landscape had changed and he led Labor in what was an appropriate direction on some fronts on that level.
Albert Mohler:
And as much as that may seem a digression, it really is the point of your book in many ways, is that what was a crisis is now a far larger crisis because the basic desecration of man you’re talking about here, we can now see is kind of inevitable in terms of some of those trajectories.
Carl Trueman:
Yes. And I mean, to sort of step back from the immediate politics, if you think about how technology, for example, is raising all kinds of questions at the moment about what it means to be human. I think Elon Musk is an interesting figure from that perspective. Praise God, the tragic circumstances of his own family certainly led him to have, I think, a tremendously positive influence on the transgender question in the current administration. But Musk’s own commitment to a form of transhumanism makes him a more problematic figure.
Albert Mohler:
I’m not at all sure that’s former.
Carl Trueman:
No, no. I think he’s-
Albert Mohler:
He has a very current commitment to transhumanism as well.
Carl Trueman:
Oh, absolutely. Yes. Sorry. I didn’t mean to say former. His commitment to transhumanism. Yes. On that level, he’s kind of part of the problem, even though he’s helped with some of the solution in some areas.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. I like the way you group these things together. And a left right continuum is not the only thing that’s operative, but it really is operative in the sense that even some of the people on the right, they’re really not conservative. They’re just ultra techno-libertarian.
Carl Trueman:
Yes, I think that’s definitely the case. And it’s been interesting over the last year or two seeing the rapprochement between the so-called tech bros and the leadership of the Republican Party. On one level, of course, they’re realists. They understand President Trump got elected, they’ve got to work with him. And that’s definitely an improvement, I think, in 2016 where you had this terrible hostility. On the other hand, I think one also sees that the right itself has to some extent lost track of what it means to be human, and it’s making it very, very vulnerable to all of the crazy suggestions coming from these guys.
Albert Mohler:
Well, part of what we are dealing with here, and you’ve dealt with this in your own way, is this technological determinism that is very rampant in the culture. I’m not at all certain that Donald Trump is not representative of that technological determinism. I look at how he handles things such as expansion of gambling, artificial intelligence. He really doesn’t want many boundaries around those things.
Carl Trueman:
No, and I think that points to another aspect of modern society, and that is that we have this situation where those driving the tech industry really don’t have any moral, ethical framework shaping what they do. They don’t know exactly where they’re going, but they’re going to go there as fast as they can.
And Peter Thiel is an interesting character on that front. On the one hand, when he’s being interviewed by Russ Douthat, he hesitates for a disturbingly long time before answering whether humanity should continue to exist. On the other hand, he’s going around the globe talking about the antichrist. There’s this sort of. . . He seems to have an awareness that we need a moral or even a theological structure for this stuff, but on the other hand, his tech investments are just racing away.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. There’s a vast overlap between what you’re dealing with here and what I am . . . I just finished a book project, the manuscript a matter of months ago. And one of the things I deal with in artificial intelligence is the fact that many of the people who are most on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, they’re scared to death by it, but they are absolute determinants. They’re technological determinants. They’re absolutely convinced this is inevitable. And so you see this in Sam Altman and as you say, Peter Thiel and so many others, this is a horrifying thing. It may come with horrifying consequences, but there’s no way we can stop it. And there’s actually no way you can even put guardrails around it. And I think the current administration’s kind of bought into that.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah, and that’s disturbing. And we know from human history, there are ways that one can corral and put boundaries around technology. I mean, think of nuclear weapons. We still have to. . . but they’ve been brought under some sort of contractual agreement between nations. We could at least try one might say, make some effort to set this tech revolution in some sort of moral context. But you can’t do that if- I was going to say, you can’t do that if you don’t know what it means to be a human being.
Albert Mohler:
Right. So where do you start with that? You really start theologically because your argument is that the denial of God means that humanity is inevitably redefined and degraded.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. I think you don’t have to be a Christian to believe that. Nietzsche in the 19th century believes that. Nietzsche makes the point. If you deny the existence of God, then you really have to deny that human beings are made in his image and you have to get rid of everything. You build upon that. So his target is the enlightenment philosophers who want to retain the vestiges of Christian morality while tearing away the foundations. So what I do in the book is I really set the debate up. I said that the big issue today is really between those who believe human beings are made in the image of God and those who deny it. And then I go on and say that. . .
Albert Mohler:
That’s hardly an original argument.
Carl Trueman:
No, not at all.
Albert Mohler:
So why did you have to make it in this context? What is the urgency?
