You Tube Theology

The West inherited a settled account of what a human being is and spent five centuries dismantling it. Now the question everyone is arguing about on the surface (gender, identity, pronouns) is only confusing because the prior question has gone unanswered: what does it mean to be human at all?

In this episode, philosopher and theologian Carl Trueman — author of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self and The Desecration of Man — traces the intellectual arc from Rousseau to Nietzsche to the sexual revolution, and argues that the West has not simply lost its faith. It has lost its anthropology.

The conversation covers:
— How the move inward — from external authority to inner feeling — reshaped what it means to be a person
— Why Nietzsche was right that killing God meant killing human nature too
— How technology made the blank slate plausible in a way it never was before
— Why the sexual revolution was an anthropological revolution, not merely a social one
— What radical secularism cannot answer — and what is moving into the vacuum
— What living well in this moment actually requires
Serious, historically grounded, and genuinely important.

• Carl Trueman's new book The Desecration of Man is available from Amazon Books: https://amzn.to/3OkKwsL
• Follow Carl at First Things: firstthings.com
• Carl will be speaking at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London in June — details at: https://www.arc-conference.com/

About Thinking Class: Thinking Class is a long-form interview podcast exploring the cultural, historical, and moral forces shaping England, Britain, and the wider Western world. Hosted by John Gillam, the show features serious conversations with historians, legal scholars, economists, theologians, and public intellectuals — concerned with long-term patterns over headlines and hot-takes.

If you value serious conversations about Britain, the West, and the forces shaping our future, why not subscribe:

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New episodes every week.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction — the prior question everyone is missing
02:00 What it means to be human: the question behind all the culture war arguments
05:30 The two critical shifts: the move inward and the arrival of technology
08:30 MacIntyre and the fragments — a civilisation that killed God but kept its moral vocabulary 11:00 Rousseau and the founding errors of modernity — is he the villain?
16:00 Artists as the new priesthood — from Schiller to Piss Christ
22:00 What modern art tells us when it has nothing left to say
25:30 The sexual revolution as anthropological shift — not about sex at all
33:00 Why dissent feels like violence — the psychologised, risk-intolerant generation
37:00 The Faustian bargain — is the desecration of man the logical endpoint?
41:00 AI, human agency, and the industrial revolution accelerated
43:00 Radical secularism has no answer to Islam
46:00 The Church of England has vacated the ground — and what's happening at Notre Dame
52:00 What living well in this moment actually requires