A number of people have asked for my thoughts on Abigail Favale's The Genesis of Gender and Carl Trueman's Strange New World – books that have garnered attention among evangelical Christians for addressing gender identity in a way that bolsters traditional accounts. Now that I've read them and found them lacking, I offer the following reviews for the sake of a more fulsome conversation.
Neither of these books is a work of biblical or theological scholarship, but they do share a theological premise. Each book offers a critical commentary on modern historical developments that expresses a preference for pre-modern norms, vaguely rooted in natural theology.
In The Genesis of Gender, English professor Abigail Favale narrates her deconversion from the feminist "gender paradigm", calling it a socially constructed "illusion" (30, 74). In Strange New World, historian Carl Trueman narrates the sexual revolution as a story of "expressive individualism" run amok (22-24). Both books have their moments, and Favale’s can be especially compelling, but neither gives a charitable reading of their opponents, and neither engages the biblical or theological issues in any depth, let alone clarity or nuance.
In what follows I will first make a few comments about what is compelling about these books, and then I will discuss what is misleading about each – at least for evangelicals. Since some of my problems with these books relate to their discord with historically evangelical convictions, Christians from other traditions may simply conclude that I am not the target audience for this book. That’s fine. Some of what these authors say will make more sense in other traditions, and I am not here to disparage those. I’m reviewing these books as it relates to their adoption in an evangelical context, so that will be the perspective I bring to bear.
I will post this in two parts. This post will begin with some appreciations for both books before focusing squarely on Trueman’s Strange New World. Later I’ll come back to Favale’s The Genesis of Gender. All page numbers in brackets relate to whatever book is under discussion in the immediate proximity.
What is compelling about these books
Carl Trueman is rightly concerned about the phenomena of "expressive individualism". In fact, I’d say this problem pervades the western cultural milieu (and not just the LGBTQ+ movement at the centre of Trueman’s focus). Trueman is right on target with some of his social commentary on this score. For instance, in chapters 5 and 6 he highlights the way modern technology enables independent mastery of the physical world to a degree that unsettles "traditional external sources of authority and identity" (97), thereby leaving individuals vulnerable to risks that used to be offset by social codes and limitations.
Trueman is not wrong to point out that reconstruction of this "strange new world" is ongoing, and cannot be unthinkingly delegated to the inertia of “progress” or technological development. Inasmuch as his critique applies to the LGBTQ+ movement, it might be fairer to say that "expressive individualism" describes an immature version of trans or gay identity formation. At times Trueman acknowledges that trans and gay communities are not just interested in cul-de-sacs of arbitrary expression but seek social "recognition" and "belonging" (87, 117, 127), but he always moves on from this quickly.
Credit where it’s due, however: he is right to warn against a total retreat into the self. Taking this on board can bolster the maturer form of LGBTQ+ identity formation that is advocated by trans and gay communities (and affirming health experts).
Abigail Favale’s book has a lot more going for it than Trueman’s. Aside from her lucid writing, the highlight is probably her lovely explanation of sin and redemption in chapter two. Indeed there are many paragraphs of her book which readers will find theologically and rhetorically compelling, even if they disagree with aspects of the moral argument in which they are deployed. For example, in the conclusion Favale writes:
There is much in life we can’t control, such as when we are born or where… We don’t choose our unique amalgam of qualities and traits, those threads that form the tapestry of personality… Yet there is one thing we can freely choose – free only because the gentle fingers of God have loosed what binds and blinds us. We can choose to receive all these things as gift. We can choose to say Yes to a Love that is stronger than death (239).
Someone who disagreed with Favale’s limitation of the tapestry of gender could nonetheless celebrate a sentence like this by seeing the transgender journey as the unpacking of a complicated gift. She did not mean it that way, but the paragraph is compelling all the same. I will come back to that later. First let us consider the problems with these books in turn.
1. What is wrong with Trueman’s Strange New World (for evangelicals at least)
False dilemmas and the authority of the presumed body
The core problem with Trueman’s book is that it consistently elevates the authority of the body over that of "inner feelings" (32), but remains vague on the delineation of an inner feeling from a function of the body. Even if we grant that inner feelings are an immaterial aspect of the person, it is hard to understand how he can reconcile his privileging of the body with the soul-privileging strain of the pre-modern theological tradition he claims to espouse. Throughout this book Trueman glosses over the historic elevation of the will, soul, or reason, which are matters of inner disposition that the Christian tradition has often put in charge of bodily forces or desires.
