A reflection on human sin and brokenness is always the first stage in any missional presentation of the Christian faith. Read C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity or N.T. Wright Simply Christian, for example.
This is because most of us, I suspect, come to the Christian faith driven by a sense of spiritual need. Would-be evangelists, then, should give careful consideration to what they will say about ‘sin’ in its contemporary manifestations. In the words of Chris Wright, author of Mission of God: ‘If our mission is bringing good news into every area of human life, then it calls for some research and analysis as to what exactly constitutes the bad news’.
Some convincing ‘research and analysis’ (by Chris Wright and others) has rediscovered an understanding of ‘sin’ as idolatry. This strikes me as a very promising development, and one well supported by the biblical evidence. But, for our evangelist, it poses as a matter of great immediate practical concern, the question: What is the prevailing form of idolatry in the world of today?
As Wright himself admits, any response to this question calls for combined biblical and sociological tools, since it involves ‘applying a distinctive biblical category (idolatry) to contemporary cultural phenomena, enabling us to see below the surface and recognize idolatrous or demonic forces at work.’
What I had expected of Trueman’s book – The Rise and Triumph of the Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution – was an analysis of contemporary idolatry powered by the sociological orientation so lacking in Wright and Beale. I was hoping to be able to say: “Look, here, in these Christian writers (Wright, Beale, Wink) we find the crucial question posed of how the human propensity to idolatry is embodied in Western culture and society – and here, in Trueman, the answer to that question!
What were the grounds of such high expectation? Largely, the term ‘expressive individualism’ in Trueman’s title. ‘Expressive individualism’ has encapsulated for a wide range of recent sociological analysis (evidently unfamiliar to theologians) the essential form of contemporary Western ideational belief. Taken up and brandished by an apologetically motivated Protestant like Trueman, I had hoped to find the form of our prevailing idolatry confidently proclaimed for the benefit of those Christian evangelical leaders seeking a more convincing way to arouse in their listeners a sense of their spiritual need.
My hope was not altogether fulfilled. Trueman’s analysis does not offer a full characterization of the distinctive idolatry of our times. Rather it focuses on what Trueman himself admits to be a sub-species of that more general phenomenon – the identity politics of LGBTQ+ and the ‘sexual revolution’. It is a sub-species that, from the evidently strongly conservative standpoint of the author, may loom larger than it would for some Christians in the characterization of the more general phenomenon of idolatry. Nevertheless, Trueman himself would acknowledge that it is far from representing the phenomenon of expressive individualism in its entirety. So, this is not, as I had hoped, a book about which you could say: ‘here is the definitive anatomy of the idolatry of our times’. Trueman foregrounds a sub-issue. Where, in earlier chapters, he discusses the wider phenomenon, he does so as ‘background’, and in the partial manner appropriate to the needs of his subsequent discussion of the narrower issue.
Needless to say, there is much in this book that can assist us towards our wider goal. In what follows, I shall begin by viewing the book in its own terms – as a ‘genealogy’ of the ethics of the contemporary sexual revolution. We will then be in a position to reflect on how Trueman’s particular interest in sexual politics has angled his treatment of the more encompassing phenomenon of the genealogy of expressive individualism, and what more there might need to be said on that theme for the purpose of clearly delineating what I believe to be the defining idolatry of our present time.
The genealogy of contemporary sexual identity politics
The book attempts to capture the development of the antecedents of contemporary identity politics in four phases, each of which is explored in the work of key ‘thinkers’.
Phase 1 could be labelled ‘expressivist individualism’ represented by Jacques Rousseau. By ‘expressive individualism’ Trueman understands an approach to the truth of human nature and its ultimate good that depends, not on received beliefs embodied in existing social arrangements, but on individual conscious experience. Truth, though obscured by custom, is, at some level, fixed in the human heart. Ultimately, we just ‘know’ inside ourselves what is true and what is good. We owe it to ourselves to pursue that inner truth, even where it may place us in conflict with social and religious custom.
