The Church’s Bane and the End of Postmodernism

The American Evangelical church has been for years defending itself against postmodernism. Buzzwords like “absolute truth” abound, especially where it tries to make inroads into more intellectual environments.

Perhaps postmodernism was once poised to make claims of the sort that there is absolutely no absolute truth. Certainly this is both harmful and false. But such a philosophy, as the church often points out, is flatly contrary to reason – so contrary, in fact, that almost no one outside of philosophy departments would accept it in such a strong form anymore. It is plainly obvious to people that there are certain external truths about the world. And as much as the terminology might suggest that postmodernism has supplanted modernism, modernism never really went away. Indeed, postmodernism will more than likely prove to be ultimately nothing more than a reality check on modernism.

The Intellectual Dominance of Modernism

Why did modernism prevail, and why does it continue to do so? Very simply, modernism stands on its fruits. In the intellectual showdown between religion and science exemplified in the Catholic church’s anathema of Galileo (though arguably an unnecessary battle), the idea of science eventually won very decisively in the popular mind. It is the peculiar folly of mankind to be bewitched by that which is placed immediately in front of him, and science plays that game extremely well. Science gives results. Its entire purpose is results, and this is exactly the same reason that modernism will triumph over (or at least swallow) postmodernism. Modernism has given us through science computers, medicine, and space stations. What has pure postmodernism given us? Incomprehensible art? I’ll take the computers, and I suspect most other people will too.

So the church’s battle is no longer over the idea that absolute truth exists. But postmodernism has not come and gone without leaving its mark. Where classical modernism attempted to find an absolute truth in everything – in arts and culture as well as science – postmodernism has made room for taste. Postmodernism’s legacy is a retreat from the excesses of the colonial era; an attempt to allow for subjective experience and preference within the modernist materialist-scientific framework. People do not deny that there is truth external to themselves (though they might rather call them facts), but rather separate things into an objective category and a subjective category. The objective category contains science and all the lingering fruits of modernism, where the subjective category contains cultural norms such as musical taste and fashion sense, for which one cannot be said in an objective sense to be better than another.

It is within this framework, the synthesis of postmodernism into the modern mindset, that the church must now evangelize – and it is not contrary to reality. For just as hardly any postmodernist outside a philosophy department would deny that scientific truth exists independently of the self and experience, not even the most ardent defender of the idea of absolute truth would venture to defend the idea that there is an objective good within musical expression, for example. Both sides must concede the existence of both categories.

The church’s problem, then, is not that people don’t believe in absolute truth as such, but that they place religion in the subjective category.

How Did We Get here?

To understand why people now place religion in the subjective category, we must first understand where that inkling comes from historically. Ultimately, classical modernism, looked on with so much fondness for its stance on absolute truth, has forced religion into that category. Because modernism’s fruits are so obvious when compared with premodernism, its foundational assumptions have been internalized: a disregard for the immaterial. Undoubtedly there are countless Christians who profess a belief in God externally, but internally the external spiritual may as well not exist.

There have been many attempts within the church to accommodate this. Liberal Christianity predominated from the late 18th century until World War II – using the mechanisms of modernism to distill a materialist core from the Bible – a core that amounts more or less to an anthropocentric moral system of loving one’s fellow man.

Since the death of Liberal Theology following the disillusionment of World War II, the same process has been applied to other religions, distilling away their metaphysical and spiritual content. Hence we get a resurgence of the same idea, but this time outside the church – people who say they follow the morals of Jesus, but no longer call themselves Christians; who would assert that all religions are at their core the same.

Indeed, distilling the supernatural from religions, they all do start to look the same. This is how religion, with so many absolute claims, became relegated to the subjective category. Stripped of supernatural claims, the choice among religions is no longer about the nature of the divine and man’s relationship to that, but simply, what framework do I like best within which to treat well my fellow man? It is nothing more than a cultural choice, as subjective as a sense of humor.

The Church and Culture

The church has not, historically, been in a position to refute the conflation of culture and religion, either. Initially, its trans-culturality was its main strength: where Roman religion (and European paganism in general) was parochial and had as its ultimate goal subservience to the state or preservation of specific culture, Christianity was explicitly noncultural. The prophets constantly refer to the expansion of the Kingdom of God to transcend national borders. Paul “becomes all things to all people” (1 Cor. 9:22), resists the identification of Christianity with the export of Jewish culture (Galatians), and gives guidelines on how to coexist with the surrounding culture (1 Cor. 8:4-8).

However, after Constantine, Christianity became indissolubly entrenched in European culture. As the Catholic church grew in power and began to disconnect the laity from the spiritual through layers of priestly intermediation, it became essentially indistinguishable from a sociopolitical institution. Likewise, the displacement of African animism and Middle-Eastern polytheism by Islam was driven by the same trans-culturality – and again followed by the cultural entrenchment thereof. Especially during the early colonial period, the church’s attempt to coopt the conquest of the Americas with evangelistic requirements made (and still makes) for a convenient strawman. These conquistadors had as their goal the enlargement of an empire, but because the church had become so politically intertwined, it sullied the name of evangelism with it. Even in the later colonial period in Africa, when missionary activity was merely concomitant with colonial presence, Christianity was nevertheless identified as a component of Western cultural export. With these historical associations in mind, people will condemn evangelism as if it were just a cultural export; as if it were one preference versus another.

Thus we arrive in the modern era with the irony that the one distinguishing feature of the success of the major world religions has rotted away. Modernism too arrived with the promise of being trans-cultural and ultimately bested Christianity at its own game. And after several centuries of modernism imbuing people with an implicit disbelief in the supernatural, the question of religion is simply not serious anymore. It is not seen as being about God (and where it is it is looked upon as quaint), but rather about the self and other people. Those with a strong degree of cultural pride may cling to religion anyway. Others realize its irrelevance and simply try to adhere to general moral principles.

The Church’s Present Vantage Point

Religion is no longer seen as a set of factual propositions, which exist on the scale of true or false, but as conceptual frameworks, which exist on the scale from better to worse. People think of them as theoretical models which make simplifying assumptions to try to describe the world and prescribe behavior.

The spiritual component of religion is regarded in this mindset as merely an allegory for self-betterment, hence the new fad of drawing a distinction between “religious” and “spiritual”. The question the church must then pose is not one of general absolute truth versus relative truth, but again one of the absolute reality versus nonreality of a spiritual world external to the self. The Church’s battle is not with the idea that there is no truth, but with the idea that there is nothing beyond what we can observe or experience, and with the idea following therefrom that religion is then an unimportant question. This is neither the epistemic attack of the postmodernists, nor the head-on skepticism of classical modernism, but patronizing new synthesis within the framework of which religion is not even an important question to ask.

The realization that Christianity is (still) serious about external spiritual reality is what will move religion in peoples’ minds from framework to fact; from useful or unuseful to true or false. Even if those facts are ultimately rejected, at least the gravity of the question is then comprehended: the atheist has a better conception of Christianity than these, even if he is more hostile. The ramifications of the reality of a sovereign God must permeate the world if we are to ever be rid of the damnable notion that Christianity is at its core simply a series of moral precepts.