The curtains open, and the stage lights flicker on. The heat of old incandescent bulbs and the dull hum of their analog workings can be sensed by the audience seated in the first few rows nearest the theater stage. There are no actors between the parted curtains. All that is heard is a baby’s cry and the sudden sound of a gasp for air. as if it were someone taking their very first breath. Those warm lights illumine a stage covered in a mound of scattered trash. Some thirty seconds or so pass with still not an actor in sight. Suddenly, a final, drawn-out gasping for breath fills the room just before the lights go out in the theater, giving way to total darkness. The curtains close, and the audience sits in silence for a moment, wondering if this is the end of the play.
Samuel Beckett’s Breath (1969) is one of the shortest and most enigmatic plays in modern theater history. In it, Beckett attempted to express his feelings for the absurdity of life through the symbolic representation of our first and last breath, bookending an empty story without purpose, value, or meaning. The space between birth and death is nothing more than a pile of rubbish.
Ever since Friedrich Nietzsche announced the “death of God” in 1882, the West has struggled to keep the inevitable nihilism that accompanies a purely mechanistic, materialist view of the cosmos at bay. If God was dead, then any quest for a civilizational story that would make claims to being the objectively true story and unite all peoples together must be a quest by the storytellers to thrust themselves into the position of being God by forceable means. By the mid-20th century, after two world wars that threatened the end of all human civilization. The modernist dream, which still wanted to somehow hold onto meaning and unite us in a shared story without God, was under intense scrutiny.
In the ivory towers of the Academy and among the intelligentsia who create and consume works of “high culture” such as Beckett’s Breath, the guiding stories of both modernity and the traditional religious narratives of the pre-modern world were deemed untenable.
Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998) called into question all attempts at an overarching, guiding story and, with it, all claims to universal truth and objectivity. Michel Foucault (1926-1984) called into question not only the modern story but also our modern institutions, claiming that they were systems of control and oppression. History is not a path of perpetual progress but the battleground for competing claims to power. Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) critiqued the very structure of language itself. How do we even know what a text from Shakespeare or the Bible means when there is no single, objective meaning to be found at all?
While there was never a universal creedal statement from these postmodern thinkers (after all, that would be a fundamental contradiction to their claims), we could say that postmodern thought shared these common ingredients:
Taken as a whole, these characteristics produced a posture of ironic detached cynicism, an aversion to sincerity, a tendency to mistrust anything that purported to offer actual, non-ironic forms of meaning or belonging.
While these ideas have been brewing among the intelligentsia since at least the mid-20th century, their full dissemination into the American zeitgeist didn’t hit until the end of the Cold War. In popular culture, the clear pivot point into the postmodern was the 1990s.
In 1992, DC Comics killed America’s greatest mythological hero, Superman, in The Death of Superman, marking the death of an iconic symbol who was simultaneously a modernist hero, messianic archetype, and embodiment of many classic Christian virtues. In 1994, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction became an iconic work of cultural impact. Pulp Fiction was a quintessential postmodern work of art that deconstructed modern storytelling, embodied the moral ambiguity of a post-truth world, and was filled with highly ironic, cynicism that would become a defining feature of postmodern film, television, and music.
By 1994, Seinfeld became America’s most-watched sitcom. Co-creator Larry David famously had two rules for the show- no hugging or learning anything. There were no moral lessons to learn from the lead characters, unlike previous sitcoms like The Cosby Show or the range of TGIF family sitcom programming like Full House and Family Matters that dominated the late 80s into the early 90s. Those older sitcoms were filled with syrupy sincerity, moral lesson-learning that preached seemingly universally accepted ethical norms, and a conspicuous lack of irony by our postmodern-informed standards of today. Seinfeld completely subverted all of those expectations and turned what might be nihilistic despair about the absurdly mundane features of life that comprise the vast majority of our existence into a kind of comedic nihilism that would be later copied by Arrested Development (2003-2019), It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005-Present) and the Gen Z-favorite Rick and Morty (2013-present).
The same spirit shows up in influential action films of the era like Fight Club (1999) and The Matrix (1999). You can even find it in that unique expression of pop culture that we call “professional wrestling.” It was in 1996 that wrestling made its own postmodern shift with the “heel-turn” of wrestling’s Superman figure Hulk Hogan into a cynical, black-clad villain wearing a “New World Order” sleeveless t-shirt.
In all these expressions of popular culture you can see the same flavors of irony, cynicism, suspicion of truth, and the active deconstruction of the institutions of the past. These characteristics have saturated our culture for the past 30 years. If we relegate our consumption of these stories to mere entertainment on par with riding a rollercoaster or playing checkers, we vastly underestimate the formative power of narrative on our souls. Humans are storied creatures.
Some of us old enough to have memories of the time before this postmodern cultural shift can attest to the fact that cynicism wasn’t always our native tongue. But for those who were born into this postmodern world with irony and deconstruction as their fundamental cultural grammar, you are unlikely to be able to conceive of ever sitting through an episode of Full House and unironically enjoying it as millions of families did back in 1990. You could never watch Rocky IV with full star-spangled-banner-waving sincerity now, but people somehow did in 1985. Through the postmodern shaping of our souls, our sensibilities have been formed to see all of that syrupy sincerity as cringe.
These same trends identified above in high and popular culture have also appeared in Christian media. The postmodern mood of cynicism pervaded the past ten years especially both in popular culture and the evangelical subculture. It was during this time that countless websites, books and podcasts deconstructing evangelicalism from both left and right: The Roys Report (2018), Jesus and John Wayne (2020), When Narcissism Comes to Church (2020), Church of Cowards (2020), The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill (2021), Faultlines (2021), The Great Sex Rescue (2021), The Boniface Option (2023), Losing Our Religion (2023), Shepherds for Sale (2024), Invisible Jesus (2024), and on the list goes.
We are not evaluating these books—they vary tremendously in quality and outlook—but instead pointing out that a cynical mood has pervaded the last decade. To state the obvious: evangelicalism often deserved skepticism and critique! Yet, is it not remarkable that the same cynical mood influenced writing on the Christian left and right? For all their theological disagreement, they share the same postmodern methodology: deconstruction. If you don’t believe me, just ask yourself: Can you name a single book or podcast with a constructive vision for the church that garnered as much attention as any of these? I can’t. And I suspect that’s because positive visions sailed against the postmodern wind.
In February of 2018, John Mark Comer and Mark Sayers released the first episode of “This Cultural Moment,” a podcast that promised to explain our “secular, progressive, post-christian culture in which we live and ask how followers of Jesus are meant to engage.” Like many pastors, their conversations functioned as a compass for navigating what Aaron Renn would later call “the negative world.”
But by the end of 2024 that cultural moment was coming to a close. Aaron Renn recently wrote there may be a “thawing” in the negative world. In late 2024, Sayers declared that “woke is broke” and then marveled in early 2025 at the rapidity with which it ended, suggesting that an updated version of This Cultural Moment would be necessary to explain what stands before us.
In his view, we’re exiting a “gray zone”—the liminal space between the culture that was and the culture that will be—and entering into a new epoch. What kind of epoch is it? To answer that, try to put yourself in the place of a 20-something young adult who has no memory of the sincerity of the 80s. They don’t have any recollection of the world before “learning anything” was forbidden, of the world when you were never asked to take the red pill or blue pill. Irony is all they have ever known. The longings and felt absences produced by such an experience will be what defines the coming moment.
What happens if you have lived all of your life afraid of the cringe? What if these cultural inputs have so shaped your soul that you felt that “authenticity” demanded you leave the religious traditions of your grandparents on a journey of perpetual deconstruction? What if you have quietly felt so imprisoned by cynicism that you don’t even know how to have a sincere conversation with a friend? You quietly despise that your speech is saturated with incessant irony. You feel that you are living outside of any meaningful story, never able to commit to any guiding story because it could be a tool of oppression. You look around and feel fragmentation everywhere. There is no social cohesion except what you can be against. It’s lonely and alienating. It leaves you in a crisis of meaning that you are afraid even to voice because you dare not come across as sincerely caring about anything at all. That kind of caring would be naive. But deep down, you wonder if you can break the fourth wall in prayer to anyone watching this show you’re living in and help your character somehow get into a better story.
The novelist David Foster Wallace, who had already been well acquainted with the flavors of postmodernism in its “high culture” expressions long before they descended into layers of pop culture, had already felt in his own soul this exhaustion with postmodern cynicism as early as the late 1990s.
Postmodern irony and cynicism become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years.
The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point. Maybe that's why they'll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval.
Like Nietzsche’s “Death of God” pronouncement prophetically foretelling a coming nihilistic age long before it had permeated the zeitgeist of Western civilization, David Foster Wallace’s announcement of a cultural movement to get beyond postmodernism presciently predicted the appetites and longings of a generation decades before these longings fully germinated in culture. This hopeful desire to escape our prison of cynicism, to not fear the sincere, and to wager that we can find a meaningful story to live in, even if it is cringe, represents a new cultural moment that goes beyond postmodernism by means of going through it.
It is what many have called metamodernism.
But the cultural mood is rapidly changing, and it’s time to take account.
By now it has become a cliche to note that we are living through a “vibe shift.” But it is a cliche because it has become so obvious that any halfway observant social commentator can’t miss it. The question is whether all these changes should be understood as a function of a single overriding change, or as disparate events representative of further cultural fragmentation.