Phase 2 is an expressivist individualism altogether disengaged from anything that could properly be described as a ‘sacred order’. It should be noted that this disengagement is far from being a necessary consequence of expressivist individualism per se. For example, the very Kantian notion of sin propounded by CS Lewis in Mere Christianity presupposes the individualist expressivist position that the moral ‘law’ is evident to each of us, along with an awareness that we have never fulfilled it. Yet, though this moral law is something we know intuitively and without necessary reference to any inherited tradition, it remains for all that something which we will discover to be rooted in a transcendent, trans-cultural sacred order, as Lewis goes to great pains to argue elsewhere.
However, expressivist individualism is clearly dissociated from any notion of sacred order in two strands of thought that constitute the next phase of the genealogy of contemporary identity politics: that of Marx and Nietzsche, on the one hand, and that of Freud, on the other.
With Marx and Nietzsche, the ‘truth’ of human nature that we experience intuitively becomes something conditioned by society and history, and a stake in the power relationships between individuals and classes. ‘Consciousness’ of ourselves is potentially a ‘false consciousness’, our morality a ‘slave morality’. Our human ‘good’ is therefore indissociable from the workings of power relationships and the evolution of human society – the fruit of a process of historical evolution.
Freud, on the other hand, knows nothing of all this. For him, the ultimate truth of human nature becomes something defined by the ‘science’ of psycho-analysis. It is identified with the ‘id’, and its ‘good’ is that of de-sublimated sexual pleasure. It remains the case that the ‘truth’ of our nature is something that, on the individual level, we must win through a struggle with socially-imposed custom; but the countering social forces, integrated by the individual into his/her own being as the ‘ego’ and ‘super-ego’, are characterized in general and universal terms as the same across cultures and societies. There is therefore a truth of human nature and its ultimate good that is, in a sense, transcendent. But this is scarcely the transcendence of a ‘sacred order’ as normally understood. The ‘nature’ of human nature becomes something individual and instinctive that apparently precludes from its definition all social and political relationships.
Phase 3 (the decisive one in the genealogy of contemporary identity politics) is a curious fusion of Marx and Nietzsche undertaken by New Left intellectuals like Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich in the pursuit of a reinterpretation of Marxist ideology in the light of the evidence of past political events. The dialectical and politically revolutionary perspective of Marx is retained, but the contested sphere of human relationships enlarges in order to focus on the formative influences of sex and family that had been the object of Freud’s psycho-analysis. It becomes imperative to sexualize the revolution by destroying patriarchy. From the Freudian perspective, this involves challenging the universality of ‘civilization’ – in short politicizing and revolutionizing sex.
Phase 4 disseminates the thinking of the New Left through the sexual revolution, the Gay and Lesbian movements, and our present-day identity politics with its Transgenderism and LGBTQ+. In all these phenomena Trueman sees an embodiment of the thinking of the New Left thinkers who inspired the generation of 68.
Reflections on this genealogy
The obvious objection to ‘genealogical’ accounts such as this is the implausibility of locating the origin of a widespread popular phenomenon in the arcane thinking of long-dead intellectuals. After all, how many social justice warriors (SJWs) have read Marcuse?
Let me begin by saying that as a genealogy of the contemporary phenomenal of identity politics, the ideology of the SJW, Trueman’s account is entirely convincing. There is nothing implausible about New Left thinkers taking on the role they themselves seem to have envisaged of an intellectual vanguard for a pre-existing revolutionary politics very much in need of their intellectual input. Nor, given the existence of cultural institutions like universities from which to dominate the cultural scene, about the dissemination of such ideas through the leftist intellectual elite; nor, given the emergence of technologies such as contraception that rendered an assault on family values more feasible, about their enthusiastic reception by students in the sixties; nor, with gay emancipation, about the development of the identity politics of LGBTQ+.
Where Trueman is less persuasive is regarding the popularization of expressive individualism which, as he himself argues, forms the necessary ideological ambience for these developments. Between chapters occupied with the key phases of this story of ideas as summarized above, the book intersperses others concerned with cultural developments that served to popularize the ideas; first, in relation to Rousseau’s expressive individualism, the poetry of the Romantics, here represented by Wordsworth and Shelley; second, in relation to expressivist individualism disengaged from any notion of the sacred order, that extreme – and, one is tempted to say, paroxysmic – fruition of Romanticism which continental European culture recognizes in Surrealism.
