Metamodern people have seen the unsustainability of postmodern deconstruction, and they desire construction. They want to believe problems can be solved and progress can be made. Even as they’re suspicious of absolute truth in theory, their existential reality leads them to desire it. After all, to construct anything, one must have foundations.

Why, when we look at contemporary pop culture—movies, music, TV, campus protests, meme culture, and TikTok (especially TikTok)—does the word “incoherence” often come to mind? Why does so much today feel random, disconnected, contradictory, aimless, and altogether void of coherent logic and purpose?
Part of it is that social media’s inherent denarratived randomness has powerfully shaped a schizophrenic cultural consciousness. We see the world as we see our scrolling feeds: one random thing after another, ephemeral and quickly forgotten, providing mild amusement and occasional resonance but without an anchoring narrative that offers lasting satisfaction. As Byung-Chul Han puts it in The Crisis of Narration, digital platforms provide “media of information, not narration… The coherence from which events derive their meaning gives way to a meaningless side-by-side and one-after-the-other.”
Charles Taylor’s concept of “cross-pressures” also helps explain the situation. Contemporary people are bombarded from all directions by information, ideas, experiences, affinities, and spiritual quests—each pulling them in a different direction. Naturally, the experience of cross-pressured life (and its artistic expression) tends to be dizzying, conflicted, and incoherent.
One term academics, artists, and critics have started to use to explain what’s going on is “metamodernism.” For Christians and church leaders, knowing what this term describes—and especially how it finds expression in pop culture—will be helpful for our mission.
Metamodernism: What It Is
Metamodernism is what came after postmodernism, which is what came after modernism. If postmodernism cynically reacts against and deconstructs modernism, metamodernism reacts against modernism and postmodernism, affirming and critiquing aspects of both. Metamodernism opposes the “either/or” bifurcation of modernism and postmodernism. It refuses to choose between sincerity/certainty/hope (modernism) and irony/deconstruction/nihilism (postmodernism). It values both, even if—or perhaps precisely because—such a synthesis is, in the end, illogical and incoherent. Metamodernism accepts this incoherence because it values mood and affect (how I’m feeling / what I’m resonating with) more than rigid logic.
If this seems like a “have your cake and eat it too” philosophy, that’s sort of the point. Shaped by the endless, have-it-your-way horizons of the internet (a structural multiverse of innumerable “truths”), metamodernism is a worldview as wide open and consumer friendly as the smartphone. Take or leave what you want, follow or unfollow, swipe right or left: it’s your iWorld, so make it a good one.
The nice academic term for metamodernism’s hyperconsumerist, bespoke toggling between seemingly contradictory ideas is “oscillation.” The metamodern outlook constantly oscillates between the poles of modernism and postmodernism. This has the effect of making the metamodern posture impossible to pin down and ultimately hyperindividualistic. Each person, in any given moment, might swing multiple times between deconstruction and construction, truth and relativism. It seems to depend only on a vague mood disposition mixed with a cautious sense of avoiding “all-in” commitment to any one direction.
Here’s how one writer describes it:
Metamodernism considers that our era is characterized by an oscillation between aspects of both modernism and postmodernism. We see this manifest as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism, a moderate fanaticism, oscillating between sincerity and irony, deconstruction and construction, apathy and affect, attempting to attain some sort of transcendent position, as if such a thing were within our grasp. The metamodern generation understands that we can be both ironic and sincere in the same moment; that one does not necessarily diminish the other.
This last oscillation—between irony and sincerity—is especially noticeable when you start to look at contemporary pop culture.
Metamodernism in Movies
The best analysis I’ve seen on metamodernism in movies is a video essay by media critic Thomas Flight (embedded below). It’s long (about 40 minutes) but well worth the time if you’d like to learn how the cerebral concepts of metamodernism show up in concrete ways in contemporary movies.
Read More
Related Posts:

For many, the God of the Bible is dead, as the title page of Time Magazine said way back in 1966: “God is Dead.” Ridgley’s conclusions also challenge the church in its attempt to interact through cultural apologetics. How do we address—with the gospel—a culture that has lost its view of classic morals? We are in the situation of early Christianity, surrounded by pagan Rome, where citizens do not know the God of the Bible. 

