Carl Trueman is a reformed Presbyterian who released a book titled, “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self,” back in 2020. It was regarded as important enough to warrant a briefer version written for a popular audience, which is what “Strange New World Is.” If large books aren’t your thing, make sure you read this one, because both of these books do a great job of making sense of a culture today that doesn’t seem to make any sense.
Basically, Trueman is arguing that our current cultural moment is not the culmination of Marxism or the sexual revolution, but is instead the result of something he calls “expressive individualism” — the idea that the chief end of man is to express one’s deepest inner feelings, and that this is so essential to one’s happiness that one’s inner feeling actually possesses an authority that eclipses any transcendent or merely external authority. In other words, how you feel about things is really all that matters.
Trueman traces this ideology back to a French thinker named Rousseau, but he shows how, over the decades, and most recently with the help of technology, it has been politicized and sexualized to the point that the traditional bedrocks of society (family, nation and religion) have now been replaced by new communities based on race, gender and sexuality. Trueman notes that it has been common in all ages to think the current age presents the biggest threat to a stable society, but he believes that “our current moment in time (is) a singularly challenging and potentially sinister one.” (126)
At the same time, the book doesn’t sound alarmist, and in fact Trueman acknowledges that there are some good things about individualism. In fact, the “existential urgency” of the New Testament stresses the importance of personal faith as a response to the Gospel. Trueman’s purpose in the book is to simply help us understand the strange new world we live in, which should be important to any serious believer.