Here I find Trueman’s account inadequate: first, to explaining the universal diffusion of expressivist individualist ideas; second, to the true scope of those developments, which, in my view, far surpass that domain of human activity that we like to delimit as the ‘aesthetic’.
A far more convincing account of both expressivist individualism and its popularization emerges in the pages of a book that Trueman acknowledges as one of his principal inspirations: Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. Rather than a series of moments in the history of ideas, Taylor offers us an account of the development of a new, cultural practice. This is what he terms epiphanic art.
So important is this to Taylor’s account of expressivist individualism that its absence from Trueman’s analysis constitutes a yawning omission. From the perspective of this blog, it isn’t just a matter of something that would have rendered Trueman’s account of the diffusion of expressivist ideas through literature more convincing. It certainly would have; but the issues for this blog go further. The basis of our initial interest in Trueman’s book, it will be remembered, was the hope that it would bring expressivist individualism to the attention of the Evangelical Christian mainstream as the dominant idolatry of our age. So, the fact that it offers so poor a rendering of Taylor’s initial concept detracts considerably from its interest. Just how far it falls short will become clear, I hope, from the account of it that I shall give shortly. But it isn’t just a question of something the evangelical world has failed to grasp. The questions raised by the intimate association of epiphanic art with expressivist individualism are very challenging: notably, what kind of reception Christians should give to epiphanic art, and whether its practice can somehow be disentangled from the expressivist notions that it so often embodies. But in order to be able to respond to such questions, we need first to have grasped Taylor’s understanding of epiphanic art and its relation to expressivist individualism.
In what follows, therefore, I shall begin by giving my own account of Taylor’s ideas. I will then set out my own disagreement with Trueman as to the attitude Christians should adopt with regard to expressivist individualism. Finally, I shall examine the implications of this difference of view for the way in which we, as Christians, draw the battle lines with the ambient non-Christian culture. Suffice it say that Trueman’s relatively tolerant attitude to expressivist individualism as a whole goes along with his readiness to focus his critique on certain aspects of that cultural phenomenon – notably the politicized developments of contemporary LGBTQ+ activism. This, I shall argue, is unbalanced, unjust and, from a statregic perspective counter-productive.
Epiphanic art and its relationship to expressivist individualism
The practice of epiphanic art began with the philosophers and poet-practitioners of Romanticism. Charles Taylor shows how, long after the demise of Romanticism, this practice has persisted from the time of Schlegel and Novalis to the popular art forms of today, and has served as a paradigm for the behaviours and beliefs associated with expressive individualism.
Epiphanic art, according to Taylor, incorporates the Romantic idea of ‘an imaginative vision that is transvaluative and creative’. According to this idea, visionary ‘seeing’ constitutes the realisation and manifestation of radically new possibilities of experience. Testimony to the epiphanic nature of artistic expression is that familiar profession of the author as ‘unknowing’, not conscious of what s/he does – practically a commonplace of contemporary artistic discourse. The artwork is thereby implied to be the emergence of something new and unpremeditated:
The poem, Charles Simic comments, “mostly writes itself”; “The poet does not write what he knows but he does not know”, concurs W.S. Graham. “Writing reveals to you what you wanted to say in the first place”, remarks M.M. Coetzeee; “In fact it sometimes constructs what you want or wanted to say … Writing shows or creates … what your desire was, a moment ago.” (A. Bennett 69-70)(1)
So, how does this practice relate to expressive individualism?
