I Don’t Think We’re in Kansas Anymore, Toto! Postmodernism in Our Everyday Lives

Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, some in the church feel as if they have been spun around in a cultural tornado that has left them so disoriented that about all they can do is echo her puzzlement: “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto!” The term “postmodernism” is often used to denote the new state in which we find ourselves. And while it occurs in our everyday speech more often than the state name “North Dakota,” it was not that long ago that its use was confined to a relatively small group of continental philosophers. In fact, the first time I recall seeing it in popular print was in an advertisement to describe the movie Pulp Fiction.

Still, the term has been around for some time. Though its origins are debated, it appears as early as the 1930s. But the consensus seems to be that its current use began in the 1970s.1 Even so, there is no one definition of the term, which is actually quite postmodern in itself.2 We will use it here to refer to a cultural phenomenon that has discernible features. We are going to paint with a wide brush and swipe with broad strokes, but we should finish with a fairly good understanding of the state in which the church’s house has landed.

The “Modern” in Postmodernism

If nothing else, postmodernism refers to the fact that we are no longer in the Kansas of modernity anymore. That means we must first understand something of “modernity” if we are going to get a handle on postmodernity.

Modernism takes us back to the Enlightenment, lodged primarily in the eighteenth century, but stretching from seventeenth-century Descartes through Kant to Hegel and the Romantics in the nineteenth century.

This period followed the premodern period of “superstition,” blood fanaticism, and religious wars, all based on the excesses and prejudicial commitments of particular religious traditions (such as various forms of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism). Folks like Descartes and Kant attempted to establish culture and life on a universal objective foundation that is beyond dispute, that all human beings can agree on, and that gives us some certainty about truth and reality. Only then can we live in peace and make progress as the dignified humans we are.

In the modern project one does not need to rely on particular religious traditions and specific historic communities to know the truth. The human individual’s reason can know the ultimate reality and absolute truth that transcends all cultures, all times, and all places. They are just there waiting to be discovered. Such confidence is enshrined in our Constitution’s familiar line: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.” Through confidence in Reason (not just an individual’s rational capacity, but a universal rationality which we all share) humans can understand the cosmos, establish social peace, and improve living conditions.

Behind this confidence lay a relationship between the individual human person and the universe that was put forth by Galileo, Descartes, and others—namely, there is the thinking human on the one hand and the non-thinking, machine-like universe outside of the human, waiting to be known by objective observation and pliable to human technology.

Except for a rationalistic deistic unitarianism, confessional religion was relegated to the private world, since it was thought to be a matter of opinion or tradition.3 Deism was thought to be a religion to which all reasonable folks could and should subscribe: it required only belief in a creator who set in motion a machine of a universe, programmed with moral instructions accessible to the thinking person, for which he would be held accountable in some afterlife. Miracles were not needed; the machine worked quite nicely on its own, and, in any case, no rational person could take seriously the miracles recorded in the Bible. A child of such Enlightenment thinking, Thomas Jefferson clipped stories of Jesus’ miracles from his copy of the gospel accounts, but lauded Christ’s moral teachings.

The “Post” in Postmodernism

Until recently, the modernist agenda held sway in the West, with only minor disruptions from time to time. But a new paradigm had been brewing a “postmodernism” dominated popular culture.

No longer is truth “out there” waiting to be discovered. All knowledge is system-dependent and culturally bound. There is no neutral, timeless, self-evident foundational truth available to anyone or that gives us absolute certainty about anything. The Augustinian dictum “All truth is God’s truth” has come to mean “Everybody’s truth is God’s truth.” It all depends on how one looks at it. As scholars ranging from Thomas Kuhn to Parker Palmer to Lesslie Newbigin point out, even the scientist is not some neutral intellect unlocking secrets from the stuff she studies; she brings a certain perspective with her to her studies which colors her interpretation and even her observation of the data.4 Not only has reason been demoted from its role as the unbiased discoverer of objective truth, it turns out that it is not all it was cracked up to be. Enlightened reason and the knowledge it brought is not an uncompromised good. Wars have not stopped, and knowledge of the atom allows us to cook not only our food, but also whole cities.

What we are left with is reason that is molded by its social location. How and what human beings know is affected by their ethnicity, gender, socio-economic group, and so on. Furthermore, the postmodern regards as naive the Galileo/Cartesian depiction of the knower who stands aloof from the object of knowledge which she is observing. Knowledge comes through a relationship with the object of knowledge, whether the object is a person or molecules.5 The knower should also be fully engaged; that is, knowledge comes through holistic means—not just through reason, but also through emotions, intuition, embodiment.

A good example of this occurred one evening as my wife and I visited our son’s high school classes on the annual “curriculum night.” In his math class the teacher wrote a problem on the board and asked the parents to solve it. Those who got the answer right were asked how they arrived at the answer. When he came to one woman, she responded, “It just felt right.”

What contributed to this shift? There are intellectual factors. Individuals and schools of thought in philosophy and literary criticism account for some of the genesis of what is now popularly described as postmodernism. The influences of past thinkers such as Nietzsche and Freud must be considered. But more to the point are Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, and Stanley Fish. As a school, deconstructionism (a strategy of reexamining the presuppositions of a text in order to uncover contradictions and confusions inherent in the text) is also important. Some of this reading is rough going for the novice, but there are some handy summaries.6 Cultural factors cannot be ignored. For example, the technological revolution we have experienced in the twentieth century has shrunk the world but expanded our awareness. It was rare for someone from the U.S. to have travelled to an African or Asian country where life and thought radically differed; today it takes only hours on a comfortable jet to find oneself disoriented in Khartoum or Delhi.7 Add to this the information explosion through an electronic web that is world wide. The world that felt so comfortable, so manageable, is now overwhelming and often unfamiliar. Perhaps this in part accounts for the rapid cultural change we seem to experience. Enlightenment universal acultural reason begins to look quaint at best, an illusion at worst.

Perhaps the most profound cultural change is the proliferation of choice. The paradigmatic icon of choice is the VCR. Once the television set forced unification: we had to watch what all others wanted to watch at the time the networks determined at their speed and with their accompanying commercials. Now one can watch what she wants to watch while everyone else can still watch the competing program, and she can watch it when she wants and at any speed she desires, with or without commercials. But the VCR is not the only icon of choice. Again, there is one’s personal involvement with the Web. Cable proliferates. Perhaps most revealing is the grocery store: in 1976 the average American supermarket carried 9000 items, whereas in 1996 it carried 30,000 items; the cereal aisle alone is enough proof.8 This proliferation of choice led Alan Ehrenhalt to lament:

Too many of the things we do in our lives, large and small, have come to resemble channel surfing, marked by a numbing and seemingly endless progression from one option to the next, all without the benefit of a chart, logistical or moral, because there are simply too many choices and no one to help sort them out. We have nothing to insulate ourselves against the perpetual temptation to try one more choice, rather than to live with what is on the screen in front of us.9

The shift to a postmodern paradigm has been made easier in the U.S. by the breakdown of a Constantinian alliance between the culture and Christianity. The Christian paradigm is no longer the prevailing religious or moral view in the United States today, and it probably will never be again. This is obvious. In the 1950s it was American to be “Christian” and “Christian” to be American. As I drove by the grounds of a vocational school last December I noticed the huge sign that wished the passers-by “Happy Holidays.” It occurred to me that a few decades ago that sign would have read “Merry Christmas.”

For these factors and more, modernity’s claim to ground life in universally accessible and defensible common knowledge turns out to be illusory. Subscription to a universal rational point of view, a universal morality, and a universal religious truth has expired. What is left? To answer that, we turn to a description of the postmodern state in which we have landed.

Crucial Characteristics of Postmodernism in Everyday Life

1. The rejection of a “master narrative”

The dismissal of a universal acultural point of view means that for postmodernism there are no master narratives; there are no metanarratives that define reality or history for all people at all times. Instead, we celebrate centerlessness, diversity, choice. To claim there is a master narrative is seen as oppressive.

