Are we masters of our own identities?

by | Nov 17, 2020 | Academic, Culture, Humanity | 0 comments

I just listened to a podcast with an interview by Carl Trueman called “Making Sense of Transgenderism and the Sexual Revolution.” Trueman can be a little academic at times, but I really encourage those of you in any kind of college, or workplaces where these things are discussed, to listen to it. You can read the interview or find it on your favorite podcast platform here, or get it directly here.

I also recommend the article, 10 Things You Should Know about the Sexual Revolution. Here are the 10 points:

1. It has been a long time in the making.
2. It has complicated roots.
3. It has long seen monogamy as a vice, not a virtue.
4. It is not about expanding the bounds of acceptable sexual morality.
5. It is not (only) about sexual behavior.
6. It is of profound cultural significance.
7. It is a serious challenge to religious freedom.
8. It connects to other forms of identity politics.
9. It is not just about lust.
10. We are all implicated in it.

It’s worth clicking over to read the details that Trueman points out. Here’s how he wraps the article up:

[T]here might be a temptation at this point to look at the chaos and carnage of the sexual revolution and respond, I thank you Lord that I am not like other men. That would be wrong for the simple reason that we are all implicated in this revolution. That is not to say that we are all using pornography or living lies of sexual license. But we are all part of the culture of psychologized personhood of which the sexual revolution is a symptomatic part. We all tend to conceive of happiness in psychological terms today. We all bristle under any kind of external authority. We all like to think we are masters of our own identities. That is essentially what the sexual revolution is about. We may not choose the sexual idiom to express it. We may even use a religious idiom to do so by, say, choosing the church that makes us feel happy or which lets us be ourselves. But in so doing we too are merely symptoms of the culture of expressive individualism of which the sexual revolution is just one iteration.