Taylor considers artistic creation the “paradigm mode” in which the modern self “finds definition” (Sources 481).(2) On the model of epiphanic art, expressivist individualism views understanding of individual experience as the progressive manifestation of something inward. Like the epiphanic artwork, “what I truly am” emerges only through its realisation:
The direction of this élan wasn’t and couldn’t be clear prior to this manifestation. In realizing my nature, I have to define it in the sense of giving it some formulation; but this is also a definition in a stronger sense: I am realizing this formulation and thus giving my life a definitive shape (Taylor, Sources 374-5)
A second characteristic of epiphanic art follows from the primary one. The revelation that it brings will always be embodied in the particularity of experience that it represents or constitutes. Naturally, if the principle that determines the artwork only emerges in the process of its realisation, it follows that every artwork will evolve in its own way. For post-Romantic art, this does not necessarily imply subjectivism. Art may be representational, as it is for David Hockney, but in the modern epiphanic context, representation is never divorced from a way of seeing that is felt to inhere in the particularity of lived experience:
The urge to represent is very deep in us. […] And this urge is there because each individual person feels or knows that he or she has a unique sort of experience. (Hockney 15-16)(3)
Hockney’s way of seeing – his style – is not abstractly codifiable in the manner of classical rhetoric, where the superlative skill of a Cicero, or Bossuet, consists in a more perfect implementation of recognized principles; it is utterly individual, inseparable from the particularity of a unique experience of the world (Koerner 50). (4)
This secondary characteristic of the epiphanic is, like the primary one, continuous with an aspect of the expressivist experience of the self which Taylor calls “individuality”:
That each individual is different and original, and that this originality determines how he or she ought to live. Just the notion of individual difference is, of course, not new. Nothing is more evident, or more banal. What is new is the idea that … each one of us has an original path which we ought to tread; they lay the obligation on each of us to live up to our originality. (Sources 375)
Now for an example. The life-goal of expressivist individualism finds particularly unguarded expression in a passage from André Breton, poet and ‘pope’ of Surrealism. Breton aspired to the production of texts that would ‘open, like banging doors, onto the street’ – that is, to a convergence of poet creation and real life. The following is a particularly revealing instance.
Above and beyond the various tastes I acknowledge, the personal affinities I feel, the attractions I experience, the events that implicate me and me alone, beyond all the impulses I recognize in myself, the feelings that I am alone in experiencing, I contrive to know what my differentiation in regard to other human beings consists in, what it involves. Because surely it will be precisely to the extent that I become aware of this differentiation that I will have a revelation of what I, as opposed to everyone else, have come into the world to achieve, and of that unique message of which I am the bearer, and for the delivery of which I must answer with my life.(5)
Breton speaks frankly here of a lifegoal that is instantly recognizable as that of expressivist individualism as we have described it. But the notion of a ‘unique message’ of which the author claims to be ‘the bearer’ contains an obvious reference to the text that we hold in our hands. This double-reference (to life and text) is reinforced by the language of ‘revelation’ and ‘differentiation’ (i.e. ‘unique message) which clearly place both life and text under the guiding principles of the epiphanic. There is a unity of the epiphanic text and the expressivist self; the story of a life becomes the living of a story. The passage points like the two arms of a signpost to the life-goal universal to expressive individualism and to the epiphanic work – and in such a way as to suggest what the one owes to the other. The ‘message’ in Breton’s case finds its goal in creative expression, and, in so doing, testifies to what any such message implicitly or explicitly aspires to. In this, it betrays the aestheticist basis of the paradigm of everyday self-realization.
How should Christianity respond?
Let us begin with Trueman’s response. His genealogical account of expressivist individualism draws a distinction between a form of the phenomenon that he sees as anchored in a sacred order, and a form that does not. It is the latter form (expressivist individualism not anchored in a sacred order) which Trueman regards as inherently anti-Christian. This perception, manifested in Rieff’s terminology of ‘anti-culture’ and ‘death-work’, unfairly singles out modernist aesthetics, and goes along with opposition to those revolutionary social developments in the sphere of sexual morality, which modernist practitioners have no doubt promoted. On the other hand, Trueman concedes far too much, when it comes to the claims of expressivist individualism tout court. ‘We are all expressivist individualists now, and there is no way we can escape from the fact. It is the essence of world in which we have to live and of which we are part’. Really?
