Surviving An Age of Sexual Self-Creation
Our cultural moment has turned sexuality into the defining marker of selfhood. The modern person no longer asks, “Who made me?” but “Who do I want to be?” Beneath this lies a more profound anthropological crisis. One that reveals how far we have drifted from understanding what it means to be human.
In my recent research and ministry reflection, a guiding question has emerged:
How can Christian leaders cultivate a theology of embodied, cruciform love that resists the redefinition of sexuality by “expressive individualism” and restores a biblical vision of human flourishing?
In this reflection, I will first identify several key patterns across thinkers who have shaped my understanding of this issue—Jeff Myers, Carl Trueman, Charles Taylor, and Gene Edward Veith Jr.—each offering distinct yet converging insights into how our culture arrived at its current view of the self and sexuality. I will then synthesize these perspectives to show how the sexual revolution reflects not merely moral confusion but a theological distortion manifesting in expressive individualism. Finally, I will consider the implications of these insights for Christian leadership and formation, proposing a way forward centered on embodied, cruciform love.
A Pattern Emerges
As I read across Jeff Myers, Carl Trueman, Charles Taylor, and Gene Edward Veith Jr., a pattern begins to emerge: each, in their own way, identifies the human tendency to trade communion for autonomy.
Jeff Myers, in Understanding the Times and Understanding the Culture, reminds us that every question about sexuality is first a question about worldview. Our beliefs about the body and desire flow from what we believe about God and creation. To detach the body from its Creator is to dismantle the very framework of meaning itself.[1]
Carl Trueman, in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, traces the long history of this detachment, from Rousseau’s inward turn to Freud’s psychologizing of desire and the expressive individualism that defines our age.[2] Trueman borrows from Charles Taylor, who defines expressive individualism as the belief that “each one of us has his or her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside.”[3] In this moral vision, the highest good is self-expression. What once belonged to the moral order of the soul has now been relocated to the psychological interior of the self. Authenticity becomes salvation; the body becomes optional.
Gene Edward Veith Jr. names this shift a theological revolt. “Rejecting God,” he writes, “human beings are attempting to place themselves in his role as creator, lawgiver, and savior.”[4] The transgender movement, for example, expresses this conviction that the self is untethered from the body. Yet Veith also notes that sex “ties culture to creation,” rooting human identity once again in the givenness of our creatureliness.[5] When we untether sex from the family and even from the body itself, he warns, “we have taken something life-giving and made it barren.”[6]
Veith goes on to expose how technological advances like the birth control pill accelerated this moral and relational detachment. What was hailed as liberation, he argues, in reality liberated men from responsibility.
Now they could have sex with women without having to deal with the consequences. No longer did men need to worry about getting a girl pregnant and feeling the obligation to marry her. Now men could talk women into having sex with them by banishing her fears of pregnancy and dismissing her instincts of resistance as outmoded psychological hang-ups. Now men could use women sexually with no inhibitions.[7]
In this single paragraph, Veith exposes not only a critical aspect of the sexual revolution but also its contribution to a culture of rugged individualism, which prizes detachment and promotes freedom from responsibility. The pill did not merely change reproductive patterns; it reshaped moral imagination. By severing sex from covenant and consequence, it legitimized the illusion that we can enjoy intimacy without interdependence.
This detachment echoes the same cultural myth that once defined frontier self-reliance: that flourishing means being beholden to no one. As I explored in earlier research on rugged individualism, this narrative has long promised vitality but delivered devastation.[8] What Veith describes in the sexual sphere is the same story told in a different key–desire extracted from design. The result is not liberation but loneliness and widespread languishing.
What I first explored through the lens of rugged individualism–our cultural obsession with autonomy and self-reliance–finds one of its sharpest expressions in the realm of sexuality.[9] The same impulse that isolates people socially now isolates them ontologically. Autonomy, once the hallmark of freedom, has become a form of exile.
Here I Stand
Three convictions have settled deeply in me through this reflection:
First, flourishing is relational, not autonomous. True life is found not in self-assertion but in participation in the life of God and the lives of others. The Trinity’s perichoresis[10], that eternal mutual indwelling of Father, Son, and Spirit, shows us that being itself is communion.[11]
Second, sexuality is profoundly theological. As Veith writes, “sex reminds us that we are not disembodied spirits but creatures of flesh and blood.”[12] It binds us to creation and to one another. To receive one’s body—male or female—as given is to confess, “I am not my own.” In an age that prizes self-creation, that confession is a revolutionary act of worship.
Third, Christian leadership must be cruciform. In Philippians 2, Paul calls us to the posture of Christ, who shows us the highest form of love — cruciform.[13] Michael Gorman’s language of cruciformity captures this well: love that takes the shape of the cross, giving life by laying itself down.[14] If our culture is addicted to self-expression, then the Church’s witness must be self-giving. Leadership formed by the cross refuses to manage people; it loves them toward wholeness.
Takeaways
The central insight of this research is that the sexual revolution has exposed our loss of givenness. Removed from what just is and now stand as a culture with our feet firmly planted in mid-air. We have mistaken freedom for detachment and equated love with self-expression. But Scripture calls us back to a different kind of freedom—the freedom in Christ to be and do as God designed humanity.
Tyler VanderWeele’s research on human flourishing reinforces what theology has long affirmed: that relational, spiritual, and moral well-being are inseparable.[15] We were made for interdependence, not isolation. The body itself testifies to this truth in that it only thrives in communion.
If I had time allowed, I would explore how practices of embodied worship —e.g., table fellowship, confession, hospitality, and shared lament — influence a cultural imagination and recover a biblical understanding of self and sexuality.
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[1] Jeff Myers, Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, (Manitou Springs, CO: Summit Ministries, 2015), 21–33.
[2] Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020), 45–53.
[3] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age ,(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 475.
[4] Gene Edward Veith Jr., Post-Christian: A Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020), 36.
[5] Ibid., 97.
[6] Ibid., 97–98.
[7] Ibid., 103.
[8] Chad Warren, “Human Flourishing in the Context of Rugged Individualism,” (March 2024), 5-7.
[9] Chad Warren, “Background Research Essay on the Emerging Solution,” (April 2025), 5-7.
[10] Trinitarian theology also illustrates that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist in perichoresis, emphasizing that flourishing is not possible in isolation but in interdependent relationships. We see the concept of perichoresis when Jesus prays to the Father that his followers will be “one as we are one,” and when he states that he and the Father are one. The Triune God’s essence is communal, revealing that human flourishing is best understood in terms of community and love.
[11] Douglas Kelly, Systematic Theology, 489.
[12] Veith, Post-Christian, 97.
[13] John 15:3.
[14] Michael J. Gorman, Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 40–42.
[15] Tyler J. VanderWeele, “Religious Communities and Human Flourishing,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 26, (2017): 476–81.
About the Author
Chad Warren
A husband, father, pastor, teacher, and student seeking to help others flourish.One response to “Surviving An Age of Sexual Self-Creation”
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Chad,
Great insights. How might you explore this connection in light of your NPO?