Post-Modernity
What is Modernity?

Some have asked, do we not have to know what modernity is before we launch into determining what post-modernity is? Indeed. Here is a definition to chew on:

Modernism…is equated with “the Enlightenment Project” as it worked its way out in philosophy, art, literature, architecture and a score of fields of human endeavor. “God is dead and man has come of age!”, modernists claimed in a stance that was characteristically humanist, secularist and rationalist. Rejecting God and the traditional supernatural explanations, modernists retained the sense of such universal transcendental norms as truth, freedom, justice, equality, progress and beauty. But they based them on purely humanist formulations as reason, science, technology and Western tradition. Man come of age therefore exuded self-confidence.
Os Guiness, Fit Bodies; Fat Minds, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1994), pp. 104-05.

Modernity sought to throw off the chains of the church and ancient ways, holding on to truth but banishing the worn our supernatural explanations. As Guiness points out this was a result of the Enlightenment. What the Enlightenment represented is best summed up by its guru, Emmanuel Kant:

Enlightenment is humanity’s departure from its self-imposed immaturity. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause is not lack of intelligence but failure of courage to think without someone else’s guidance. Dare to know! That is the slogan of the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment provided man with the vehicle to go beyond God and the conventional. Man was not longer shackled and he could measure all things by his own reason.

One more distinction need be made. The Enlightenment worked itself out as Guiness indicated in three different places in three different ways. Here is a summary:

In France, the essence of the Enlightenment—literally its raison d’etre—was reason. “Reason to the philosophe, the Encyclopedie declared was “what Grace was to the Christian”…The idea of reason defined and permeated the Enlightenment as no other idea did…The driving force of the British Enlightenment was not reason but “social virtues” or “social affections” In America, the driving force was political liberty, the motive for the Revolution and the basis of the Republic. For British moral philosophers, and for American Founders, reason was an instrument for the attainment of the larger social end, not the end itself. And for both, religion was an ally, not an enemy.
Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity, (NY, NY: Knopf, 2004),
pp. 18-19.

Reason did not dispatch religion in the U.S. Faith and reason in Britain and the U.S. has always had a relationship. Reason outlawed faith in France leading to the internal bloodshed of the French Revolution and the anti-clericalism that lead to the demise of the church in France.

So while modernism worked itself out differently in the U.S. there is still the emphasis on man and his definitions of reality instead of God’s. Just look at the man-focused, needs based, individualistic Christianity that grew in the 20th century and dominates evangelicalism today. Faith is still deemed o.k., but it must be privatized without influence in the world where we all live. There are still churches but they have no authority over believers. You can find a group of believers who cotton to your personal views of what Christianity is, even when those views are no where found in the history of Christianity. And, you do not have to answer to any authority of any kind. All you need is to be “born again”, sort of the Christian “I’m OK, you’re OK.” Its seems we are all modernists now…except for the post-modernists!