On February 19th, 2026, the Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government (CCCG), co-sponsored by the Department of Theology, hosted a book launch for Professor Carl Trueman’s new book “The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades our Humanity.”
Trueman is a professor of Biblical and Theological studies at Grove City College, and is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Notre Dame with the CCCG, where he recently taught a one-credit course titled “The Abolition of Man.” In addition to his academic pursuits, Trueman serves as a contributing editor at First Things and a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. His previous work revolved around Reformation and post-Reformation Protestant thought. However, in recent years, he has focused on identity, critical theory, and the sexual revolution.
The event began with a book signing and was followed by Trueman’s lecture, entitled, “All That Is Sacred Must Be Profaned.” The lecture centered on how the desecration of God permeates our culture, and how Christians should respond to a culture rejecting the simple foundational claim that man was made in the image of God.
Trueman began his remarks by explaining how the inspiration for the book arose from his own dissatisfaction with the dominant approach to interpreting modernity, which proposes that modernity has led to a “disenchanted world.” Trueman illustrated the fact that disenchantment cannot explain everything going on in our current world by examining how language surrounding abortion has strikingly changed over the recent decades. “In the 1990s” he said, “the pro-choice lobby argued that abortion should be safe, legal and rare.” Trueman contends that this language is “a kind of disenchanted statement,” suggesting a tragic moral concession where abortion may be permissible in a broken world: “The world is not as it should be. Sometimes we have to do things we’d rather not do, and if we’ve got to do those things, then let’s make them safe, legal, and rare.”
Trueman then, however, demonstrated the stark contrast between this language and much of the rhetoric invoked in 2024 by pro-choice advocates, celebrating abortion as a human right, which is “not simply explicable in terms of disenchantment.” Trueman proposed that this cultural shift signals something deeper, and suggests that the rejection of the sacred is largely at play in the degradation of society. He terms this phenomenon “desecration,” and believes this is what has been “bubbling under the surface of modernity.”
However, desecration alone cannot explain everything going on. Trueman also argued that one must first understand the “normative notion of the self” which characterizes modernity, namely expressive individualism. Trueman explained expressive individualism as capturing “the way we think about ourselves and who we are today compared to the past. It’s a response to the malaise of personal insignificance produced by the liquefied social conditions of modernity.”
Trueman suggested that as expressive individualism emerges, traditional societal and moral givens fall away, lending a hyperfocus on the “inner [psychological] space” where internal feelings define one’s self. One effect of this inward turn is that inherited traditional values come to be seen as oppressive, and anything external to one’s inner self may be described as “inauthenticity.”
Drawing on psychological sociologist Philip Reef, Trueman explained that institutions that were previously the transmitters of traditional values and places of formation, such as family and the church, have become places of performance: “They no longer see their role as preservation or the modification of a culture. They see their role as the overturning of a culture.” As the importance of formative institutions declines, entertainment and the medical industry rise to prominence, because “they are all about making you feel good, allowing you to be yourself, not about forming you.” Trueman argued that this notion of authenticity “replaces an ethical model of what it means to be human.”
Trueman concluded that it is this expressive individualism that fuels the cultural desecration in the West. He traced the philosophical roots of this shift to Nietzsche’s account of the arrival of nihilism following the “death of God:” “you can’t get rid of God and carry on as if everything else continues in the same fashion.” Expressive individualism, then, is the idea that “objective morality [prevents] us from rising to be authentic long after the God upon whom that morality was founded has been slain.”
He noted at the close of his lecture that “We are on the brink of using the exceptional abilities that come from being made in God’s image to make ourselves into nothing exceptional at all.”
Trueman concluded with a call for action to reenchanting this desecrated world through consecration: “The answer is the Church,” and “a liturgy that … reinforces the teaching of that creed and a code that leads us in our daily lives.”
The lecture was followed by a reception in the Eck Visitors Center. Among those in attendance from the Notre Dame community was Dave O’Connor, Professor of Philosophy and CCCG Faculty Fellow, agreeing that “political analysis that does not take on this religious issue” of desecration as Trueman explained it “cannot understand our politics.”
Another audience member, John Luke Hoonhout, a third year Political Science Ph.D. candidate in Constitutional Studies, said he was excited to attend the event because of the insightfulness he found in Trueman’s previous book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. “I thought that his thesis in the lecture about desecration as a driving force in modern life was similarly illuminating, and it provides a helpful addition to or even correction of the disenchantment narrative.” Hoonhout added that he is “grateful for the opportunity to engage with scholars such as Dr. Trueman, who remind me that academic work should not be divorced from how we live as individuals and communities.”
To view the full recording of Trueman’s book event, as well as past archives, visit our lecture library.