I will come back to that particular problem later, but it illustrates a recurrent problem in this book: Trueman has a proclivity for posing false dilemmas and declaring a presumptive winner without acknowledging the theological arguments entailed. For example, he wrongly pits legitimate theories of original sin against each other in order to support the caricatures he is drawing, as seen when he insists that "original sin" is an "innate tendency to law-breaking" rather than a corruption by social "conventions and demands" (38). These are both legitimate ways to think about how original sin is transmitted, and are not mutually exclusive.
Another example of this is when Trueman suggests that modernists after Marx have politicized the "prepolitical" (59) – as if there used to be a stable "intrinsic morality" that has only now been turned into a political battle (51). Trueman is not wrong about the polarization of partisan American politics, but it is disingenuous to suggest pre-modern societies had pristine access to apolitical goodness that was unaffected by social power constructs until Marx came along. This leads to the next major problem of this book: its presentation of history is insidiously slanted.
A slanted version of history that glosses over pre-modern patriarchy
As noted above, Trueman suggests that modernity made sexuality primary to identity. What is insidious about this is that it fails to acknowledge that, in its own way, premodern patriarchy did this first. Trueman consistently typifies the sexual revolution as a chaotic disruption of what was a serene and unproblematic tradition, consistently glossing over the fact that old social orders relied on visions of justice that rightly came under serious critique (see chapters 4 and 7).
There are reasonable critiques to be made of modernity, of course, but Trueman deals in caricatures. This makes it easy to express greater faith in old "national narratives" than the "imagined communities" of today’s "social justice" narratives (118-20). Since it is unclear whether Trueman even understands those communities, I get the sense that his imagination is doing most of the work here.
It would be one thing to argue in favour of relative cultural uniformity to pre-modern values based on presumptive orders of nature, but it is appalling to ignore the lessons of 1930s Germany on this precise point and then have the gall to associate social justice communities with ISIS (118-21). Trueman is ruthless and uncharitable toward his opponents, while his portrait of tradition is rose-coloured. His critique of modernity reads like walking into a broken home and yelling at the nine-year-old for not cleaning their room.
This is quite pronounced in the chapter on sexual identity, where Trueman pejoratively typifies the LGBTQ+ “coalition” in terms of "victimhood" rather than looking upstream for sources of victimization (131). It is not wrong to identify the modern Romantic interest in "human subjectivity" as a precursor to the "moral relativism" of "inner voices" (48), but Trueman uses this as a straw man and barely acknowledges the problems that modernity sought to correct.
Reading only this book would make it easy to forget that the modern turn destabilized the dominance of one kind of voice, and that we are still in the process of gathering and reconciling more diverse voices on the way to a fuller anthropology. This does mean we are in the middle of what might feel like a messy reassessment of identity and its intersections, but Christians need not be afraid to wade into those complexities and seek the Spirit’s guidance into truth.
Dependence on a vague form of natural theology
There are really only a few pages of theology in Trueman's book. At one point he rattles off a few reasons why Christians have typically privileged heterosexual marriage – namely, "the teaching of Genesis 2, the complementarity of men and women, and the procreative intent of marriage" (155) – but then he briskly moves on so he can deride the US Supreme Court for seemingly dismissing this tradition overnight. What Trueman does not acknowledge is the ongoing legitimate discussion among Christian theologians and Bible scholars about what Genesis really teaches, about the ambiguities of complementarity, and about whether procreation is an essential good of marriage. Mentioning these topics in passing is not theology. Trueman is free to ignore that discussion, but those who need to have it will need to read past his book.
When Trueman does pivot to theology toward the end of the book, it is to highlight the importance of community and to distinguish it from a mere aggregate of individuals (173-78). This is a very good word indeed. However, it is odd to see Trueman acknowledge that "the LGBTQ+ community is proof of this point” (175), only to carry on reproaching the movement as nothing more than a symptom of the expressive individualism that threatens the social fabric.