Carl Trueman:
I think a couple of things. One of them is we have the existence of this sort of third party that I think their influence is fading, but you have the characters that we might call exclusive humanists. Stephen Pinker would be one who thinks that one can maintain a moral view of society on the bridge itself. In highway, Roger Scruton was one. And that’s the second thing. And it pained me to do this because I absolutely love Roger Scrutin’s books. But Roger Scrutin, he argues for the importance of God because, dare I say it, I think God is useful to his, particularly his aesthetic views, but also his moral views.
Albert Mohler:
Well, and at the end of his life, I think he saw, I don’t know how to put it, but the notion of God, even the reality of God is a necessary predicate for everything he was trying to do. But that’s very different than Christian theism.
Carl Trueman:
Yes. I remember the only time I ever heard Roger Scruton lecture was at 2017 in Princeton and he was doing a double header with John Halday in the Catholic Philosopher. And Roger Scruton gave this beautiful statement about what it meant to be human and about art and beauty. And at the end of it, John Haldan stood up to respond and he said, “Roger, everything you’ve said is wonderful. Everything you’ve said is true, but unless you affirm the Christian God, all you’ve done is constructed a castle in the air.” And I remember Scruton’s response, he hesitated for a while, smiled, and then he said, “Yes, I know, but I just can’t go there.”
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, I appreciate your literary references in this book. And I will tell you, every once in a while, there’s someone that just walks around in your head. I guess that’s true for a lot of people. And so from the time I was a teenager, there’s a part of Dostoevsky always talking to me because that was really one of the first times I read great world literature and found out how it grasped you and just won’t let you go. But there’s some other things. So in reading your book, I thought several times of The Remains of the Day by Ishiguro.
Carl Trueman:
Oh yeah.
Albert Mohler:
And the whole point of that, which is a beautiful, beautiful movie as well, it’s really about trying to perpetuate a civilization when the ontological and metaphysical foundations are gone and it just turns out to be impossible. The next thing you know, there’s an American owning your British estate.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah, it is a great … Actually, my wife and I, we watch that movie with students at Grove every couple of years. I say to them, “If you want to know why I’m peculiarly screwed up as an Englishman, you need to watch this movie.”
Carl Trueman:
It captures the English sensibility well, but I think you’re right. What you’re seeing there is a way of life that is living off borrowed capital, capital borrowed from a previous generation.
Albert Mohler:
It’s just so well depicted. And honestly, it reminds me that at times fiction can far surpass nonfiction in making a moral reality like that so clear.
Carl Trueman:
Yes. And of course it loses its morality because the Butler really plays along with his boss’s Nazi sympathies, for want of a better term ,because he’s his boss. He can’t answer why he just does it because, hey, that’s the way it’s always been. And that’s what I worry about the nihilism that Nietzsche talks about that one could perhaps say Roger Scruton indulged in. And that is, you keep doing the same thing and trotting out the same values, but are they grounded in a living faith and a living belief in what the world is like grounded in God?
Albert Mohler:
The other wonderful thing about that movie is, and I want young men to watch that movie, Christian young men, I want them to watch that movie. I want them to see Anthony Hopkins when he finally musters the courage to go see Emma Thompson and it’s too late.
Carl Trueman:
It’s heartbreaking.
Albert Mohler:
He will never know love for the entirety of his life because he waited too long. I always find when I make that argument, young women cheer and young men, their ears do pick up.
Carl Trueman:
Yes, that is a problem today. It has to be said.
Albert Mohler:
In your book, by the way, we read so many of the same people and it’s not just nonfiction, but figures. And I find it hard to find a conversation partner on many of these people, but life and the death works. Yeah. First of all, I find that a very puzzling work, but on the other hand, I find it rather essential.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. Yes. Philip Reef is an extremely important thinker. I think his day is yet to come. There’s increasing academic interest in him.
Albert Mohler:
His father was a major figure.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. Yes. And of course, very interesting coming from a Jewish family that the police- Absolutely. Yeah. There’s that very moving bit at the end of Life and the Death Works when he talks about, I think it’s his father wanting to go back and be buried in Israel because Hitler won in America. In other words, America’s abolished what it means to be human. That’s the point he’s making there.
Albert Mohler:
Well, that is a pattern now. That is a pattern. I think someone like Yoram Hazoni can explain this very well. There are good many Jewish people who come to the conclusion that the current situation, even in the United States, is increasingly, well, antisemitic and hostile. And that’s why there has been the movement of several people from … I don’t mean just a handful, but quite a significant kind of new pattern of immigration to Israel based upon persons who see exactly what you’re talking about there.
Carl Trueman:
I think it’s even more tense in the UK on that front. I never thought I’d see some of the reports I now see from the United Kingdom, Israeli football fans being banned from attending football. Absolutely. Which is on the basis of lies being spread on the internet. It is remarkable what we’re seeing and speaks again to that desire to shatter that which binds us all together, our common humanity and fragmented into these sort of exultant micro identities.
