These very (post)modern times

Often in church debates today, one hears a pastor or speaker disparage "postmodernism" as the scourge of the Christian church. Postmodernism is supposedly corrupting our children, opening the gap to terrible crimes against morality, and disrupting our understanding of theology. There is a great deal of difficulty to this little soundbyte, mostly because what Protestant theologians mean when they say "postmodernism" and what the rest of the academic community means when they say "postmodernism" are two very different things.


Academic Postmodernism

When an academic says the word 'postmodern' to you, unless he is specifically an architect or a fine arts major, he is probably talking about literary postmodernism. This is a breed of writing that sprouted up in English and philosophy departments around the Western world in the latter half of the twentieth century. It was a reaction and often a critique (in the academic, dialogue-ish sense of critique) of a movement called Modernism (I know, big surprise), which had taken place in those same spheres in the early half of the twentieth century. As a reaction to Modernism, postmodernism is heavily defined relationally; it finds its boundaries in the spaces excluded or questioned by Modernism.

The postmodern writers called for a re-evaluation of the whole concept of modernity, in a 1920-ish sense of the word. The Modernist movement had positioned itself to advocate against widespread ignorance, superstition, and resistance to technological and cultural innovation. Postmodernism, far from advocating a return to those conditions, was a dialogue with modernism about the need to be 'modern'. It consisted of questioning traditional authority structures, experimenting with finding meaning in dialogues outside the traditional means of dialogue. Hence, the famous postmodern authors who broke down constraints of genre or even grammatical conventions to explore new ways of communicating. These authors were not necessarily disagreeing with the ideas that Modernism had brought up (the need to embrace innovation and the need to question orthodoxies that had long stood qua orthodoxy were both strong and common threads for the two movements), but instead were exploring different ways of doing similar things. In this way, postmodernism might be viewed as an extension rather than a debate with the Modernist ideas. Postmodernism was, in a very real way, the efforts of a group of scholars to adapt the ideas of modernism to a newer time and social climate engendered by events like the Vietnam war.

Most literary scholars, in fact, now agree that the postmodern moment has passed and that contemporary writings along that vein are in fact dialoguing with (as opposed to being integrated as part of) the postmodern canon. Postmodernism was a movement situated in a very particular social climate.


Theologians and the 'postmodern' ethos

The explanation given above has nothing to do with what your average pastor means when he says 'postmodernism'. Even if he is aware of the history and the conversations surrounding the idea of modernity, the academic sense of 'postmodern' is almost certainly not what he intends. The catchphrase 'postmodern' is now used almost as a jargon term among Christians, and it roughly denotes the forces in society, whether moral, social, political, institutional, etc. that are opposed for whatever reason to the moral doctrines of the Christian church. In the Christian sense of the term, society's obsession with Paris Hilton is obviously symptomatic of the postmodern condition. It is in opposition to the morals of the church, and a competitor for the primacy of the church in the hearts of potential converts. In the academic sense of the term, it is not clear that this has anything to do with postmodernism at all, because social fascination with an heiress has nothing to do with questioning institutional norms (in fact, if anything it strengthens institutional norms by providing a pervasive image of the wealthy as a specific social class with specific behavioral expectations and obligations).


At any rate, 'postmodern' is a term with very different meanings depending on the context in which it is used. Someone hearing the word in conversation (whether with a pastor or with an academic) must be careful to consider the meaning behind the word, and not to apply with a broad brush a connotation which may not be intended at all.