Because of a book I had co-edited entitled More Than One Way?, I was invited to be a guest on an evening talk show in the Chicago area. With me were a Jewish rabbi, a Muslim imam, and a Catholic theologian. The question of the evening was “Who gets into heaven and why?” At the end of the first half-hour, the Jewish host asked me if, based on John 14:6, I thought that he, the rabbi, and the Muslim were going to be in heaven. After twice protesting that it was not my place to be the judge, I was pressed until I had to admit that it was only through Jesus Christ that a person is saved. The rabbi turned on me, incredulous that in the 1990s anyone would hold such a view, particularly in light of the Holocaust. For him, my insistence on a metanarrative—a normative reading of salvation history— was an oppressive view of Holocaust proportions. For the next hour and a half I was seen as the oppressor and he was the victim.

Lesslie Newbigin is right when, using sociologist Peter Berger’s categories, he states that the only “plausibility structure” in place today is the insistence that there is no socially accepted plausibility structure. And the one who says otherwise is a “heretic.”10

2. The authority of the self

In place of a master narrative is the authority of the autonomous self.11 The self is the source of truth and reality. Nothing else should interfere. As Roger Lundin points out, we live in “an age that believes that freedom will make you true.”12 All selves are autonomous. Our world is a fragmented, chaotic, arbitrary amalgamation of multiple selves. Gone is the Enlightenment’s claim that there is a universal human nature, a universal humanity, a universal self.

If each self is autonomous to construct its own reality and truth, then we must respect others who define themselves. In postmodernism there is an acute awareness of the “other.” Again, this is a consequence of the fact that there is no metanarrative, no universal way of interpreting things. Each December equal respect must be paid to Hanukkah, Christmas, and Kwanza. And so we live by the dictum of “political correctness” and use “pc language,” all buttressed by the supreme virtues of niceness and civility. All selves have an equal voice and, more importantly, all are considered equally valid. As Derrida has suggested, the primary form of postmodern discourse is the collage.

3. The power of language

There is, then, no one way of looking at anything. Our lives together are fragmented into a plurality of views. Meaning and truth are not “out there” waiting to be discovered; they are social constructions created by groups that share a common tradition or perspective—collectives of like-minded selves. But some of these groups manage to gain a privileged status, silencing or marginalizing the views of others and insisting that their interpretation of reality and truth is the only true one. This is the oppressiveness we have mentioned above, and, as we have pointed out, postmodernism insists that a master narrative is really just one of many equally valid interpretations of reality. In fact, there are many realities—as many as there are perceptions. Even concepts such as “rational” and “justice” are up for grabs. Those who pretentiously define the terms for everyone else are the “victors.” Postmodernism claims that the entire cultural and social history of the “victims” is ignored, denied, or brought into line with the dominant narrative of the victor. The victim is, therefore, implicitly labeled by the victor a deviant or simply wrong. So knowledge of reality is not the discovery of what is waiting to be grasped in the same way by everyone. In the most radical senses of postmodernism, reality has to do with who has the power. For example, do we call what gestates in the womb of a pregnant woman a “fetus” or a “baby”? Is the termination of the pregnancy “abortion” or “murder”? Thus we learn to appreciate the power of language.

We create reality with words that we use for pragmatic purposes. Language and symbols do not represent truth. Language is used to tell stories that rearrange information to describe whatever reality a person or group is constructing. Richard Rorty put it this way: “Anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed.”

4. The construction of reality

Now it should be obvious that what is perhaps most characteristic of postmodernism is its emphasis on the social construction of reality. This is poignantly portrayed in Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway. Several times in the movie scriptwriters insist, “An artist creates his own moral universe.” The trouble is that the artist must then learn to live by the rules of the moral universe he has created. The protagonist in the movie—a young scriptwriter who has sold out to a gangster-turned-producer and his “leading lady” girlfriend who cannot act—becomes entangled in a moral universe he creates in hopes of reversing his artistic failures. After compromisng his craft, ruining his relationship with his steady, and learning of the homicidal elimination of the artistically-challenged gangster’s girlfriend, he finally rejects the fabricated moral universe and submits to the one that he found himself thrust into all along. In a final scene of reconciliation with his original girlfriend he admits: “I know two things: I’m not an artist, and I love you. Now I’m free.”

