Our current cultural moment is confusing and increasingly divisive. It is also a moment of opportunity - one that we won’t be able to grasp if we think we’re still in the postmodernity of the last century. In this article I offer something of a conjecture as a framework for Christian engagement: We are now living in a new Age of Piety.
The Age that was…
I remember when I first learned about postmodernity as a young curate; someone explained the genius of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo & Juliet. This film departed from the purity of Shakespeare and offered it for a new generation. Whatever Shakespeare intended for the play, this movie made it ours. It was not through some explicit adaptation - like our parents’ Westside Story - but by the infilling of the ancient play in and beyond its original intent with our aesthetic, our angst, our meaning, our purpose. We didn’t have to hold ourselves outside of the defining story now; we had something to say!
But what was going on? It was all about truth.
In the previous age of modernity, truth lay in what was objective, rationale, propositional. In my world of theology, the task was about establishing what was literally right, codifying it into a coherent system, and asserting and applying that truthiness. I can show you the textbooks that layout doctrine like a programmatic procedure.1 Controversies could be settled by appealing to science and academic rigour; the last gasp of this was the New Atheism circuit shows.
It wasn’t a sudden shift. For myself, the experiences of charismatic and pentecostal spiritual expressions was the touchpoint. Truth wasn’t something ‘out there’ to approach by conforming to some dusty dry ‘deadwood’ intellectualism. Rather, I could find it in the connection of the Holy Spirit with the depths of my self. Truth wasn’t distant anymore. And it wasn’t lonely. Truth could be experienced - worked out and wrestled with - rather than isolated to the rational mind.
In Christian thought we were dealing less with propositional logic and more with narrative: story! It made sense: The Scriptures are full of story; they are story. Story is a landscape - just ask Tolkein who invented a world not a book! - which can be explored, studied, experienced. That’s where discipleship happens - in the biblical landscape! Bring to it the scars and learnings of your journey so far, and then wonder anew at what you behold in the light of prophet and psalmist and the divine Word himself.
In the wider world of the West, postmodernity’s ideal was pluralist freedom. Oppression was the attempt to totalise with a metanarrative; to assert a story as an asbolute definitive fremework to which you must comply. If I use my words to define you and demand you play a certain role, I am not speaking truth I am simply exerting power. This power, including the historic privileges of Christendom, should therefore be deconstructed. We now all bring our words, our semantics, our story, our truth. So, at our best, you do you, and I’ll be me.
Philosopher Charles Taylor called this the ‘Age of Authenticity.’ Locating truth in our own interior was more than ‘egoism and the mere search for pleasure […] but a large-scale shift in general understandings of the good.’2 This ‘culture of authenticity’ is that each one of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own.’3
Christian mission adapted. The church plant we were involved with during that era turned away from modernistic seeker-sensitive commercial principles and expressed it something like this: ‘No matter how people find us, they must encounter authenticity; even if they think we are weird, they must at least be moved by the fact that we believe it.’ Throughout this age, free from its Christendom dock, and robustly floating on its own, the Christian story could be held, spoken, and heard. Jesus declared himself to be the truth. His was a metanarrative that was total, but not totalising. Invitation was part of the story: ‘Come and know me. Taste and see. Enter my landscape; see what I see.’
That age is no more.
Rocking of Ages
Postmodernity has collapsed in on itself. In some ways it was inevitable because ultrarelativism is inherently incoherent. If everybody’s truth is ‘their’ truth from their own private experience - including the very sense of words and images and history - then how, in the end, do we actually talk to each other? Communication requires agreed upon protocols and encapsulations of meaning, like language and grammar. If these are deconstructed to the point of no longer being held in common, then we end up talking past each other. Society coagulates into semantically-demarcated tribes.
This was the difference between, say, the 1990’s, and the 2010’s: The postmodern relativism of the 1990’s existed, but whether we liked it or not, it was within some often unacknowledged set of fundamental absolutes. We at least shared some semantic building blocks. I explored this a decade ago, at the time when one of the last of these human axioms - sex and gender - was being deconstructed: Eunuchs, Semantics, and the Theological Divide
The Age of Authenticity is not surviving this. To use a political phrase, the centre of common ground is shallow. As we invite discourse and pursue the natural inclination to live in society, we look for it. We appeal to things such as ‘common human decency’, ‘human rights,’ ‘tolerance,’ ‘love,’ ‘compassion,’ ‘justice,’ or even ‘British values.’ But these former common senses are now contested; claimed by each tribe, and used to dominate the definition of truth and virtue. At the heights of covid and at the end of Trump One, I reflected on this: Speed Wobbles in the World and the Church. The intensity has only increased since then.
What has emerged is not the postmodern ideal; we do not have an harmonious polyvalent swelling of authentic selves held in a equitable homegenity of creativity and experience. We don’t even have a society of warring tribes, occasionally held in peace by some neutral necessity or authority; whose power would define that? What we have is competing empires of people who will deconstruct everybody except themselves: demarcated, bounded, protected, and advanced by a renewal of absolutism.
We have reached a post-postmodernity. We have our metanarrative, and we will totally totalise you with it. Insert slogans here.
So what now?
The Age of (Re)Piety
If we were in the Age of Authenticity, it is my conjecture that we are in - or moving towards - a new Age of Piety, a Repiety perhaps.
In my mind, it is a movement from and to the authenticity of earlier.
