During the abnormal days of 2020, evangelical church historian Dr. Carl Trueman used the time to satisfy his “curiosity about how and why a particular statement has come to be regarded as coherent and meaningful: ‘I am a woman trapped in a man’s body.’” The result was his excellent book,” The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self” (or its more accessible version, “Strange New World”), which explores a series philosophical waypoints that inform transgenderism. To arrive at our current culture wars over the very definition of male and female, Trueman explained, “The self must first be psychologized; psychology must then be sexualized; and sex must be politicized.”

After Dr. Trueman gave a weeknight lecture at my church, I asked how Christians should respond to transgenderism’s anti-Christian mythology from a biblical worldview. His response has stuck with me (although, unfortunately, not his exact words): recognize that our culture’s postmodern worldview is the soup we all swim in. A fish doesn’t recognize water as wet, simply as his environment. In the same way, even Christians can unconsciously absorb some unbiblical elements of our culture simply by living in it.

As it turns out, Trueman had made the same point in his book, and here it is in his more elegant language: “Most of us do not think about the world in the way we do because we have reasoned from first principles to a comprehensive understanding of the cosmos. Rather, we generally operate on the basis of intuitions that we have often unconsciously absorbed from the culture around us.”

And what an effect that has! In October 2025, FRC’s Center for Biblical Worldview released a nationwide survey of churchgoers in which only 31% of respondents affirmed that “People are born into sin and can only be saved from its consequences by Jesus.” Other churchgoers answered that “People are neither good or bad when they are born, but become either good or bad through their accumulated life choices” (32%), “People were originally good but have become corrupted by society” (10%), “No one is good or bad; people are who they are” (7%), and “Everyone is a divine creature engaged in the eternal pursuit of unity and a perfected consciousness” (15%).

According to this survey, nearly two-thirds of American churchgoers hold a “view of the human condition” that is modernist, postmodernist, amoral, or panentheist, rather than biblical. Of course, when professed Christians hold such unbiblical ideas on foundational doctrines, it affects their views on other issues, such as abortion.

“FRC’s latest national survey of churchgoing Americans shows just how real this danger is,” said Dr. David Closson, director of the Center for Biblical Worldview. “In only two years, the share of regular churchgoers who identify as pro-life dropped from 63% to 43%, while those identifying as pro-choice increased significantly, alongside growing confusion about whether the Bible speaks clearly on abortion. Today, only about half of churchgoers say Scripture is clear on the morality of abortion, and a rising number admit they don’t know what the Bible teaches at all.”

“What’s especially sobering is that this drift appears even among those who attend church regularly and read the Bible frequently, suggesting the issue isn’t access to Scripture but whether Scripture is actually functioning as our highest authority,” Closson continued. “Christians need discernment — not withdrawal from culture, but the humility and discipline to allow God’s word to correct us wherever our thinking has been shaped more by cultural pressure than by biblical truth.”

“Everyone has a worldview — a framework that helps us determine what is true, good, and worth defending,” Closson explained. “And if that framework is not being consciously formed by God’s word, it will almost certainly be shaped by the dominant ideas of the age.”

This truth contains an urgent call for faithful preaching. Pastors must set forth the whole counsel of God, even the parts that the culture finds unpopular or unwelcome. In fact, those are the parts the culture most needs to hear. This is a responsibility not only of pastors but of ordinary church members, who should cultivate a taste for faithful preaching and refuse to be satisfied with anything less. In his letter to Timothy on church order, Paul called the church “a pillar and buttress of the truth,” a description that encompasses both behavior and doctrine (1 Timothy 3:15-16).

But we are also faced with a question: why do people hold unbiblical ideas about human nature (or sexuality) in the first place? If one looked back through time to 1250 A.D., biblical teaching informed the general cultural attitudes toward human nature in Western civilization. Even in 1950, American culture still coasted on this Christian heritage. So, what changed?

Space precludes a full discussion, but there are two major movements to consider briefly.

First was the modern era, originating in Enlightenment thinkers like Rene Descartes, famous for speculating, “I think; therefore I am.” With this formulation, Descartes jettisoned a long train of thinkers who had based their conclusions on God’s revealed word. But, instead of grounding his philosophy on God and his word, Descartes made man his starting point. This new tradition developed its own branches and schools (rationalism, empiricism) which eventually resolved in the thought of Immanuel Kant. Kant cemented the naturalist, materialist perspective of this man-focused philosophy, effectively ruling out the possibility of divine revelation. For a century, Western civilization became giddy with fantasies of infinite progress — economic, scientific, social — based on man’s achievements, education, and knowledge.

But the Great War (World War I) brought these dreams to a rude awakening, as modernism’s high view of man failed to account for the vicious brutality of modernized, total war. It catalyzed a reaction to modernism that rejected its assumptions about man’s rationality, and even the notion of absolute truth. In came notions of critical theory, with its obsession about power, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, and ultimately the skeptical feminist thought of the 1960s and 1970s. In came the post-modern era, which rejected a biblical worldview every bit as much as modernism, but it also rejected modernist assumptions, too. Post-modernism denies absolute truth, reduces reality to a person’s internal (felt) perception, and extols expressive individualism.

Our culture bombards us with post-modern ideas every day. Fast food retailers adopt slogans like “Have it your way.” Catchy songs proclaim, “No right, no wrong, no rules for me; I’m free.” Movies embed postmodern concepts in their very plots, such as the body-soul separation in “Soul.” Or they extol the benefits of shedding one’s roles and responsibilities to pursue emotional freedom, such as Phillip Carlyle’s (Zac Efron) decision in “The Bargain” scene from “The Greatest Showman.”

When the culture hits you with a post-modern message, can you realize it? Can you subject it to God’s word and analyze where it goes astray?

This is not to say contemporary culture has no virtues. The urge to undermine injustice is beneficial and in alignment with Scripture, even if most of its most zealous advocates lack any solid grounding on what true justice really is. Even the notion that “everyone has a worldview,” as Closson mentioned above, is an obvious feature in a pluralistic post-modern society, though it would have been less obvious to a thinker from a more uniform era.

“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes,” C.S. Lewis explained nearly a century ago in “God in the Dock.” “Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united — united with each other and against earlier and later ages — by a great mass of common assumptions. … None of us can fully escape this blindness.”

“Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we,” Lewis continued. “But not the same mistakes.” Lewis’s prescription was to read old books, since “They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us.”

“To be sure,” Lewis added humorously, “the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”

Of course, there is one very old book that speaks both to the past and the future. And, unlike the works of merely human authors, which Lewis references, it is true “without any mixture of error,” as the Baptist Faith and Message puts it.

“Culture is constantly shaping the way we think, whether we realize it or not,” Closson concluded. “That is why Christians must be intentional about examining our assumptions in light of Scripture.” We cannot avoid swimming like fish in our cultural tides. But we can choose to immerse ourselves in the clear waters of Scripture until its unfailing light shows us the errors of our times.