Other than much of the popular music of the 1990s (from Kurt Cobain to Eminem), postmodernism remained largely a scholar’s game. Professors and students might tut-tut about there being nothing outside the text but, for ideas to escape the academy for the real world, humans need more than abstractions.
It was the evolution of Critical Theory that gave flesh to the fundamental assumptions of postmodernism. As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay describe in their book, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody, what began as a new way to interpret texts mutated into a quest “to reconstruct society in the image of an ideology.” Proponents of Critical Theory are as adamantly against the powerful imposing their views on the oppressed as any postmodernist was. However, with a strongly moralistic streak, they insist that all views must be conformed to theirs, and they will use their newly acquired cultural power to punish anyone who fails to comply.
What we’re left with is a directionless, insatiable demand to combat injustice and oppression but without any means to say that one moral claim is better than another. Attempts to find or forge common ground between people or communities are cynically seen as a quest for power and oppression.
In the end, as fun as it is to tease our friends in France about the ideas that were birthed on their shores, they are right about the dangers of Critical Theory, especially when it comes to those core French ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity and their hope in the universal rights of a universal humanity.
Like Postmodernism and Critical Theory, Christianity also objects to the failed promises of the Enlightenment and Modernism. Christianity, however, is hopeful, not cynical.
Rather than reducing life to a constant battle for status and power, Christianity offers the only historically solid ground for unity or progress. In the imago Dei, Christianity tethers universal human dignity and justice. In the doctrine of the Fall, we can make sense of power and oppression. Within the framework of redemption, we have hope for a life propelled by love, not universal, unending, unwinnable competition.
This framework tasks Christ-followers to work for justice but to be driven by mercy. We are called to love our neighbor, not see them as the hated “other.” In other words, the Christian ethic provides the passion and foundation for a better humanity and a more just world, the very things which postmodernism and its offspring sought but could never find.