Albert Mohler:
Tell us how you came to write the book.
Carl Trueman:
Well, I actually wrote a completely different book. Originally, I wanted to write a book looking at nihilism. And my editor at Penguin, Bria Sanford, I think she sent it back four times. So what you actually have is the fifth draft, and it’s a totally different book to the one that it first was. I wanted to write about nihilism, the loss of meaning in the modern world. And then I realized that when I went to the man that I, from my amateur perspective, thought was the nihilist philosopher, par excellence, Nietzsche. I realized that Nietzsche actually thought cultural Christianity was nihilism, and it was following down that trail that led to the development of the book as a whole. So it started as a book about nihilism, ended up as a book about desecration.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. When I lecture on Nietzsche, I always try to make the point that Nietzsche’s in constant conversation with historic Orthodox Christianity.
Carl Trueman:
Oh yeah, yeah.
Albert Mohler:
When you had many liberal Theologians who didn’t know what it was, Nietzsche knew what it was. No, excuse me. He has this abstraction of cultural Christianity, but he knows what it is. He knows what Christianity is.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah, of course he’s the son of a man. He’s a son of a Lutheran pastor who his father died when he was very young, but he was confirmed as a Lutheran. You can find his confirmation picture online if he doesn’t look too happy, but you can find his confirmation picture.
Albert Mohler:
What boy that age looks very happy in that kind of picture?
Carl Trueman:
Yes, it’s difficult.
Albert Mohler:
But in his case it is a little haunting.
Carl Trueman:
Yes. Yeah. His sister, who was scarier than him, looks even less happy. It has to be said.
Albert Mohler:
Well, the amazing thing for me when I was a doctoral student was realizing how much I agreed with Nietzsche.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah.
Albert Mohler:
And by the way, I don’t mean final agreement. I hasten to say at any of those major points, but if indeed Christianity is a charade, if indeed all that’s left is this cultural crudescence. And if even the Christians don’t believe what they say in saying, then have at it.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. I think Nietzsche is the most consistent of those philosophers. I remember I first latched onto that when I read David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions maybe 15 years ago. And Hart was gunning for Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Company. And he made the point that these polite atheists need to read Nietzsche, that Nietzsche’s the man who says, “You can’t do what you’ve done with God and retain your senior common room, Manhattan cocktail party morality. It all has to go. You have to rise to be gods yourselves.”
Albert Mohler:
Right. And otherwise your life has no meaning whatsoever.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. The challenge is. . .
Albert Mohler:
You’re going to have to earn the meaning by will and power.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. So I think Nietzsche is … Yeah, I reviewed a book by David Barash recently, The Soul Delusion. And he makes these ridiculous statements. The whole book is full of ridiculous statements, but he makes this ridiculous statement towards the end to the effect that, well, morality’s obvious. Everybody agrees on what’s moral. And I’m thinking what you’re actually doing there, Dr. Barash, is you’re saying you have morality.
Albert Mohler:
And where did it come from?
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. And everybody who deviates from you, they’re somehow immoral.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. I’m glad that book came out when it did, because it was in time for me to include it in some of my own considerations. I’ll put this forward to you. I think one of the most interesting things going on in the world right now is the fact that you have someone like a Richard Dawkins, and I think far more superficially than Roger Scrutin. But nonetheless, in some politically genuine way, Dawkins is afraid of what the world looks like without cultural Christianity.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah.
Albert Mohler:
He even said, “I’m a cultural Christian.”
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. I think at the end of his life, he’s looking at what he’s done and realizing it isn’t that good. At the end of the book, I actually, the two men that I look at are Richard Dawkins and Roger Scruton. And Scruton I take very seriously. I think he was a serious intellect. Dawkins may be a great scientist, but he’s clueless philosophically, clueless. But you can see the problem.
Albert Mohler:
But you know what? So I’m writing on Dawkins right now and actually a document I was able to get, which involves Dawkins. And Dawkins is making the case for male and female. And you realize that his entire scheme of things right down to the selfish gene is the process of evolution. And the evolutionary process requires male and female. And so, he is absolutely determined that if nothing else in the university exists, male and female are clear categories. But he wants no ontology. No. When it comes to like cultural Christianity, he wants the cultural Christianity, but Christianity is integral. It includes an ontology. And you’re not going to be able to have cultural Christianity if Christianity isn’t true.
Carl Trueman:
No. I hate to sound like a critical theorist at this point, but essentially what he’s doing is he’s making the things that he prefers into absolutes. So male and female are absolute. I would respond, well, cancer’s a biological reality as well. Why do we treat cancer? Why not allow cancer to triumph?
Albert Mohler:
No, what he would say is the difference between cancer and XX and XY is that life itself can only be explained in terms of XX and XY, whereas cancer’s the aberration. So in other words, it’s amazing. He really does attempt to have an answer for everything. He’s the only man I know in that world who’s really tried to create an entirely comprehensive worldview based on evolution.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. And it clearly doesn’t even work for him as he’s now having to pull in cultural Christianity reluctantly into the frame.
Albert Mohler:
If you really want to, and you’re drawn to go here, the choir in Westminster Abbey saying, “Oh, come on you faithful,” you’re not that good at atheism.
Carl Trueman:
No. Not at all.
Albert Mohler:
You’re supposed to find that absolutely repellent.
Carl Trueman:
Yes, yes.
Albert Mohler:
You have a strategy in your book, and I appreciate it. And I appreciate the fact that as an author, you give a map of your strategy. You set out some early chapters in order to get to later chapters. So tell us what your strategy is there.
Carl Trueman:
Well, the early chapters are really set. First of all, I raised the issue that you’ve alluded to in the figure of Dawkins, but I think is wider than that. And that’s a growing interest among intellectuals in the Christian faith. Dawkins would be very much at the weak end of that. But if you think of somebody like Ayaan Hirsi Ali or a husband, Nile Ferguson, what seems to me to be a much more serious engagement and grappling with Christianity, not just for its cultural benefits, but realizing that there’s a whole metaphysics, there’s a whole theology that goes with this. So I start with raising the question of, why is this happening? Then I go to Nietzsche and say, “Well, really it’s because the Nietzsche option is the compelling one, but its results are clearly disastrous.” And people are now realizing that the pinkerite exclusive humanism isn’t really an option at this point.
And then I go on to look at three aspects of what I call the modern revolution, sex, procreation and death, and really compare the promises of the modern revolution in those three areas, that it will liberate us and grant us freedom with the results, arguing that actually the results have led to the objectification of human beings, take the sexual revolution. Nothing has turned women into abused objects in the history of humanity on a large scale, like the sexual revolution has done. It promised freedom and it delivered slavery. And then finally, in the last chapter, I say, “So what’s the answer?” Well, here’s the good news. In some ways, if the problem’s desecration, then the answer is consecration. And that’s where the Christian faith comes in because we know that consecration has to have a Christological and an ecclesiastical context. The teaching of the church, the ritual worship of the church, and the living life as Christians day-to-day is what truly brings out the real humanity, makes us understand who we truly are.
So I tried to end on a. . . Bria, my editor was very keen that I ended on a positive note. So I’m naturally a doom and gloom man, but I managed to get this positive and constructive note in at the end.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I think it’s gospel and biblical, so I think you’re on good ground here. Yes, of course. And I know you well enough to know you would’ve ended there in your own way. You mentioned Stephen Pinker. Isn’t this an interesting development? You have so many people who worked so hard to be on the left, but the left is passed far beyond them. And so Steven Pinker now, on his own university campus, is a recidivist. He’s a part of the problem as Dawkins would not be really eligible probably for election to his own department at Oxford any longer.’
Carl Trueman:
Yeah, that Overton window has dramatically shifted. I mean, if we’d been having this chat round about the time I saw that picture of you and Mrs. Thatcher and you’d asked me, “Where do you put yourself on the political spectrum, Carl?” I’d have said, “I’m an instinctive centrist, maybe slightly left of center, but a centrist.”
Albert Mohler:
That’s kind of where I thought you were.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah, that’s where I was. And now I find myself characterized as being off sometimes on the far right. And as I was saying to a friend this morning, I’m not actually conscious of having changed my opinion on very much. It’s just that there’s been a whole sea change in the way we think of the left right division in politics.
Albert Mohler:
I was looking just this morning at a journalistic engagement with Rod Dreher, and Rod’s a friend to both of us and is an interesting figure in himself. And he’s been in so many different places, but he is very much right now, given his influence on Vice President Vance and others, very much an issue of public interest. And one of the things that perplexes those who are from the secular world trying to engage him is it’s hard to categorize some of his positions as left or right. And that’s the way it is in terms of if Christianity is a thing, and if it is a fixed body of truth, if the Scripture is the word of God, and if this is the gospel and this is a biblical understanding of human beings, it’s not going to map politically as clearly as the New York Times might want it to.
