Published July 16, 2026
Is Western imperialism alive and well? It would seem so. Turkey and Egypt recently refused to allow a cruise ship to dock in their ports. The reason? The ship, the Scarlet Lady, is part of Atlantis Cruises, a company that offers vacations as an “incredibly all-gay experience.” In short, it was carrying wealthy gay men around the Mediterranean for a mix of parties and sight-seeing. And neither Turkey nor Egypt wanted to enable such.
Homosexuality is legal in both countries, but, of course, legality does not mean that any foreigner has the right to come and flaunt their sexual proclivities. If the website of Atlantis Cruises is representative of its ethos, that is exactly what its customers do. And they clearly expect other nations, other cultures, to indulge them as they do so.
This is where the question of Western imperialism becomes newly interesting. We are all familiar with the usual complaints surrounding the topic—how white Europeans and Americans assumed the normativity and superiority of their cultural systems and imposed them without consent upon great swathes of the globe, with no concern for local customs and morality. Polemics against this, and the anathematizing of anyone who dares even to suggest that the standard narrative of Western oppression is perhaps a tad unnuanced, has been a staple of progressivism in the United States and Europe for many years.
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Carl R. Trueman is a fellow in EPPC’s Evangelicals in Civic Life Program. His work focuses on helping civic leaders and policymakers better understand the deep philosophical and cultural roots of our current social malaise. In addition to his scholarship on the intellectual foundations of expressive individualism and the sexual revolution, Trueman is also interested in the origins, rise, and use of critical theory by progressives and the current crisis in anthropology. He serves as a professor at Grove City College.