Someone, I suggest, who ought strongly to disagree with such an assertion is Rod Dreher who wrote the laudatory ‘Forward’ for Trueman’s book. In his recent publication – The Benedict Option – Dreher proposes Benedict’s famous Rule as, in broad outline, a possible inspiration not just for enclosed orders of monks, but for everyday Christians. Is there not, he argues, a kind of ‘poverty’ that Christians can espouse outside the cloister, a ‘chastity’ too for the non-celibate, and even a certain style ‘obedience’ that we are called to observe with regard to our own Christian leaders?
We have already described the lifegoal of expressivist self-realization as illustrated by our passage from Breton’s novel. There we find exemplified the distinctive morality of our social elites and those who aspire to them. This is what is what contemporary idolaters do with their gold ornaments. It is by no means necessarily a selfish or ungenerous goal. Today’s Israelites, like those of Moses’ time, invest their gold in communal projects.
But it is hard to imagine an ideal more at odds with the Benedictine rule of poverty, chastity and obedience. Not because ‘self-realization’ necessarily requires a life-style that is lavish. But because the monastic practice of poverty inhibits precisely the expression of that differentiation which, for the expressivist, holds the meaning of our existence. Imagine the young Breton entering a monastery. How would he cope with the material uniformity of the monastic life – the dress, the life-style, the possibilities of everyday association? To say the least, these are constrained by the necessity of inhabiting a social and physical environment which one has not chosen. Self-realization, on the other hand, requires the possibility of choice. For if what is most precious to us consists in the manifestation of our differentiation from our fellow-beings, then our ideal social and physical environment will need to be one that allows us a diversity of options. The monastic life, by contrast, implies the acceptance of a uniformity of life that pretty much eliminates the possibility of that kind of self-expression. Yes, there are monks who have been great artists and craftsmen. But Dreher revealingly alludes to the case of a Benedictine Abbot who has ground for thinking that one of his monks is priding himself too much in the quality of his work, and consequently moves that monk into another role. His point here is that the goal of work – ultimately the worship of God – takes precedence over the work itself. It is hard to imagine anything so contrary to the expressivist paradigm of the artwork, or its actualization in the everyday ideal of self-realization, where it is precisely the work itself, or the authenticity of the individual self, that must take precedence over any ‘external’ social, religious or political considerations.
Implications for how we respond to the ambient expressivist culture
The problem with Carl Trueman’s critique of expressivist individualism is that it is unbalanced. It singles out contemporary politicized developments of that ideology in the shape of the identity politics of LGBTQ+, while acquiescing in far more widespread and less politicized aspects that are no less reprehensible from a Christian perspective. This is particularly misguided given the need for the Church as a whole to address the LGBTQ+ question as a pastoral issue. After all, there is a history of very real grievances here, and the Church urgently needs to re-consider how it will respond in a more hospitable manner towards all those in relation to whom it exercises its Christ-given vocation. But it is, above all, the expressivist political agenda espoused by LGBTQ+ that has turned a civil rights movement into an ideological war engine against the Christian religion, as Trueman himself admits. It makes sense, therefore, to detach the advocacy of LGBTQ+ civil rights from the politicized expressive ideology which it has come to embody. The way to do this is surely to focus our critique on the expressivist ideology itself rather than the politicized developments of it by the New Left.
Here our criticism of Trueman’s has to go further. The basis of his not wholly negative appraisal of expressivist individualism lies in his earlier distinction between an expressivist individualism based on a ‘sacred order’ and one that is not. While the former is something in which Trueman appears ready as a Christian to acquiesce, he has nothing good to say of expressive individualism disengaged from sacred order and the forms of art associated with it, described in Rieffian terms as ‘anti-culture’ and ‘death-works’. This is unbalanced. For a start, it demonstrates an overly narrow understanding of what constitutes a ‘sacred order’. Far more importantly, however, it distracts from the underlying issue of the appropriation of the epiphanic by the immanentist spiritual agenda of expressive individualism. For, I would argue, it is expressive individualism itself that constitutes the fundamental scandal for Christians, not the radicalness of certain expressions of the epiphanic. A Christian-derived aesthetic would, I suspect, have a place for surrealism; however, the pursuit of ‘what constitutes my differentiation from other people’ is absolutely not the ultimate goal of the Christian life.
