Despite the many technological advances of the last hundred years that have brought unprecedented material prosperity and productivity to our society, there are few people who think the West is in a healthy place, culturally speaking. Diagnoses of what ails us vary widely across the political spectrum. Even among conservative Christian commentators, one doesn’t find close agreement on what lies at the root of our dysfunctions. 

British author Paul Kingsnorth’s “Against the Machine,” a New York Times bestseller that has provoked much discussion, lays the blame at the feet of “the Machine”: the ever-expanding techno-capitalist industrial complex and its mantra of “progress” that has alienated us from both the natural world and our traditional rootedness, with calamitous consequences for Western civilization. 

Kingsnorth’s prognosis is highly pessimistic, if not fatalistic. Our only hope is to resist and renounce the siren call of “progress,” to disengage completely from the Machine, and to reestablish a proper relationship with nature and more ancient ways of living (including our Christian traditions). But, according to Kingsnorth, the West will likely have to die first — and it will be death by suicide.

Carl Trueman’s latest book, “The Desecration of Man” (Sentinel, 2026), also strikes a somewhat depressing tone, though it is far from defeatist. (It is also, mercifully, half the length of Kingsnorth’s.) Whereas Kingsnorth rails against our desecration of nature, Trueman more accurately points the finger at the deeper sin: our desecration of human nature. Insofar as Western societies have rejected God and renounced Christianity, they have cut themselves loose from the only solid grounding for human value, dignity, and purpose: the doctrine of the imago Dei. 

By denying the one true God and seeking to deify ourselves, we have only desecrated ourselves, and the evidence is all around us in the cultural confusions and societal dysfunctions of our present moment. Or to put the book’s thesis in terms that Trueman would approve: Nietzsche wasn’t kidding around.

The opening chapter contends that the pressing question raised by the moral crises of our day is one of anthropology: “What is man?” We cannot know how we should live unless we know what we are. Ethics must have a teleological dimension, and the human telos is bound up with the question of human nature. 

Western civilization was largely built upon the biblical theistic answer: man is essentially a creature made in the image of God, where God is understood to be the personal triune Creator and Governor of all things. 

From this conviction, Trueman observes, four key implications follow: first, we are exceptional among living creatures; second, we are persons, not mere things; third, we were made for certain God-ordained ends, with corresponding capabilities and responsibilities; and fourth, we are embodied beings (from which a distinctive sexual ethic follows). All of this entails a moral code that defines how we should live in relation to God and one another. 

Once the biblical doctrine of the imago Dei is abandoned, however, what replaces it is an “anthropology of self-creation” that “repudiates the obligations, limits, and ends” of man that have shaped Western culture (pg. 17). What was once held sacred, because it was bestowed and blessed by God, is now desecrated. 

Although fallen man has committed acts of desecration ever since Cain’s murder of Abel, our modern culture of desecration has distinctive features: “the repudiation of human exceptionalism, the objectification of persons, and the move to self-creation” (pg. 20). Adding perversity to injury, this self-degradation is marketed and celebrated as liberating and even exhilarating: “There is a delight being taken in the destruction” (pg. 21).

Chapters 2 and 3 invite Nietzsche to take the stage, presenting him as a prophet ahead of his time. The German philosopher is well-known for announcing “the death of God,” which is to say, the post-Enlightenment repudiation of Christian theism as the controlling framework for human life and self-conception. In “The Gay Science,” Nietzsche tells the story of the Madman who runs into a town square, declaring that God is dead because “we have killed him.” That part of his message scarcely raises an eyebrow. What invites ridicule, however, is the Madman’s ominous claim that this act of deicide will uproot everything else we take for granted in our culture, including morality and meaning. “All limits, obligations, and ends have to be rethought in light of the death of God,” Trueman writes (pg. 26). 

The West was unprepared for this rethinking. The Madman had come too early. A suitable “social imaginary” (Charles Taylor’s term) was not yet in place, one that would permit — indeed, promote — the desecration of man along with the desecration of God. According to Trueman, this social imaginary would have two main elements. First, highly advanced technology that “encourages us to think of the world as a set of challenges to be overcome or limits to be transcended,” which finds its extreme in the transhumanist movement (pg. 53). The second is “expressive individualism,” the origins of which Trueman has charted in previous books.

In chapters 4 through 6, Trueman surveys how those two cultural developments, technological advancement and expressive individualism, have impacted three of the most important aspects of human existence: sex, reproduction, and death. 

The sexual revolution overthrew the idea that sex has a sacred significance and a divinely-given telos aimed at human flourishing. Promising liberation, it has delivered only a depersonalizing objectification of the human body. 

Meanwhile, reproductive technologies such as IVF and surrogacy have “reinforce[d] the logic of the sexual revolution in further attenuating the reproductive teleology of sexual acts,” leading to the dissolution of natural parent-child relationships and the crass commoditization of human beings (pg. 123). 

And as the beginning of human life is industrialized, so the end of human life is trivialized. A society that has lost sight of the sacredness of life will inevitably fail to comprehend the significance of death. “The incoherent approach to death in the modern world—by turns, marginalizing it, ignoring it, medicalizing it, and trivializing it—all indicate a basic inability to come to terms with it,” Trueman argues (pg. 174-75). 

The ethical confusion and incipient nihilism in all three areas reinforce Trueman’s contention that desacralization leads inexorably to desecration, and self-deification to self-destruction.

The concluding chapter opens by comparing the responses of two unbelievers, Richard Dawkins and Roger Scruton, to the current cultural crises. Both have indicated their affinity for cultural Christianity, albeit in different ways, but Dawkins is unwilling, and Scruton unable, to accept the truth of the biblical narrative. Neither can meet the challenge of Nietzsche’s Madman. “Both are repackaging a form of nihilism and offering the problem as if it were the solution” (pg. 184).

So, what is the solution? In theory, it’s simple: “The answer to desecration is consecration” (pg. 187). 

Humanity must be reconsecrated, not merely by living as if Christianity were true — as a socially useful mythology — but by wholeheartedly embracing and embodying the truth of the Christian faith. In this remedial process the church must play the central role in three vital and inseparable areas: creed (“the set of beliefs that define the faith”), cult (“the worship practices of the church”), and code (“the moral habits and practices of life that are expected of Christians”). 

Trueman’s prescription is robustly Augustinian: “Only a renovation of the heart, redirecting it toward God, is able to [answer our plight]. And that only takes place in the context of the church, where humanity by creed, cult, and code can once again realize what being made in the image of God truly means” (pg. 209-10).

Trueman is in his element when documenting and dissecting cultural pathologies, and “The Desecration of Man” does not disappoint. I imagine few Christian readers will find the central argument of the book controversial. Those who have a firm grasp of biblical theology and ethics, are reasonably familiar with Western intellectual history, and have been paying attention to the cultural trends of the last few decades, will not encounter any great revelations. 

Nevertheless, Trueman makes his case with wit and verve, and the book abounds with insightful observations, not to mention eminently quotable sentences. Pastors will certainly find it to be a valuable resource to recommend to congregants who want to better understand the times.

The book’s conclusion is more constructive and hopeful than that of Trueman’s “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self,” which is a welcome development. Trueman claims that “The Desecration of Man” is not a Christian apologetics work because it does not argue for the truth of Christianity, but that assertion assumes too narrow a view of apologetics and undersells the value of the book as a tool of persuasion. 

After all, if Trueman is right that there is “no third stable option” between Christianity and Nietzscheanism, and the latter has led us down a bleak path of moral confusion and self-degradation, surely that provides some good reason for a wayward society to return to the ancient paths.

James N. Anderson serves as the Carl W. McMurray Professor of Theology and Philosophy at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina.