post-modernism

It's hard to understand the movement from modernism to post-modernism until you realise that there are two different ways of defining modernism, and post-modernism is more a response to the kind of modernism that it seems more remote from. 

There was the modernism of the early twentieth century, which was basically about questioning everything and embracing the idea that you could do things in different ways. Like, a chair doesn't have to have four legs and a back rest...literature doesn't have to conform to established patterns and formulae...that's modernism. 

Then, post-modernism came after that, but post-modernism is less a continuation of that questioning process (although it can be regarded as that, in a way) and more a reaction against a much broader and older trend that is also called modernism, which grew out of the enlightenment and the scientific revolution. That form of modernism is about the primacy of reason. Post-modernism questions things that used to be considered absolutes - objectivity, morality and truth. Post-modernism embraces relativism. It's easy to see how that is incompatible with Christianity, and in fact Christian thinkers have been very vocal and prolific critics of post-modernism. and in the same argument, post-modernism is often (in some ways rightly) associated with critical theory. 

it seems like history is a series of reactions back and forth, but it's not that simple. In relation to religion, post-modernism is more of a continuation of modernism than it is a reaction against it. One of the ideas that drove the enlightenment was that the old grand narrative(s) - which were based in religion - should be superseded by reason. But then, when post-modernism rejected the primacy of reason, it also rejected religion and the idea of moral good and evil being objective realities. 

Because, from a post-modern point of view, modernism - even with all of its talk about the primacy of reason - was still subject to the old narratives and paradigms. I think that's true. Isaac Newton, for example, was a devout Christian. 

But I think there's actually a positive way of viewing post-modernism, even from a Christian point of view. Because, in Newton's day, being a Christian was just the 'done thing' - it was hardwired into the DNA of society. What post-modernism does, with its intense scepticism and its representation of other ways of thinking about the world, is that it gives us a choice. It's socially acceptable in today's world, to not be a Christian, or not even to believe in God, and there's a sense in which that makes being a Christian a more meaningful thing - because you've chosen it.