Carl Trueman:
No, and I’ve been reading a lot of Solzhenitsyn recently, always loved Solzhenitsyn. But what intrigues me about him, of course, is that he comes to the West, but he’s not pro-Western. Now, this isn’t to endorse everything he says, but if we’re looking for analogs of the current day in history, Solzhenitsyn, why? Why did he not fit anywhere? And I think it’s because he saw the crisis, not as an East/West crisis, but as a spiritual crisis affecting humanity as a whole that manifested itself in different ways in different cultures. And that’s where I think a lot of Christians today, we need to think of ourselves as called to analyze, diagnose, and call to repentance the spiritual crises, illnesses, catastrophes of the day, wherever we happen to find ourselves. If I was back in Britain, the agenda would be somewhat similar, but a little different than it is in America. We need to be witnesses at the time we are placed, where we are placed.
Albert Mohler:
Yes. And by left and right, I mean, not the same thing as the left and conservative. I think conservative by its very definition is a thing. It’s a disposition that isn’t perfectly mapped onto the right. And so the right goes to extremes far beyond, and frankly, a very anti-human extreme. Solzhenitsyn is so fascinating. I’ve been fascinated with him ever since I was a teenager as well. And one of the things that offended me by Solzhenitsyn as a young American was the fact that he said very inconvenient things to Americans.
Carl Trueman:
Yes. Very inconvenient.
Albert Mohler:
Most famously his commencement address at Harvard. But even beyond that, he never bought into the idea of Western representative democracy. In other words, he was not a liberal in any political sense. I mean, little L as in liberal democracy. He wants for Russia or wanted for Russia a return to the czar.
Carl Trueman:
Yes.
Albert Mohler:
Holy Mother Russia.
Carl Trueman:
Yes. Yeah. And the one model of democracy he saw in the West that he liked was the Swiss model where everything really rises from the local level. Now, America’s too big to pull that off really.
Albert Mohler:
Right. And he was horrified by a consumer society, just absolutely horrified by a consumer–it’s a guy that I don’t think he wore anything but brown and black. He was just was horrified by that.
Carl Trueman:
He’s not a stylish man, that has to be said.
Albert Mohler:
But if you were to put Solzhenitsyn down, he’s been dead now for decades, but if you were to just be able to put him down right now, I think in the United States he would say something like, “I told you so.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah.
Albert Mohler:
I’d be tempted to say to Solzhenitsyn, Well, look at Russia. I told you so.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah, Yeah. Well, of course, he says, “What has the fall of the iron curtain brought to Russia? We’ve imported the West’s rubbish pop entertainment, it’s pornography, it’s greed, it’s materialism.” I mean, his great fields-
Albert Mohler:
Blue jeans.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. All of the worst things of the West would come in and transform Russia. So that’s not proposing him as necessarily as the answer, but as say, I think.
Albert Mohler:
Prophets in a cultural context don’t always have to have all the answers. They’re sometimes very useful to us. Like I say, Dostoevsky, very useful to us in pointing to fault lines and horrifying ideologies and their consequences. But Dostoevsky is never actually clear about what escape from that would look like.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. Well, and I might put Roger Scruton in that kind of category. I think he has more answers, but they’re not necessarily well grounded in terms of theological metaphysics, but certainly he was somebody who saw the problems. His England an Elegy is a very powerful for anybody brought up in England in the 70s and 80s is a very powerful and heartbreaking book that if I read it today, I’m sure I would find it more true than I did when I first read it a decade ago.
Albert Mohler:
He was very interesting also in terms of his confidence and tradition, and that has been one of the central planks of political and cultural conservatism. It’s the one that I don’t argue against. I just can’t valorize it the way he valorized it. And I’m not against foxhunting. It’s just, he made that. He made the elimination by law of foxhunting basically a dagger at the heart of what it means to be English.
Carl Trueman:
Yes. Well, growing up in a rural fox hunting area, to me, it was the city guys imperialistically imposing their views on us.
Albert Mohler:
There you go, you’re a Marxist at heart.
Carl Trueman:
I would say I find his view of tradition attractive, but one thing I was never able to find in him was how we distinguish between good traditions and bad traditions. Slavery was a tradition.
Albert Mohler:
He seems to say over time, human experience, very much like the agrarians, as conservatives said. In other words, you take slavery as an example, they would say, But yes, but the logic works its way out. Not very satisfying to the people on the wrong side of that.
Carl Trueman:
No, and not very satisfying in a highly technologized world where these things don’t necessarily fade out. They can, as we see with slavery, slavery is real, alive and well in China. We enjoy the fruits of it with our cell phones. We just don’t own the slaves ourselves.
Albert Mohler:
Right. And the technological revolution also brings a velocity, which by the way, I think you’re one of the few people who would know this. The Frankfurt School saw velocity as an important social category. The faster things happen, the more you can move fast. In other words, a fast changing society is one in which the Marxists could take particular opportunity. And I think they had no idea how fast things are moving. Now, today’s edition of the New York Times, as we speak, has yet another article about people inside the tech industry going surreptitiously to members of Congress saying, You got to stop this before it gets out of the room.
