We’re all postmoderns now

If you grew up as a Christian in the 1990s or early 2000s, chances are you were exposed to Christian worldview training that warned against the dangers of postmodernism. We were told that postmodernists did not believe there was such a thing as absolute truth: At best, all truth claims were relative, reflecting perspective and bias. At worst, they were just assertions of power by elites seeking to reinforce their privilege.

By this definition, we’re all postmoderns now.

Whereas some progressives were ideologically committed to this “hermeneutic of suspicion,” imbibing it from philosophers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Richard Rorty, conservatives learned their suspicion from experience. As James Davison Hunter writes in his new book, Democracy and Solidarity, “Conservatives … looked around them and saw universities, news organizations, and even the new social media websites—all the proud inheritors of the liberal discourse tradition—cheerfully employing every tool at their disposal to restrict the range of acceptable opinion.” Truth claims, many of us concluded, were mere power plays.

When Donald Trump was first elected president in 2016 and began denouncing the “fake news” media, he spoke for many Americans who had come to doubt that the so-called “mainstream media” could ever be trusted to give them a straightforward and honest take on any issue of political or cultural significance. Increasingly, Americans gravitated to alternative media sources, especially online, to find a more truthful perspective. By 2020, however, social media seemed just as slanted, censored, and unreliable, and many of us began to wonder, “Can I trust any media?” Four years later, many seem to have become so jaded and cynical that it is hard to even take truth-telling seriously as an ideal anymore. If all truth claims are power plays, many have reasoned, we might as well play that game, too.

For some, on both the left and the right, the high stakes of the cultural conflict justify the sacrifice of truth to power. In wartime, even Scripture seems to teach that you can deceive your enemies, and hasn’t our politics descended into war by other means? Others might hesitate to justify lying outright but are still willing to shade the truth about their political opponents, attributing to them claims they’ve never made or deliberately quoting words out of context. It is all too easy to convince oneself that although the quotation might not be technically accurate, it’s still basically on target because you’re convinced that’s what your opponent believes deep down, even if it’s not what he or she said out loud. On this basis, both sides of the culture war now shamelessly edit sound bites to make their opponents look as bad as possible.

Setting aside for a moment the moral implications of this increasingly cavalier attitude toward truth, it doesn’t take long to realize that it is self-defeating. Long ago, Immanuel Kant argued against lying on this basis: It only works so long as others don’t do it. That is, no one bothers telling a lie except to people who expect them to tell the truth. If they expect me to lie, I can no longer gain an advantage over them by hiding the truth. Deception is thus parasitic on truth—once society at large gives up on truth and expects lies, statements cease to have any real meaning.

In such a condition, the natural response is to reframe truth as “what my tribe thinks.” If a claim comes from someone you like and generally agree with, you treat it as true. But if it’s from someone you dislike or often disagree with, you treat it as false. My truth will simply be different from your truth, and no arguments or facts you can allege will persuade me otherwise.

Within such a post-truth society, the most countercultural thing that Christians can do is refuse to play the game. Whatever the world may pretend, we know that reality is a very stubborn thing, and it can only be evaded, not twisted into whatever shape we wish. Thus, even if others insist on casually lying to you or about you, you can still choose not to make any claims whose veracity you cannot vouch for with a straight face—however much you may feel they are true.

If there’s a silver lining to this cultural challenge, it’s that it might push us to start investing our attention again in our local churches and communities. After all, it’s a lot easier to distort the truth, and a lot harder to tell who is trustworthy, in cyberspace. Lying face-to-face is hard, and character marked by integrity shines forth irresistibly in flesh-and-blood communities. In a world burned out by spin and desperate for truth, Christians must have the courage to model an alternative.