Published August 22, 2024
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.
Click here to continue reading.
Brad Littlejohn was a Fellow in EPPC’s Technology and Human Flourishing and Evangelicals in Civic Life programs from 2022-2025. His wide-ranging research and writing encompasses work on the relation of digital technology and embodiment, the appropriate limits of free speech, the nature of freedom and authority in the Christian tradition, and the retrieval of a Protestant natural law ethic.
