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.
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Brad Littlejohn, Ph.D., is a Fellow in EPPC’s Evangelicals in Civic Life Program, where his work focuses on helping public leaders understand the intellectual and historical foundations of our current breakdown of public trust, social cohesion, and sound governance. His research investigates shifting understandings of the nature of freedom and authority, and how a more full-orbed conception of freedom, rooted in the Christian tradition, can inform policy that respects both the dignity of the individual and the urgency of the common good. He also serves as President of the Davenant Institute.