Carl Trueman:
Right, right.
Albert Mohler:
I mean, that’s a real thing. It’s really happening. I’ve heard from some of these senators and congressmen that they are getting these contacts from inside the Silicon Valley world, stop us before we kill again, basically.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. I’ve got a few friends who are involved in that kind of world, and I’ve sort of said to them, What kind of things have been developed? And their answer is always, You don’t want to know, but keep you awake at night. We’re doing you a favor by not telling you about the things that horns are nightmares. It is a very interesting time in which we live, but you’re right, of course, Marxist love change. There’s that passage in the communist manifesto where all that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned, and man is at last force to come face-to-face with his real conditions and his real relationship with his kind. And we sort of live in that world today. We’re being stripped of everything solid. And as I try to argue in the book, that has a profoundly, if one wanted to put it neutrally, transformative effect on what it means to be a human being, perhaps better, a more desecrating effect of what it means to be made in God’s image.
Albert Mohler:
That statement from Marx in particular, I will in lectures set over against Genesis one.
Carl Trueman:
Right.
Albert Mohler:
They’re absolutely, I mean, this is God making solid things out of nothing.
Carl Trueman:
Yes.
Albert Mohler:
Marx wants to make nothing out of solid things.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. And technology has carried that forward. Marx thought it would be industrialized labor. In actual fact, it’s cell phones, it’s the internet, it’s the tech bros.
Albert Mohler:
Well, and when we talk about things, so for example, I was trying to explain, and actually Roger Scruton was the man I was talking about. So I was talking with someone about Roger Scruton, and it was occasioned by the fact I was going to have this conversation with you. And I said, I, as a very young college student, first got to know Roger Scrutin through some of his earlier works on philosophy more than anything else. And he wrote for some kind of fringe British publications. And so when I was over there in 1986, for example, I found some volumes in which he’d written things. But before the internet, Carl, I mean, you had to wait to find out when this book came out and that it even existed, and then you had to go and ask a bookstore to order it. People don’t understand how that velocity has changed.I mean, now you can, well, here we’re talking about your book and by the time people hear this conversation, they’re one click away hint hint from having it themselves. That’s a very different world.
Carl Trueman:
It is. I remember growing up in a very rural part of England, I would go to the library, they had this volume, books in print, and I would go to the library and I would have to check books in print to see-
Albert Mohler:
Which was out of date before it was published.
Carl Trueman:
Of course. And then I would go to the one local bookstore and they would order the book and it would take a minimum of three weeks if they could get it. You could go back after three weeks and they’d say, Oh, actually it’s out of print and we couldn’t get it for you.
Albert Mohler:
Well, you may remember, because we’re at least not too far apart in age, that when I was doing doctoral work, there were entire British publishers that would not mail to the United States.
Carl Trueman:
Interesting, interesting.
Albert Mohler
So in other words, you could find out the book was in Britain. That didn’t even mean you could get it at any cost. So I had to go and subterfuge. I had to find a friend in London who would buy the book and as he would say, post it to me.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. And I did that the other way around from the States. We could get them, but it took a long time to contact somebody over here.
Albert Mohler:
But ideas move more slowly, which is to make your point about the tech bros and velocity. I mean, the developments and artificial intelligence, what we know from inside the movement, and you and I both talked to some of the people very much inside the movement, it goes faster than they can keep up with.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have a colleague at Grove City College who’s been trying to get a book published on artificial intelligence. And the problem he hits, of course, is every time he sends in a proposal, by the time he’s written that proposal up and it’s been accepted and the book is coming up for publication, it’ll be 18 months out of date. It’s very hard to get thoughtful interaction with this stuff for pure production commercial reasons.
Albert Mohler:
It’s one of 10 chapters in this big book that I’ve just completed. It’s one of 10 chapters. And I had to completely redo it already, but what I decided to do is to do a theological engagement with it and to talk about the boundary lines of human-like, anthropologically inclined, generative, human impersonable. In other words, I can’t possibly know what’s happened this afternoon. I can say I think these are going to be the huge theological issues that are going to be really undermined, subverted by artificial intelligence. And then of course, we do already know, and that this is congressional debate this morning, we do already know that, for instance, there are a lot of young people whose lives are already being destroyed by basically chatbots.
Carl Trueman:
Yes. I’ve never done this, but I’m told if you go to certain chatbots and ask, what’s the best building to jump off in Chicago to kill myself? The chatbot will tell you. There’s no moral framework. If you asked a friend that, somebody with real intelligence, if they’re a decent human being, they would try to dissuade you. They would try to find out-
Albert Mohler:
And they wouldn’t leave you alone.
