We live in a postmodern age. I do not think this is a myth or a sociological invention. So many of the tendencies in evangelicalism today are explicable when seen against the background of this cultural megashift.
Postmodernism
One of the primary marks of postmodernism is that human reason is no longer assumed to be able to answer every question and solve every problem. Classic humanism and modernism believed reason replaced God. You just wait long enough and have clever enough people and ultimately everything will be answered. Increasingly, we are not living in that age. Now rationalism, having failed, is giving way to irrationalism.
In an irrational age, there are no absolute truths. Everything is relative. If I claim to have knowledge, and say this knowledge is true for all time and all places, I am deluded. I have been conned. All supposed knowledge is a construct, either a personal construct of my own or a social construct - a result of the thinking of a certain group of people maybe a long time in the past. These constructs, which govern my understanding of the world, are conditioned by an infinite variety of unknowable factors and influences, and it is impossible to get to the root of them. We live, therefore, in an age which is sometimes called post-ideological.
