When I was a young adult, coming of age at the turn of the millennium, my evangelical pastor often preached against moral relativism. “If anything is true, then nothing is true,” he would say, “and the world falls apart.”
Around the same time, I attended a summit, held at a conservative Christian college, that was meant to introduce college-bound students to secular philosophies and then refute them with the Bible. It was here that I received a simplistic definition of postmodernism as the rejection of absolute truth. At the time, postmodernism was often conflated with the politics of the left. After all, Democrats had excused Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct and his fast-and-loose definition of truth under oath.
Today, conspiracy theories and scientific skepticism have permeated the political right. Donald Trump’s presidency has been characterized by serial dishonesty, the bounds of which appear to know no limits. The overwhelming barrage of untruth might be the point: to list the instances in which President Trump has rewritten history and made false claims can feel both mind-numbing and hopeless. The same demographic that, 20 years ago, was adamant about truth—White evangelicals—now largely embraces what they once would have derided as relativism. Like so many other millennial evangelicals who grew up on a steady diet of anti-postmodernism, I continue to feel astounded by this moral hypocrisy.
