"The Madness of Crowds"

Book of the Month/December 2019

Douglas Wilson
Blog & Mablog


We live in demented times, and proofs of this assertion can be found by pointing in pretty much any and every direction. One of those proofs is the fact that I am able to select as my book of the month a book written by an open homosexual, and with the topic of the book being certain issues surrounding gender and identity. This book, The Madness of Crowds [by Douglas Murray] is that book. I recommend it highly.

The Christian reader has to discount for the fact that Murray has obviously carved out a space in his worldview for his own sin. And if we believe the Bible, we don’t get to go along with him in this. But at the same time, even when he is talking about homosexuality, he does a remarkable job of not politicizing it. He asks hard and pointed questions about how our culture at large is responding to a sexual revolution that has turned itself into a mindless and moralistic crusade. Murray is dealing with the thoughtlessness of that. As the title indicates, he is dealing with the madness of crowds—and this is quite a timely book because we are certainly in the middle of an epic fit right now.


When it comes to sexual topics, a certain party line is being imposed on all of us, and is being imposed with a ferocity that is scarcely to be believed. And Murray is challenging all of that. He is not offended by those of us who believe that he is sinning in his sexual choices, but he is insulted by those who have turned all sexual choices into an all-consuming ideology. He uses the example of how Peter Thiel, another open homosexual, was excommunicated from the “church of gay” when he endorsed Trump. It turns out that sexual perversion is not enough—you have to be homosexual and a hard leftist. Having sex with other men is not enough to make you gay. You have to do that and toe the party line. He uses another example of how Germaine Greer was excommunicated from the “church of feminism” because of her questioning of the transsexual foolishness.

The sexual revolution, like all revolutions, devours its own.

Murray is asking hard questions about how we know what we are claiming to have discovered. The sexual revolutionaries are simply dogmatists, and just because somebody in charge of the propaganda bureau flipped a switch does not mean that we all suddenly “know” that transsexuality is healthy and normal and okay, and what’s wrong with you red state troglodytes? 

What about the epistemic effects of sin? Yeah, that is curious. When it comes to the sexual revolution, Murray’s questions and reasoning are so consistently good throughout this book (with certain exceptions, as noted above), and the reactions of our Christian leaders have been so lame and piecemeal, one is tempted to start looking around for the epistemic effects of sin in places other than the enclaves of sinners and tax collectors. Yeah, there is an epistemic effect of sodomy. But maybe we need to start asking if there is an epistemic effect that comes from an evangelical seminary education also.

Regardless of how you answer that question, this book is worth a read.