Many sociologists now speak about the arrival of the post-Christian era in both America and the West in general. Way back in 1976, Newsweek Magazine spoke of “the year of the evangelical.” But church attendance is down in America. Young people abandon any semblance of their childhood faith as soon as they set foot in a university. This is a great concern in our churches. The Wall Street Journal recently published an analysis of national sentiment over the past 25 years on: 

      Religion: 62% in 1998 vs 39% today.
      Having kids: 59% in 1998 vs 30% today.
      Community involvement: 47% in 1998 vs 27% today.
      Patriotism: 70% in 1998 vs 38% today.[1]
      The number of weddings: 40% lower in 2000 than in 1970

Star Parker, a black Christian intellectual gives similar figures and sees the sign of a “nation committing suicide.”[2]
While 20th century unbelief was atheistic, religiosity is now everywhere, as astrology and occultism flourish in mainstream culture.[3]  Such an abandon of personal biblical faith has some obvious causes. Many universities, for instance, have become centers of Marxist training and/or Critical Race Theory, both of which are based on a godless post-modernism, generally called Wokism. George Floyd’s death affected major institutions—from federal agencies to Fortune 100 companies. Encouraged by the Department of Justice and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, such organizations hastily pledged themselves to the new flag of Wokism. They gave multi-millions to groups like Black Lives Matter and promoted a revised version of morality preached through DEI—“diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Wokism’s leaders insist that America is fundamentally racist and they demand “antiracist discrimination” (a technical term used to discriminate against people identified as racist) to produce “racial equity.” This semi-religious ideology abhors “systemic racism,” “white supremacy,” “white privilege,” and “antiracism.” Racism in America today is, to a very significant degree, a manufactured problem, crafted by woke Leftists in order to overthrow the American way of life. Most major cities, many major companies, the educational system and the government’s policymaking apparatus all bow down together before the god of Wokism. 
Few Christian students seem trained or qualified to know how to answer such powerful ideological opposition. Indeed, as we will note below, students have been deliberately trained into a Wokist viewpoint. The average four-year university now has more DEI officials on its staff than history professors. DEI offices have broadened the meaning of terms like “harassment” and “discrimination” not to promote a welcoming campus environment but to enforce a progressive ideology often proposed as a Marxian counter-revolution, determined by an ideologically driven progressivism.
Those who have lost faith in God need a new moral structure, which Wokism provides by playing on the sensitive conscience of American citizens, especially young Americans. They are told that white supremacy is just like the Marxist description of oppressing owners and oppressed workers. Now it is White oppressors and oppressed minorities—Blacks, women, illegal aliens, gays and trans individuals. Unlike biblical morality, this system does not include forgiveness. Whites remain guilty forever and blacks are doomed to be forever victims. In addition, there is no notion of original sin, no divine justice, and no atoning work of Christ to wash us clean. Alas, this is a false pagan morality in which God is absent. Such thinking has entered many churches under the appeal of moralism—see for instance, Lucas Miles’ Woke Jesus[4] and A.D. Robles’ Social Justice Pharisees.[5] Soon, I hope to treat this more thoroughly, but here I am focusing on the attack against students.
Professor Stanley Ridgley in his book Brutal Minds: Brainwashing in Our Universities,[6] documents that university administrators in particular deliberately intend to undermine a student’s ability to engage in classical academic thinking and to inculcate in them a serious case of “religious” guilt. Ridgley seeks to show “how one of history’s great institutions—the American university—is undergoing an infiltration by an ‘army of mediocrities’ whose goal is to destroy the university as an institution of knowledge-creation and replace it as an authoritarian organ of ideology and propaganda.”[7] Jesse Jackson’s 1987 rallying cry at Stanford University, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civ has got to go,” springs to mind, since Western Civilization courses have truly disappeared. 
The new ideology, now labeled as Wokism, is summed up in a vigorous and progressive political program, which has spread in recent years throughout the culture—in government administrations, businesses and educational facilities— via the prompting of “diversity officers” of DEI, “diversity, equity and inclusion.” In the wake of George Floyd’s death, companies scrambled to hire “chief diversity officers” who would apply DEI, which quickly imposed the new moral principles required by the progressive state. In 2018, fewer than half the companies in the S&P 500 employed a “chief diversity officer.” By 2022, under pressure from state regulations, three out four companies had created such a position.[8] This is also the case in university administrations.
As an example of how far this goes, consider the following incident. In February 2023, Dennis Prager, a Jewish intellectual who promotes conservative values, was invited, along with Christian leader, Charlie Kirk (founder of Turning Point USA) to speak at Arizona State University (ASU) for a conference organized by Barrett College, the honors college of ASU. The conference was innocently entitled “Health, Wealth and Happiness.”
Read More
Related Posts:

Allow the weight of your depression to dash you upon the Rock of Ages. Press into Christ. Let the sadness press you toward Him. Abandon everything but hope in Jesus. Run into His arms because there is nothing good anywhere else. You have been given clarity that very few people have. You understand that there is nothing good anywhere without God. 

I have noticed a world of difference between visiting the depressed and visiting the physically sick. The physically sick will chat with you and will enjoy a prayer at the end of your conversation about their illness and the medical plan to take care of it. The depressed, on the other hand, want to talk to you about God. They weep over their sins. They look to the words of the pastor as if life were in them. Their eyes contain tear-filled expectations, simultaneously expressing grief and hope.
If we evaluate these types of sicknesses—mental and physical—it is easy to see that one type lends itself to an openness to the Lord. Of course, as Lewis says, “God shouts to us in our pains.” We hear God, like Job, when we physically suffer. But mental pain (that is, depression) makes us alert to God in a heightened way.
If you have cancer, you will think about death. You will worry. You will ask your pastor to pray. You will turn to doctors and hope that they can fix you. Cancer can be a gift, which is why John Piper says, “Don’t Waste Your Cancer.”
But when you are depressed, and the depression does not lift, you are backed into the corner of hell. Behind you are the flames, and no doctor extends a hand to help. There are none to pull you from the flames but Christ.
Your conscience is burdened with the feeling that you are to blame for your predicament. The guilt weighs upon you like a thousand-pound weight. Every thought is another burden added to the weight, increasing the pain until it becomes unbearable.
This pain vents itself in cries of desperation, “God, please help me!” When He does not answer, the weight pushes you through the floor.
People with cancer know nothing of this desperation. People with cancer want to live, but people with depression want to die.
We wonder how Paul was able to say, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.” We marvel at the humility of John: “He must increase, and I must decrease.” The Psalmist outshines our spirituality on its best day when he says, “There is nothing on earth I desire besides You.” How are these people able to say such glitteringly spiritual things?
They walked through the valley of the shadow of death. They have experienced life without God. Like the title of Martin Lloyd Jones’s book, they have tasted Spiritual Depression.
It is staggering to see how many people are depressed today. Someone recently told me that, on average, Americans are more suicidal than those interned at the Nazi concentration camps. Could this be a grace, a gift of God?
I just heard a pastor say that revival always occurs when a society loses the most hope. When people look around and say to one another, “There is no hope left for us!” The eagles of Christ’s mercy swoop down with healing in their wings.
When we are depressed, we sprint toward the medicine cabinet. When we do not feel well, we turn to the bottle. When anxiety strikes, we open the refrigerator. Like a doctor striking our knee, we have instant responses to depression—and they are always to mask it.
But what if our depression is actually preparation? What if the Lord is preparing our hearts to be humble and meek, like His?
Read More
Related Posts: