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If you've been to a conference on the state of the church in the last five years, chances are you've heard it said that while we live in a postmodern world, the church is still largely stuck with assumptions and practices shaped by modernity. That's the thesis of A New Kind of Christian (Jossey-Bass), by Brian McLaren, the founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in the Washington- Baltimore area. What follows here is the first in a series of three responses to McLaren's book, after which McLaren himself will respond. Next issue: Mark Dever, pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church.
There is something quintessentially American—not to mention modern—about the title of Brian McLaren's book. St. Luke famously described the citizens of Athens as "spending their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new." Imagine what he would have said about the denizens of advanced consumer capitalism, for whom the pursuit of novelty has become a veritable patriotic obligation. We spend our time not so much telling or hearing, as buying and selling, a new kind of everything under the sun.
The first chapters of A New Kind of Christian don't entirely ward off such skepticism. Neo, the book's Caribbean American postmodern muse, leads off with a series of admitted "gross oversimplification[s]" that recite the now-familiar case for postmodernity. (Neo, by the way, joins a host of spirit guides of African descent in recent popular culture, from Will Smith in The Legend of Bagger Vance to Whoopie Goldberg and Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix. The significance of these enigmatic characters, almost always helping a white Everyman come to terms with his past and his destiny, is worth pondering.) According to Neo, the modern era was characterized by, among other distinctives, conquest and control, secular science, objectivity, the monolithic organization and nation-state, individualism, and consumerism. (No real exploration here of how individualism and monolithic organizations managed to flourish side by side.) Postmodernity, then, will be "postconquest, postmechanistic, postanalytical, postsecular, postobjective, postcritical, postorganizational, postindividualistic, post-Protestant, and postconsumerist."
Well, it all depends on what you mean by post. In his less careful moments, Neo seems to take post to mean non or anti, and that is certainly too simple. As I write, a massive military force is converging on Central Asia to achieve conquest and control on the behalf of a secular, consumer-oriented nation-state, buttressed by a flood of public and private analysis and critical thought—and even if ultimate conquest and control may be elusive, that will make us no less modern than Europe in the unstable years between the World Wars.
It would not have been unusual, before September 11, to hear postmodernistas explaining that patriotism and civic duty were decaying features of the "modern" era, soon to be eclipsed on the one hand by Pico Iyer's "global souls" and by their anarchic wto-bashing opponents on the other. But anyone who sold short the shares of flag-makers has been sorely disappointed. Postmodernism, as Neo defines it, bears more than a passing resemblance to nineteenth-century Romanticism, and there's ample recent evidence that a modernist is a Romantic who's just been mugged by history.
Still, there are many reasons to agree that conquest, mechanism, analysis, secularity, and the rest have lost some of their totemic power, even if the average cubicle-dweller remains firmly in their grip. Witness the unintentional hilarity of 1950s-era instructional science films, with their stentorian narrators and godlike scientists in white coats. Westerners may be more dependent than ever upon the apparatus of modernity, but they are less happy about it. But even if conquest, analysis, and monolithic organizations have lost their compelling power, that by no means spells the end of consumerism. The consumer, after all, is constantly encouraged to be postanalytical and postcritical ("Just Do It," commands Nike), postobjective ("Make Your Own Road," urges one purveyor of mountain bikes), and even, through the device of brand identity, simultaneously postorganizational and postindividualistic—a member of a postmodern tribe who leverages the prosperity of modernity to join a few kindred souls on an island of commodified culture. The acid of consumerism, dissolving the few bonds that constrained choices in the modern era, produces a fluid environment in which brands achieve world-orienting status almost by default. Postmodernity is ultra-, not post-, consumeristic.
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