Up from desecration

Some writers you read for information, others you read for clarity. Carl Trueman belongs firmly in the second category. He has a gift for naming things plainly—especially when the rest of us may be satisfied to speak in generalities.

His latest book, The Desecration of Man, is a case in point. It’s relatively brief, and pointed. Its central claim is as bracing as anything he has written: Ours is not simply an age that has lost its sense of the sacred—disenchantment. It is an age that increasingly rejects it—desecration.

That is a harder word. It implies intention. And, in Trueman’s telling, something more than intention—something like enjoyment. Modern culture, he writes, shows a “sheer delight … in toppling the moral codes of the past.”

This is not mere forgetfulness of what is sacred. It is transgression with a smile.

If the sacred character of human life is no longer assumed—if it is instead something to be challenged or redefined—then moral language itself begins to destabilize. We continue to make claims about dignity, freedom, and justice. But we make them without a shared account of what a human being is—whether our nature is something we receive or something we invent.

So we’re met not with confused silence, but with confident, often aggressive, contradiction—frequently unmoored from reality.

Trueman’s answer is not to meet that noise with more noise. If the problem is desecration, he says, the answer is consecration. But he is not talking about a plan or a program. He is talking about something slower—and harder.

“Faithful church attendance,” he told me, “and a vibrant, joyful church life that flows over into the everyday life, attitudes, and behavior” of believers. That is what reconsecration looks like. The clearest sign, he adds, is the love Christians show one another.

That answer may feel almost anticlimactic. It does not promise quick results. It does not map neatly onto political strategy. But that is precisely the point. We are not meant to remain at the level of belief and worship, but to see them take shape in the way we live.

Trueman organizes his argument around three categories: creed, cult, and code. What we believe. How we worship. And how we live. The shortcut is to separate the last from the first—to rush to moral conclusions without formation, or to linger in belief and worship without ever arriving at how we live. But Trueman insists that the code cannot stand on its own. It must grow out of creed and cult—out of truth believed and practices embodied over time. Catechesis—teaching, worship, and shared life—is basic to that work, because it is what gives shape to how we live.

When that formation is weak, the moral life becomes unstable—or never really takes shape at all. Convictions harden quickly. Disagreements escalate. And questions that require prudence are treated as if they admit only one obvious answer. As Trueman put it to me, if churches and families are not cultivating Christian virtue, “nothing society does can compensate for that lack.”

That is a sobering thought, particularly in an age that looks instinctively to politics for solutions. Trueman does not deny the importance of political life. Not at all. But he places it in its proper context. “Christians need to realize that earthly politics is not an exact science,” he notes.

We may differ on some of the details, and that’s where “modesty of judgment and respect for others even at points where we differ is important.”

That emphasis on prudence is not a retreat from moral seriousness. It is an acknowledgment of complexity—and a recognition that not every question is settled at the same level. In the end, The Desecration of Man is not a book about policy or even primarily about culture. It is a book about formation. About how a people come to understand themselves, and about the practices that sustain that understanding over time. Which is why its answer is at once simple and demanding.

If we want a more stable moral world—if we want our claims about justice, dignity, and human worth to hold—then we must recover more than arguments. We must recover the habits, the worship, and the shared life that make those arguments possible—the kind of life that can actually sustain them in practice.

In Trueman’s terms, we must recover creed and cult.

Then the code is likely to begin to take shape—and to hold.