One event, however, shattered the entrenched optimism of modernism in western civilization more than any other. At a time when it was assumed that with enough good western science, education, medicine, government, and religion, modernism could conquer every problem and virtually bring heaven to earth, the two nations that had the best western science, education, medicine, government, and religion went to war in the most horrific conflict the world had yet witnessed. Germany and England (and their allies) fought across Europe, devastating a continent and a generation. Following WW1 was a global influenza pandemic, a global economic depression, and a second world war. By the 1950s, western optimism was replaced with a new pessimism that precipitated the revolutionary postmodern paradigm shift.
As modernism was in every way a reaction to premodernism, so postmodernism is in every way a reaction to modernism. Every way that postmodernism judges modernism as wrong, it is right. Unfortunately, though, postmodernism sets up a just-as-wrong alternative to biblical revelation.
The optimistic secular worldview of modernism has been replaced with a pluralistic worldview. David Henderson writes, "Postmodernism is a rejection of Enlightenment thinking, the rationalism and optimism of the modern world. Purpose, design, objective truth, absolutes, and any idea of overarching “metanarratives” or “totalizing discourses” are thrown out the window. Instead, postmodernism embraces the nihilism of and perspectivism of Nietzche and the existentialism of Sartre. Life is pointless. There is no inherent meaning or purpose in life and there is no truth."
The politically correct liberalism of postmodern western civilization accepts all opinions as being pluralistically “true.” The concept of “truth” itself has been deconstructed and is now popularly understood to be a perspective, and only one piece of a pluralist mosaic of opinions. Therefore, contradictory ideas can be held to be mutually “true” in that they merely represent differing perspectives.
In the post-Einstein world, human reason was found to be an unreliable arbiter for understanding reality. Postmodernism has replaced rationalism with sentimentalism. Human experience and feelings have replaced reason as the most trustworthy, final authority. If the truth about life and faith is relative, one can rely on personal experience and personal revelation to be as – or even more – authoritative as the Scriptures.
Life, then, is governed not by principles, but by personal preference. There is a post-liberal idea in postmodernism that suggests that Jesus and the Bible may be true for Christians, but not necessarily for others. In the smorgasbord of religious ideas available to the western postmodern person, the individual’s personal preference is the final governance for life and faith practice. The highest form of religious freedom is the liberty of each individual to make personal choices in every area of life and faith.
The place of God in the imaginations of postmoderns has been replaced by a myriad of spiritualities. This contemporary western generation is religiously sophisticated. It is exposed to a plethora of religious traditions and ideas, which are being picked over, accepted, and combined with pluralistic zeal to create new, relativistic, personal religions. John Stackhouse Jr. writes, When it comes to ultimate matters, then, many of our North American neighbors have resorted to a secularism that frees one from all religious authority to a hyper-individualistic “religion a la carte.” Indeed, our society’s tolerance of do-it-yourself religion is, itself, a manifestation of secularization. For in leaving questions of the reality of God or the gods up to each individual, this attitude implies that there really aren’t any such supernatural entities."
The highest value for postmoderns is tolerance. The least tolerated notion from modernism is the idea that one religious expression is better than another. It is interesting that angels, demons, ghosts, and miracles are more prevalent in popular postmodern culture than they were in the modernist context. American movies and television, capitalizing on the religious milieu of the nation and the surprising popularity of Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion of the Christ, are addressing issues of the supernatural and religious. Meanwhile, mainline churches in North America are losing adherents at an alarming rate.
The place of the self in the postmodern context is “unanchored” and responsible to no one. There is a fixation with the freedom of the adolescent lifestyle in popular western culture. Staying young, fit, and active are the highest of values, while responsibility, wisdom, and maturity are abhorred. The place of others is seen in terms of their value in serving the self. Others are there for the self to use. Relationships become means to an end in the service of personal fulfillment. The self exploits the relationship to get what it can from the other and then discards the other when it is of no more use to the self. This is a disposable culture. Marriages, churches, friends, and business associations can all be discarded when they no longer serve the perceived needs of the self. No-fault divorce is an invention of the postmodern western world. It is simply a symptom of a wider throwaway society.
However, the place of creation in the postmodern context is over the self. Nature has come to be seen as practically a deity to be served. The virtues of ecological preservation are unquestioned by the majority of postmoderns, and the literal worship of nature through pagan religions is on the rise in the West, with significant representation of the “Covenant of the Goddess” at the 2004 Parliament of World Religions. Meanwhile, the United Nations Environmental Protection Agency names Christianity as a source cause of environmental problems in its 1995 document, The Global Biodiversity Assessment.
In the postmodern context, morality is governed by personal choice. The popular way of judging whether something is morally acceptable is whether someone’s rights are perceived to be in danger of being violated. Anything is permissible, then, as long as “no one gets hurt.” Each individual defines his own morality based on his perception and interpretation of individual, personal rights. It can be said that in the postmodern context, life is lived for “whatever.” If there is no objective truth, and morality is governed by personal choice, then the purpose of life is determined by the sovereignty of each individual. It is no longer asked, “Is it true?” Rather, it is asked, “Do I like it?”