Carl Trueman:
No. Chatbots are dehumanizing in a whole host of different ways.
Albert Mohler:
So you wrote this book and again, the title is The Desecration of Man, meaning Humanity, How the Rejection of God Degrades our Humanity. So ground this in an historical timeline. So when I’m reading a book, I sometimes wish the author were right here and ask him a question. Why did you begin where you began? It’s further arbitrary. Every book is. It’s not a criticism, but I mean, why did you begin where you began?
Carl Trueman:
Well, I think one criticism book might be, haven’t human beings always been desecrating themselves since Adam and Eve took the fruit.
Albert Mohler:
That’s kind of why I’m asking, yes.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. And I think the answer is yes, but we actually live in a world now where the capacity for desecration is so much more powerful that I’m actually able to desecrate myself in ways that would’ve been unimaginable 100, 150 years ago. Take transgenderism, for example. I couldn’t even imagine that 150 years ago. Now it’s made possible by technology. So there’s a strong technological component to this. Think of the sexual revolution. Sure, human beings have always been sexually immoral, but we’ve been never able to really, or most of us were never able to really think about sex as purely recreation and a sexual partner purely as an object in any widespread sense until we had the advent of very easy to obtain contraceptives and very easy to obtain antibiotics because the social risks posed by the limited technological nature of our world corralled us into behaving ourselves. It didn’t make us morally any better, but it meant that our behavior was restricted somewhat. So what I’m trying to do here is say, Nietzsche makes this point in the 19th century. His madman in the gay science makes the point that we’ve got rid of God. We need to rise to be gods ourselves. Everybody laughs at him. And then the Madman says, “My time has not yet come.” And what I do in the book is I say, well, actually technology means that the madman’s time has come. Now his message makes sense to us in a way that it did not do when it was first written.
Albert Mohler:
This is a very uneven process in ways that I think you would acknowledge. So I mean, given your own British background, the Bloomsbury set was there 80 or 100 years ago. It’s not equal. The difference now is that all of societies being transformed virtually, all of society, the elites were there. It shows up in Brideshead revisited. In other words, it was already there, but it was in Bloomsbury. It was at Cambridge, I think probably more than Oxford, actually. And in other words, it was localized and it was class identified, but the 13-year-old with the computer or the smartphone isn’t class identified anymore.
Carl Trueman:
No, no. I think we’ve seen this percolation of desecration through society and it’s been, for want of a better word, democratized. The rich have always been able to break the rules and to an extent, get away with it. Now we all think we can. I actually think that the rich can still break the rules and get away with them more than most of us can, but we all imagine we can break the rules now in ways that we enjoy an impunity that was not enjoyed by previous generations.
Albert Mohler:
I think it may be even worse. I don’t think the rich do get away with as much as they want others to think they get away. So for example, right now, the highest 20% of the American economic spectrum, far more likely to finish school, get married, stay married, not have a child on a wedlock. They have downshifted the pathologies. They are lying. They fed a sexual revolution, and they do live it with birth control and contraception in their college and young adult years. They are living it. But they also actually for all kinds of, and I guess Marx would say just for capitalist reasons, they do believe in actually holding the family unit together in a way
Carl Trueman:
Interesting.
Albert Mohler:
That honestly– they’ve downshifted a lot. Well, in fact, J.D. Vance makes this point in his Hillbilly Elegy. He makes that very point. The elites brought the sexual revolution and it’s out of control, but now they can just sit back and let the rest of the world fall apart.
Carl Trueman:
And I think it’s Rusty Reno, our mutual friend who edits First Things, made the comment. I heard him make this comment in a lecture once that the interest on the mortgage of the sexual revolution is paid for in the poorest parts of American cities. You want to see the human cost, the real desecration of what it means to be human in the sexual revolution, go into the inner cities and see the amount of one parent families, the numbers of kids with no parents at home, the levels of incarceration in certain communities.
Albert Mohler:
The sad thing is, and I say this with real heartbreak. The sad thing is it’s not just the big cities and the inner cities. It’s rural America. Not all of it, but in particular, there are segments of rural America. Again, J.D. Vance’s book about his own family. These pathologies get downshifted fast and they do far more damage where the options are so few.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. Well, when you think of something like the fentanyl crisis, that wasn’t affecting Beverly Hills. It was devastating Western Pennsylvania, Hazard County, Kentucky, places like that.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, Eastern Kentucky, Western Pennsylvania. Well, the desecration of humanity, the desecration of man, and I really do appreciate because I thought immediately what I saw it, that’s kind of downstream from the abolition of man. I’ll tell you, one of my criticisms of The Abolition of Man, and it’s such an important book, but one of my criticisms of The Abolition of Man is that there’s no so then. And of course, it was really presented as a lecture. So I don’t mean that as a severe criticism, but I will say I’m thankful that your publisher wanted you to end on a, I won’t say a happier note, but on a deeply Christian gospel centered.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. Yeah. Bria did a wonderful job for me. I’ve never been edited without improvement, and Bria is one of the best editors I’ve ever had. So very much appreciate her pushing me in a positive, hopeful direction at the end.
