There is a lot of hype today about this book being so important, and in my estimation it is justified. So many Christians are puzzled at how our culture has deteriorated so drastically and so quickly. Trueman’s task in this book is to explain how this has happened, making the point that current assumptions in Western culture have “deep historical roots and a coherent genealogy” (29). In other words, when you hear about a woman claiming to be trapped in a man’s body, we should know that the roots of such a statement did not begin with the sexual revolution in the 1960s, but in philosophical ideas that circulated centuries ago, and are just now trickling down into the social imaginary of the common person. These ideas are “deeply embedded within our culture and have been slowly but surely transforming how we think of ourselves and our world for many many generations.” (386). In response, the task of the Christian is not to “whine about the moment in which he or she lives but to understand its problems and respond appropriately to them.” (30).
This idea of the “social imaginary” (36f) is one of the most fascinating concepts in the book. The term was coined by Charles Taylor, and refers to the way ordinary people imagine their social surroundings, without understanding the philosophical or theoretical concepts at the foundation of these surroundings. In other words, people today think like Rousseau and Freud and Marx, even though they haven’t read one printed word by these men, because their ideas have slowly come to dominate the social imaginary of western culture.
When human identity becomes primarily psychological or therapeutic, and when the psychological then becomes primarily sexual, and when sexual identity eventually becomes political (250), and when “expressive individualism” is assumed as the highest good and obvious default setting for every human being, you can very easily see how a woman can not only claim to be trapped in a man’s body, but also demand that the rest of society acknowledge and affirm this.
The development of ideas over the centuries that Trueman traces out finds its culmination in the phenomenon of transgenderism, the logical outcome of ideas unwittingly absorbed in Western culture. Transgenderism is a “function of a world in which the collapse of metaphysics and of stable discourse has created such chaos that not even the most basic of binaries, that between male and female, can any longer lay claim to meaningful objective status.” (376).
This is one of those books that you feel like you need to read again right away, not just because the ideas take some extra work to absorb, but because it makes some sense of the strange world in which we live. Later in the book (p.357f), Trueman describes some of the conflict that exists among the different letters represented in LGBT, leading to a situation where “the man who thinks he is a woman trapped in a man’s body wants to be a woman in accordance with male expectations of what a woman should be.” (360-361). That statement alone reveals the intellectual chaos in which we live, showing how people become futile in their thinking (Rom. 1:21) when the transcendent norms given to us in God’s word are rejected.