The truth is that everyone in the modern West is beset with the fragmenting forces of expressive individualism, and everyone is longing for real community. The precise problem with the LGBTQ+ communities is not expressive individualism, per se: it is that the they do not ascribe to the traditional confessions and biblical worship to which Trueman ascribes (178-82). When it comes to gender and sexuality, the real issue is not community vs. individualism but rival visions of society (175). Most of this book evasively collapses the latter argument into the former.
Which is not to say that Trueman says nothing about the rival visions. The theological argument underpinning the book’s actual challenge to LGBTQ+ identities is that "the church needs to recover natural law and a theology of the body" (182). Unfortunately, while Trueman acknowledges the Roman Catholic roots of this tradition, he claims that it has "died away" among Protestants "in the last two centuries" and does not trouble himself to say any more. This is a particularly glaring omission since the debate about natural law was a significant part of the Confessing Church’s opposition to Nazification in 1930s Germany (still less than a century ago).
As an evangelical theologian I consider this is to be a serious problem. Trueman repeatedly assumes an "absolute moral standard" (62) to which humans have natural access, thus begging the question why we even need Scripture or community, let alone a living Christ. It is odd to see Trueman’s book gobbled up by evangelicals who claim to believe in sola scriptura and who have historically been willing to go back to the Bible with an open mind under the living Lordship of Christ when their interpretations of the natural order have come under serious question.
Instead of a careful definition or an explainer on the historic pros and cons of natural law, Trueman briefly asserts that our "bodily constitution places restrictions on what [we] can and cannot do" and explains that "natural law is the extension of this idea into the realm of morals" (183). If Trueman is aware how complicated it is to argue from natural and physical phenomena to moral principles, it does not deter him from preemptively pinning his argument on a simplistic and contestable view of nature.
Again, this is a simplistic account of bodies and souls
In his attempt to treat the LGBTQ+ movement as a triumph of inner voices over real-life bodies, Trueman argues that its advocates "set aside the importance of biology ... in order to present a common front" against hetero-normativity (131). If this were entirely true it would represent a valid concern, but it is unfortunately rather dismissive of the lived experience of trans and gay individuals.
Trueman would have us assume that trans identity is wholly psychological “performance” that "floats free" of the body (133), while traditional gender categories are physical constants attached to knowable metaphysical realities (132). This is woefully simplistic on both accounts. The question whether patriarchal social constructs provide access to metaphysical reality is debated, and even those who argue for it only see it as an analogue in some respects. But the theological premise of his book boils down to this: If you're confused about gender just look in your gym shorts. Anything else is “expressive individualism” run amok. I'm not sure Trueman is as interested in what our bodies tell us as he is in how patriarchy ordered bodies.
I know there is a genuine debate to be had about nature and grace. I respect and listen carefully to those who hold to a qualified theological understanding of natural law. But on every level the story is more complicated than Trueman lets on. This is the case not only on natural law but also on the constitutive relation of the body and the inner self (or soul). A person who only read Trueman might assume that the Christian tradition has always prized the body over the soul, when in fact it has typically taught that the desires of the body have to be conformed to God by the penitent soul (or the will or the mind).
There are unresolved tensions and unknowns in the studies of sex and gender, but it is uncharitable for Trueman to portray trans and gay people as if they are making arbitrary choices running completely against the inclinations, dispositions, and constitutions of their bodies. It is as if Trueman has in mind a 12-year-old with queer classmates who succumbs to peer pressure to try out nonbinary identity like a new shirt, and is unwilling to consider the many people who arrived at their trans and gay identities against the grain of social pressure, precisely because it finally put them at peace with their bodies. Such people typically refer to their identities as discovered rather than invented – but you wouldn’t know this from Trueman’s depiction.
Here is perhaps the most glaring problem with all this, at least as it applies to sexuality: All the time Trueman is railing against expressive individualism, it never seems to occur to him that the problem he is describing is not homosexual desire (per se) but selfish desire (in general). Someone could actually buy his central thesis and entertain the possibility that same-sex marriage is a gift; a covenantal context where sexual desire can grow out of grasping lust and selfish individualism into the beauty of self-giving love and mutual belonging. But that's a discussion for another time.
Abigail Favale’s The Genesis of Gender is better than Carl Trueman’s Strange New World, but it does share similar problems. I will turn to it later in part two.