EXCLUSIVE: ‘Demands Christianity can’t ignore’: How our understanding of humanity shapes politics, sexuality and AI

Modern political debates often lack a moral compass, but they still wrestle with fundamental questions about humanity, giving Christians an opportunity to provide answers, said Carl Trueman, an author, speaker and Christian college professor.

“The problem today is that the key political issue is anthropology,” he told Heartlander News in an exclusive interview. “Whether it’s sexual revolution, whether it’s gender, whether it’s transhumanism, whether it’s artificial intelligence, all the key issues today in the public political sphere are anthropological issues, which really means that Christians can’t avoid them. Not because Christians want to go out of their way to be political, but because politics is now making demands that Christianity cannot ignore.”

Trueman, a professor of biblical and theological studies at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, clarified that the intersection of Christianity with politics is not an association with “party politics,” namely because the “role of the church is primarily to witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

“It’s good that we don’t blindly identify our allegiance to Christ with allegiance to a particular earthly political party or platform,” he said. “On the other hand, we have to speak to those issues, where the secular culture encroaches.”

Modern politics has hijacked the centuries-old answers to basic questions: What does it mean to be human? What is a man? What is a woman? What is morality?

The statement “marriage is between a man and a woman” is a theological statement that precedes politics, although it “has been made political,” Trueman explained.

The outworking of the sexual revolution

The redefinition of marriage to legally permit male-male or female-female relationships resulted from the premise of the sexual revolution: “the slow but sure logical outworking of the transformation of sex into recreation,” Trueman said.

“The previous wave of the sexual revolution was facilitated by the pill and by antibiotics,” he said, citing measures to fight venereal disease and avoid pregnancy. “I think we’re entering a very interesting phase now where technology is opening up a whole new range of possibilities for perversity.”

Modern technology not only offers free sex without fear of pregnancy, as in the 1960s with the contraceptive pill, but now promises gratification without even the presence of another.

“The use of pornography is the logic of the sexual revolution played out to its final conclusion, that you don’t need relationship,” Trueman said. “You don’t need self-sacrifice. You don’t need commitment. The ultimate form of sexual activity that reflects those things is pornography.”

Pornography is one example of the societal rejection of human-to-human engagement, as screens conquer more and more of daily life, Trueman explained, emphasizing that modern technology has decentralized the human body.

“The loss of the importance of the body for human interaction – it’s key,” he said. “Human beings are embodied. Our relationships are embodied. Our consciousness is intimately connected to our bodies. When we develop a way of thinking about the world where the body is marginalized, dramatically relativized in some way, that represents a fundamental change to what it means to be human.”

The idea of human embodiment involves more than sexual relationships, but culture has reduced human-to-human engagement to merely sexual categories. Through this reduction, society has lost the traditional depth and understanding of friendship, Trueman explained.

Anthropological issues at the core of societal concerns

Modern political debates and technological developments wrestle with the same basic questions of anthropology, or the study of human beings, Trueman said.

“To ask the question, what is a human? I don’t think modern society can give a coherent answer to that,” he said.

In his most recent book, Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity, Trueman outlines how the issues of anthropology reduce to theological questions at their core amid the modern rejection of a morally objective standard.

“If you get rid of God, you have to get rid of everything that was built upon the idea of God,” he explained. “You can’t have the morality of an image bearer of God if there is no God, whose image one bears.

“That’s why I say in the book, I make the point: anthropology is a theological question. Whether you believe in God or not, that’s a theological standard and that’s going to show what you think human beings are.”

He gave the example in his book of Friedrich Nietzsche’s madman, who runs into the street carrying a lantern at midday to announce that God is dead because man has killed Him and now must begin again.

“He’s making the point that Western culture was built on the idea of God. Get rid of God, you’ve got to rebuild everything,” Trueman explained.

Artificial intelligence requires a strong definition of human

Today, humanity’s rebuilding manifests in the instability of artificial intelligence. Man works to “become like God” and build something great, but that very thing “ultimately reduces us,” Trueman said.

“What is it that makes human beings great? I would say it’s that we’re made in the image of God. So how do we assert our authority over God? Well, you assert your authority over God by smashing His image.

“You’re in a pagan temple and you want to claim it for the Christian faith. You smash the images of the pagan gods. The paradox of the human condition is, in smashing the image of God to make ourselves into gods, we actually destroy what makes us smash and reduce ourselves.”

In many ways, AI is similar to every previous technology that brought monumental societal changes, Trueman said, giving the example of a hammer or the printing press. But those technologies “did one or two things,” whereas modern life includes technology in every sphere.

“New technologies are always disruptive. They always involve change,” he said. “The invention of the steam engine disrupted time and space. The invention of the automobile did the same. But we now face technologies that place a comprehensive claim on life in a way that previous technologies did not.”

Technology always poses “questions of a comprehensive nature” that were previously nonexistent or unconcerning, Trueman said. That is why a sturdy anthropology is necessary to steer through the uncharted waters of AI, he explained.

“We should think about it in the same way we think about other technologies, and that is we need a strong anthropology, a strong understanding of what it means to be human, so that when we’re faced with a new technology we can ask ourselves: are there ways in which we can use this technology that are consistent with our humanity (and) perhaps enhance our humanity? Or are there ways that it would undermine and conflict our humanity?”

(Image credit: Carl Trueman, Grove City College)