The first movement is from - it is outwards. Self-referential authenticity has created a deficit of realism. The location of truth within our own personal experience, while authentic to ourselves, also detaches us from anything else. That includes the rootedness of heritage and history, and the connectedness of community and accountability. Having given up and deconstructed institutions and power structures, we are left with only the guidance and belonging of our own hands. We long to be held.
Phenomena such as the so-called Quiet Revival and the anecdotal increase in religous enquiry and commitment, especially by younger generations, reflect this, I think. The four pillar questions of any worldview are being asked: epistemology (how do I know anything?), ontology (who am I?), teleology (what’s my purpose?), and eschatology (what landscape of history holds me and moves me?) As a Christian, I can trust that this increased thirst for belonging is a work of the Holy Spirit. The answers that were always there in the Spirit’s work in church and society are being re-encountered. Couched as a prayer, it is a petition to the Spirit of Revelation. Perhaps Paul’s prayers in Ephesians 1:15-23 have continued to be asked, and have been answered.
The dynamic, in the best sense of the word, is a pious one, even beyond the religious space: ‘Connect me to something ancient, give me the right thing to be devoted to, and provide me a path of discipline and purpose. Give me a narrative outside of myself that is bigger than me and doesn’t depend on me; show me the path of true devotion.’ In this way worldviews and metanarratives are increasingly being held piously. Positions are taken with religious zeal and markers of purity are policed with increasing vigour. Each tribe has its legends and stories, its saints and its infidels, its heresies and anathemas, and certainly its excommunications. Neutral ground is disappearing.
Which brings us to the second movement, which is inwards. As the location of our meaning and truth increasingly resides outside ourselves - within a structure that imparts meaning, and coalesces community - we define our authenticity by our alignment to it, i.e. by our loyalty.
This is not inherently negative! Again, from the Christian perspective, our defining dynamic is to pray to our Heavenly Father: ‘Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’ We find this coheres with blessing and purpose, not just within our individual selves as we are more closely aligned to the way of Christ, but as it pertains to fellowship, community, and our engagement with society.
More widely, and certainly in the Western context, this loyalty dynamic has allowed greater room for the participation and influence of more communal cultures. It has also matched the increase influence of more socialist frames, including the intersectional framing of different communities by varying degrees of privilege and oppression. In a positive sense we see this manifest in language such as ‘allyship’ and, negatively, in container-phrases such as ‘-ist’ and ‘-phobia’ suffixes to determine opponents. The most obvious manifestation is in the increasing contention of flags. Flags are the symbols of loyalty and allegiance. So whether it be St. George’s flags or Pride flags, red-green-white-black or red-white-and-blue, these connote that our truth - our sense of rightness or wrongness - is found by being marked by a collective.
Now, to be sure, I don’t think we have simply reverted back to modernity - despite the reprise of late of some decidely 20th Century ideologies. Our notion of truth is still fundamentally experiential - often mediated and amplified by social media - rather than modernistically rational. What has changed, I think, is how we evaluate the authenticity of our experiencee and how we weigh, measure, and perceive them. This is often limited by blindspots and projections. The measure is still subjective to self, but measured by collective markers dogmatically defined. At its best, in modernity, you could argue and persuade someone to change their mind; now someone’s position - their loyalty - is hard to shift, and only a dramatic experience is likely to.
But so what?
If my conjecture is correct - and I’m very happy for it to be torn to shreds, just show your working - there are implications for how Christian mission and hope might be held and pursued in the midst of this Age of Repiety.
Firstly, as Christians, we should rejoice. We have a great wealth of heritage and history. We have a way of life that has weathered all number of historical realities, both pleasant and difficult. The fellowship of Christians includes those that have gone before, and the full river of those who are pursuing Jesus in their various places now. In Christ we have a home; and by the Spirit of Christ, it is a home with an open door, and room at the table. If this Age of Repiety in the West increases the accessibility of that, then let us rejoice and certainly not be ashamed of it by confecting experiences to try and be ‘relevant.’ Our Lord is real, and is made real through Word, Sacrament, and the ministrations of the Spirit. That is experience enough; we need only seek what he has already given us.
Secondly, we should recognise that the Christian identity is inherently trans-tribal. Historically it has always drawn from across the divisons; tax-collector and zealot, Jew and Gentile, citizen and barbarian, East and West. God is not the European God, or anyone’s really; He simply Is. Christian belonging is not about birthright, or secondary allegiance, but to Christ alone. At the end, around the throne of God, from every tribe and tongue, will be those who are currently situated at every point in the current culture wars. If we draw our boundaries in the same place as other tribes - we lose our vocation as peacemakers, and hope-offerers. So let’s not fly their flags.
Thirdly, and relatedly, when acting prophetically - i.e. pursuing and advocating for justice and truth - we should come as ourselves, on our own terms, open and transparent and showing our working. It is Western arrogance - and stupidity, and, in the end, tyranny - to assume that there is a baseline enlightened metanarrative to which all reasonable people can and must adhere; it is part of our blindness and why our institutions - and certainly our politics - are diverging from cultural reality. When it comes to dialogue and communication outside of our own community we can no longer assume common meanings. In this age, when different worldviews meet in the integrity of themselves, they must negotiate their own common ground. Therefore, we must know where we stand, definitively and positively, and where we do not. In short, we must have our own house in order, and with confidence, be willing and able to give a full account of the hope that is within us, and where that might invite others.
More thoughts will emerge. Watch this space.
Louis Berkhof of course.
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 475
Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 486