But one’s own construction of reality is not always rejected in the end. In the Italian film Big Night, after two brothers realize that their supposed friend, neighbor, and competing restaurateur has ruined their business with a ruse, the competitor defiantly announces, “I am a businessman. I can be anything I want to be at any time.” And in Star Trek: The Generations, where virtual reality turns a spaceship hurling through the galaxy into a tall ship sailing through the high seas, there is no moral responsibility in the end: Captain Kirk can simply go back in time and replay an event in which he acted less than virtuous until he gets it the way he wants it. In the recent movie Matrix we witness both the computerized construction of reality by machines and the attempt to sabotage such a construction by a small minority of quasi-religious human remnants.

5. The priority of images

In the construction of reality images are important, whether one is courting sympathy in a murder trial, invading an enemy who is as another “Hitler,” slipping in sound bites and irrepressible images in a political campaign, or capturing a family vacation on video tape. The trouble is that in something like the last example one often misses an underlying reality of relationships that is taking place before one’s eyes while trying to get it just right on tape so that it will play well in the family room a year later. That is the essential message in the movie Reality Bites: a young woman is so caught up in her attempt to construct a filmed image of her friends’ daily lives and interactions that she finds herself unaware of the relationships in which she is embroiled with the objects of her movie.

Language and video do not convey what is, but fabricate “what really is.” It is true: when the storm dumps you in some state other than Kansas, perceptions are reality. The lines between fantasy and fact begin to be erased. Pretty soon everything becomes a continuous interpretation of (and debate about) words. Words refer to words. Even the word “is” might be up for grabs!

6. The importance of management and therapy

It should come as no surprise that in the postmodern state the important occupations are the manager and the therapist. The pragmatic postmodernist seeks to manage her experience and environment in the interests of a “manipulatable sense of well being.”13 The concern is self-improvement and a comfortableness with one’s self over against the ethical ultimates and obligations imposed by “universal truth.” Rabbi Kushner’s book How Good Do We Have to Be? assures us that God only expects us to be pretty good. (At least Dennis Rodman is honest. About the same time as the rabbi published his book, Rodman published Bad As I Wanna Be. I suggested to my local Border’s that they display the books side-by-side!) Even churches are caught up in the cultural shift. The pastor’s chamber used to be referred to as a “study”; today it is more often called the pastor’s “office.” In fact, many churches have resorted to psychologizing the gospel to meet self-centered, consumer-oriented, media-induced “felt needs.” Proof came in my mailbox one day: relatives sent a church’s Easter-season brochure announcing its offerings. While there was not a single Bible study or prayer group listed, there were courses on managing finances, grief, divorces, medical emergencies, anger, and potty training.

What Should the Church’s Response Be When It’s Blown Out of Kansas?

Christian responses to postmodernism run the gamut. Some insist we should return to the Kansas of modernism and rediscover universal reason and a common reality. Others have settled into the new territory and are getting used to the exilic conditions, adopting postmodernism as their new home. It is probably best to see postmodernism in our everyday lives as both a challenge and an opportunity for the church.

First, the church must realize the shifts have taken place.

Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon indict the contemporary church in their book Resident Aliens for blithely carrying on as if modernism and the American-Christian metanarrative were still in place. While the indictment hit closer to home in 1989 when the book came out than it does in the undeniably pluralistic atmosphere we now breathe, there is still a lot of catching up to do in the church. For one of the authors, the shift took place as early as a Sunday evening in 1963, when the Fox Theatre in Greenville, South Carolina opened for the first time on a Sunday:

On that night, Greenville, South Carolina—the last pocket of resistance to secularity in the Western world—served notice that it would no longer be a prop for the church. There would be no free passes for the church, no more free rides. The Fox Theater went head to head with the church over who would provide the worldview for the young. That night in 1963, the Fox Theater won the opening skirmish.14

What one critic recently said of a divinity school in Chicago unfortunately applies to many evangelical and conservative churches: “Someone has got to tell them that the Enlightenment is over.”

Second, the church should welcome postmodern’s overthrow of modernism’s confidence in unaided human reason.