Albert Mohler:
So where do you end?
Carl Trueman:
I end with the church. I think some will be frustrated by that because it’s kind of a low energy answer. I think another aspect of modernity, because we live in this very fast moving world, is we think we can solve the problem by a week on Wednesday. My answer is really a very early church answer. We need to be faithful Christians in the local church witnessing in our communities, and that will have a slow, steady, incremental impact for the good. And for most of us,
Albert Mohler:
Very gospel. But very Augustinian. The longer I live, the more Augustinian I think I’ve become. All of this in the city of man is in a temporal frame, which looked at one way, is short, looked at another way is long, but Christians are called to a long faithfulness.
Carl Trueman
Yeah. I think it was you that recommended the book, The Inevitability of Tragedy to Me a few years ago, the study of Henry Kissinger’s approach to foreign relations. Yes. Very Augustinian. And I’m very much that way. And I also think though it makes it manageable for your typical Christian. Your typical Christian is not going to be President of the United States. The typical Christian is going to have an influence in the local community where he or she finds themselves. And I think when we think of ourselves as church-centered and gospel-centered and oriented to the simple obedience of the Christian life, that actually makes it manageable. I haven’t got to save the world by myself. I just have to witness to that part of the world in which I’ve been placed.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. So today, one of my closest friends in the world became a grandfather.
Carl Trueman:
Oh, fantastic.
Albert Mohler:
I’d been looking forward to it with him. He’s been waiting and he knows how much joy my grandchildren and for my wife and I, our grandchildren bring us. And I just wrote him a note quickly today to say, God bless you, praise be to God. But your life and ministry are transformed at this instant because you’re going to find yourself, I find myself, and I have to watch getting too emotional here. Everything I do is now framed for the world my grandchildren will inhabit. The church my grandchildren will be a part of by God’s grace, I pray, and who they’re going to be, that changes everything. And I think that’s deeply organically biblical. And I think that’s a part of what you are doing. You teach young people, but you’re teaching them against a frame of eternity, not just for graduation.
Carl Trueman:
Yes, it is. It’s a wonderful privilege to teach the 18 to 22 year olds. As you were giving the anecdote of your friend’s grandchild, I remember holding my granddaughter for the first time. And my first reaction was one of unalloyed joy. And then part of me sort of felt, Oh no, I got to worry about the next 70 years now. And there is that sense in, yeah, it’s a real check that it isn’t about you. Your task is to preserve and pass on the truth to the next generation.
Albert Mohler:
I was walking the hall this morning after chapel and came across, it was a group of people. I could tell immediately what was going on. There were two 17-year-old boys with their parents and they were making a campus visit for Boys College. And I introduced myself, I talked with them a few moments. I looked at these two boys and I thought, You have no idea how much your parents love you. You have no idea how hard this visit is for them. I do, but it is because everything in their lives has been tilted towards you and one day beyond you. And without a biblical worldview, I think a lot of people get there intuitively, and society’s been based this way. I think a 19th century Chinese father would’ve thought in the same terms, but we’re living in a day in which everything in the West, in Western cultures is now on a precipice to go one way or the other.
Carl Trueman:
Yeah. Yes, I think you’re right. I mean, intuitively, I think we do know that we are not the autonomous free floating meaning creators that the world tells us we are, particularly when we fall in love or when we have a child or when we have a grandchild. And I really hope that by common grace, those intuitions remain strong enough in coming generations for society itself. If it doesn’t become Christian, it can at least be humanizing in a significant and real sense.
Albert Mohler:
Carl, I think you’re one of the most important public intellectuals in the Christian world today. This book is further evidence. You have found yourself writing these books, I think, in a very powerful way. Your voice is so important, and frankly, I just am thankful for you. I want you to know that, and you to know how thankful I am for this conversation.
Carl Trueman:
Oh, thanks so much for having me on. I’ve enjoyed it as always, Al. Value your friendship.
Albert Mohler:
Many thanks to my guest, Carl Truman, for thinking with me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you’ll find more than 200 of these conversations at albertmohler.com under the tab, Thinking in Public. For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, go to boycecollege.com. Thank you for joining me today for thinking in public. And until next time, keep thinking. I’m Albert Mohler.