Concluding reflections on what a Christian response to expressivist individualism should be
First, the plainly ideological – indeed, religious and mystical – nature of the self and its realization needs to be laid bare. People who see their lives in such terms need to be brought to understand that such notions are ‘social constructs’ which have no more basis in a culturally-transcendant ‘reality’ than any other religious or ideological construct – and certainly no claim to a position of religious neutrality, such as is implied by the word ‘secularism’. The struggle that Christians face in the contemporary world should be seen as one that pits them against a fully-orbed immanentist belief system with a religious agenda of its own. The religious choice that confronts everyman/everywomen is not, as so often believed, between religion and no religion, but between one religion and another – the transcendentalist God of Christianity, and the immanentist belief system of expressive individualism. Christian apologists have every interest in disabusing their interlocutors of the illusion that religious neutrality is possible, and every interest in bringing them to a more accurate appraisal of their religious position.
Second, Christians need consciously to distance themselves from notions of ‘self’ and its ‘realization’ both in the symbolic realm of art and in personal behaviour and lifestyle. Christians do not set an ultimate value on the pursuit of individual differentiation or the diversity of human experience. In fact, this tends to elitism, and is absolutely inconsistent with the core Christian belief in the equal value of all humans as recipients of – and sharers in – God’s sacrificial love. The whole terminology of ‘self-fulfilment’ or ‘authenticity’ have no place in Christian discourse; the very idea of ‘self’ is so laden with expressivist ideology as to be highly suspect. Christians need to attune their lives to the harmony of Benedictine poverty and obedience, not place themselves under the onerous obligation to ‘be the very best version of ourselves’, or achieve creative fulfilment, or leave an indelible mark upon the world. Moreover, no blame attaches to ourselves through failure to ‘achieve’ in these ways – not at least in the eyes of God. All this, I suspect, is understood instinctively by many Christians. But more could be done to raise this instinctive awareness to the level of conscious understanding, and to clarify, for the purpose of aiding our witness, where our boundaries lie in regard to the immanentist values of the ambient culture.
Third, we need to appropriate epiphanic experience for the purposes of a transcendentalist Christianity. Obviously, there are – and long have been – Christian writers, painters etc. who are doing this through their own creative production. The nature of the ambient culture renders this a particularly important aspect of Christian witness. Yet, these cultural practices occupy a rather different position in the context of a Christian value system from the position that they hold within immanentist religion as the dominant paradigm of expressivist individualism; for that place, within Christianity, is occupied by the paradigm of the Eucharist. So, Art, within the Christian context, might appear to undergo something of a dis-enthronement. After all, our Eucharistic worship can be as well as expressed in acts of loving kindness towards our neighbour as in writing, painting or music. Moreover, Christians have every reason to be suspicious of the term ‘Art’, which has come, for the post-Romantic age, to suggest a project strongly tainted by expressivist individualism. Here, I am reminded of the cautiousness of the earliest surrealists. Writers like Breton were keen to appropriate the mantle of Romanticism, of which they saw themselves as the ultimate development. But what they respected was the epiphanic element. They were suspicious of the term ‘Art’ – which seemed redolent of a bourgeois past-time (‘embellir les loisirs d’autrui’), and sought to produce texts that would be like ‘doors banging open on the street’ (‘portes battant sur la rue’). This appropriation and re-contextualization of practices – and products – traditionally placed in the domain of Art in the name of a wider, and (in the Surrealist case) mystical and quasi-religious cult of ‘la merveille’ is something Christians might do well to emulate.
PART TWO: CAN WALTER WINK HELP US ‘UNMASK THE POWERS’?
1 Andrew Bennett, The Author, London:Routledge, 2005
2 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, Cambridge: CUP, 1989
3 David Hockney, That’s the Way I See it, ed. Nikos Stangos, London: Thames & Hudson, 1993
4 Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, London: Reaktion, 1992
5 Andre Breton, Nadja [1928], Paris: Gallimard, 1964