The Gospel is not something that can be known by everyone merely through human reason. Paul makes this clear in I Corinthians 1:18-2:16. In the modernist climate of the past it may have been a wise strategy to approach people with rational arguments for the truth of Christianity and its morality, believing that any rational person who was not simply stubborn would accept the Gospel as the only guide to belief and practice. We often defended our beliefs and practices in terms of some publicly acceptable criteria of truth. The trouble was, until postmodernism came along we did not readily recognize the fact that we had made reason the final arbiter of truth and morality. And, along with that, we were so confident in human reason that we assumed we could achieve a rational certainty about Christian beliefs and practice.

An unfortunate side-effect of this was that our articulation of Christian doctrine and our Christian practice looked a lot more like Western reasoning (specifically, U.S.) than Christian reasoning, so that, for example, we reinterpreted the “hard sayings” of Jesus about turning the other cheek and a camel getting through the eye of a needle. Even our idea of the Christian-sanctioned “traditional” family, which we took to be a timeless, acultural paradigm, really turned out to be a concept dictated more by late nineteenth century and early twentieth century industrial America. As Rodney Clapp argues, postmodernism gives the church an opportunity to recover the particular Christian understanding of the family.15 Unlike those in the “Jesus Seminar” who have not yet heard that the Enlightenment is over and still operate as if modernism were the reigning paradigm, postmodernism should help us to realize what has always been true in orthodox Christianity—namely, that the truth of Christianity and its morality is not accessible to mere reason. The Christian’s perspective on God, humans, morality, and so forth is dictated by a very distinctive and particular point of view—that of Jesus Christ. The postmodern demotion of reason frees us to echo with the Apostle Paul that spiritual truths are only known by the spiritually minded; they cannot be known by the natural mind (I Cor 2:14-16). We must therefore take responsibility as the church to live out before a watching world a distinctive understanding of what it means to be “rational” and “moral”—an understanding not necessarily shared by all people.

A caution is in order at this point. In accepting postmodernism’s rejection of modernist optimism about reason we cannot slip to the other extreme and abandon all rational scrutiny, seeing Christianity as just one more option among equally valid religions. Many in the postmodern camp would want us to do just that. But the claim that all religions are pointing to the same God and talking about the same salvation is itself an intolerant metanarrative—what Alister McGrath calls an “intellectual Stalinism”:

The days when it was possible to regard Christianity [or any other particular religion] as simply a local manifestation of a universal category of “religion” are long since past, despite the fact that this view is maintained on life-support systems throughout religious study facilities in North America.16

This came home to me when I sat on a panel at the national headquarters of the Theosophical Society discussing the assigned topic “Many Paths, One Reality” with a Buddhist monk, a Jain, and a Sikh. With a recitation of the Christian story, I attempted to make it clear that we were not talking about the same God (if about any god at all), nor were we talking about the same concept of salvation; in fact, our views were often contradictory (such as the Christian and Buddhist assessment of human suffering). Still, the moderator, who was the Society’s leader, summarized each presenter’s religion with observations of similarities in order to remind the audience that, in the end, we were all speaking about the same reality. (Actually, the moderator was forging an interesting amalgamation of modernist and postmodernist agenda. Though it’s another paper, the case can be made that we in the U.S. still have modernist “hangovers,” such as our belief in progress, coupled with characteristics of our cultural postmodernism.)

So, while we want to avoid either extreme with reference to reason, neither enthroning it and equipping it with universally accessible truths nor dismissing it as if it were merely a social construction, we can appreciate the fact that postmodernism forces us to examine ourselves and ask whether we have construed Christianity in North American white terms. We must listen to other voices, since there is no one human voice as modernism advertised.

Third, the church must learn and teach the metanarrative of Christianity.

Now we have come to the point at which the church cannot compromise with postmodernism. We cannot apologize for the Christian metanarrative claims about God as creator, about humans as fallen in sin, about Christ as the normative revelation of God, about redemption as solely available in Christ, and about the coming renewal of the creation when the Kingdom of God is a completed reality. In other words, the world does not call the church into question, forcing it to answer the world’s agenda; the church calls the world into question with the master narrative of the gospel.17 We are like the hero in a Walker Percy novel who is always a “bubble and a half off plumb”—we look strange to a world that has become comfortable with itself because we see the world in a different way, in the light of a defining story that embraces all time and all things (Eph 1:3-23).

In part, the church’s job is to teach people to understand what they cannot and do not understand through mere human reason or intuition. The incarnation is not only God entering into our world as a resident, but entering into it as an alien. For example, Jesus spoke in parables to make his teachings clearer and also to hide his teachings. If the culture understands everything we do in worship, if the culture can make complete sense of our Christian practice, if the culture can understand our proclamation of a grace that cannot be earned, then we should probably be worried that we have not insisted on our metanarrative enough. The church lives its life and professes its faith in a way incomprehensible apart from the God revealed in Jesus Christ. Our morality does not make sense outside of the church and Jesus’ vision of life. To the watching and listening world, severed from our master narrative, our actions and words look and sound like a foreign culture and foreign language.

By the way, learning a foreign language and its culture is much easier when we are children. The church must teach the Christian metanarrative to its children. That we are not doing a good job is easily demonstrated. Ask your church-bred high school youth to put the following events in the correct order:

• Judah is taken captive by Babylon.
• Moses leads God’s people out of Egypt.
• David becomes king of Judah.
• Isaac is born.

Or, if you think the Old Testament is too tough, broaden the exam:

• The prophets speak to Israel and Judah.
• People speak in tongues on Pentecost.
• God makes promises to Abraham.
• Christ dies for our sins.

This should not be a tough quiz for kids who take AP exams in U.S. and world history. The question is: Whose master story are our kids learning best and fashioning their lives after? What single event is their interpretive key to understanding history—the Holocaust, the American Revolution, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, or Kurt Cobain’s suicide? By teaching the story, language, and practice of the master narrative centered in Christ we can help those in the church make sense of life; we can give them a sense of coherence in a fragmented, decentralized world.

Fourth, the church must live and talk as a witness in the courtroom of the public world18

Refusing to compromise our commitment to the Gospel metanarrative does not mean that the church is not obligated to understand the postmodern culture in which we live and to which we must effectively communicate the Christian message. But it does mean that we can no longer defend the faith the “old-fashioned” way. Rationalistic, evidentialist arguments for God’s existence or Jesus’ resurrection have had their place, but they will no longer be effective with someone like the parent who “felt” her answer to the math problem was right. We live in a culture where only 28% of Americans believe that there is “absolute truth,” and the majority believe that two contradictory statements can be true at the same time.19 The Christian story is rooted in history and refers to real events, but communicating that history and reality can no longer be done as if people will accept our claims if only they were rational in their thinking. In fact, we must first convince those in our postmodern culture that we have something that needs to be heard that cannot be heard anywhere else; then, we can suggest that it might ultimately be true. John Stackhouse Jr. put it this way: we must argue for the plausibility of Christianity before we argue the credibility of Christianity.20 And to do this the church must make the biblical story evident in all aspects of its life. Since we are not in Kansas anymore, we cannot be satisfied with a rational defense of our doctrinal confessions; we must go further and live out the doctrine we confess. (This is precisely what Elizabeth Achtemeier called us to in the previous issue of Theology Matters).

Fifth, the church might have to be an alternative culture at times.

The crucial question that is before us is how we are going to make the narrative that we believe to be true compelling for all? How are we going to witness to the God of Abraham and Jesus without that witness collapsing into the vortex of postmodernism?

It could be the case that the church’s most effective witness in this postmodern culture might involve being less concerned about the relevance of the church at times and more concerned about the truth of the Gospel in a culture that is pluralistic, consumer oriented, and infatuated with managerial and therapeutic approaches to life. We need a strategy that is relevant to our postmodern culture, while we maintain the purity of the Gospel.

We are not in Kansas anymore. And unlike Dorothy, no matter how hard we wish nor how many times we tap our red shoes, there is no “home” to which we can go back. For the church there is only the Kingdom way forward.

This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Jul/Aug 1999).