Let’s consider a few key dimensions of change.
Just compare the reaction to Trump’s inauguration in 2017, which led to 500,000 protestors organizing in Washington and Snoop Dogg declaring all inauguration performers racist, to the 2025 inauguration. It generated no large protests. Snoop Dogg and the village people (who previously issued Trump a cease and desist letter for using Y.M.C.A.) performed. Sports stars are doing the Trump dance, and celebrities from Christopher Watkin to Joe Rogan are declaring their support. The corporations that once paid lip service to progressivism now seem free to turncoat. Zuckerberg, Musk, and Bezos all joined the inaugural celebrations.
Ross Barkan at The New York Times argued that this marks the end of an era of the “hyperpolitical” era in which both sides saw their movements “in Manichean terms. … Fervor was the currency and ‘moral clarity’ the catchword. Nuance was discarded.” By Barkan’s own admission, this era left little durable reforms (as opposed to the civil rights movement) and little energy for further deconstructive ire. Barkan writes, “The activist energy has leaked away.”
2020 saw a five year low in Bible sales, but 2024 reversed the trend. Bible sales grew by 22%, and they were fueled by first time buyers. Stories are cropping up about young men converting to Greek Orthodoxy, and massive Gen Z gatherings, like Passion, have grown so large they need to hold two consecutive conferences (in a massive arena) and still sell out. One of the biggest stories in college sports was the conversion of much of the National Champions’ football team (which led to on campus baptisms), and subsequent discourse on ESPN about the value of Christian selflessness.
This is to say nothing of other stories of campus revivals across the country. Meanwhile, New Atheists and historians, like Ayaaan Hersi Ali and her husband Niall Ferguson, converted to Christianity. Even Richard Dawkins declared himself a “cultural Christian.” Jordan Peterson recently declared that he believed Jesus is God. America’s biggest media personality, Joe Rogan, transitioned from mocking Christianity to showing curiosity about the faith. His interview with apologist Wesley Huff is quite likely the largest gospel presentation and Biblical textual criticism lesson in history. Even the journalists are getting in on the curiosity. The Atlantic, The Free Press, and New York Times Magazine have all published pieces about the value of church non-Christians. Oh, and let's not forget that even Jelly Roll is dipping his toes into the world of Contemporary Christian Music.
Perhaps it’s obvious given everything above: progressivism crashed against the rocks of reality. Men in women’s bathrooms, prisons, and sports never made sense, and now most Americans agree. Meta’s woke fact checkers were fired, opting for community notes instead. Their content moderation operations moved to Texas to free Meta from progressive overreach. Virtually every demographic (but especially young men) moved toward Trump. We can’t know for certain why, but I suspect it’s something of the rebel, rugged American spirit. Progressivism reigned ascendent in government, journalism, Hollywood and Wall Street. The people saw the fruit and rebelled—and in America rebellion has always been cool.
So what do we make of these changes? Is there a unifying theme? I believe there is, but it’s not what many are assuming.
On the surface, the vibe shift appears to be a rapid rightward movement. This leads to obvious questions: How long can the Trump-Musk, populist-technocratic coalition hold together? Is the so-called religious renaissance an earnest turn toward Christ or something else altogether? Indeed, it seems that Rogan’s circles represent not a burgeoning Christian revival but a mystical techno-pagan-utopianism trafficking in UFO spirituality, psychedelic experiences, and AI-enabled transhumanism.
I suspect that all of the “rightward shift” analyses, while true, may be superficial. They bury the lede. We aren’t merely moving one way on the left/right spectrum. We must think in three dimensions. We’re moving up and out of the postmodern miasma that animated both the left and the right for the last decade. The pervasive, deconstructive skepticism that energized pop culture (as well as the evangelical subculture) for years is drying up. That energy surged most strongly in progressive circles, which is part of why the shift, on a superficial level, seems rightward. But what makes all four of the above changes feel different is that they’re characterized by a feel. 2025 has a different texture. It’s characterized not by postmodern cynicism, but by metamodern sincerity. Not by enraged deconstruction, but by incredulous aspiration. Not by jaded irony, but by ironic earnestness. There is something of the modern and postmodern in the present. A fresh desire to make meaning, find transcendence, and build beyond the postmodern rubble without entirely leaving postmodernism behind. The rightward shift is a notable flavor in this new feast, but it is not the feast itself. Something new is happening.
The same change can be seen religiously. What on a popular level would’ve been thought naive and cringy five years ago is now cool: buying your first Bible and posting about it on TikTok, converting to a patriarchal tradition like Greek orthodoxy, or throwing your entire body into arena worship.
Our culture is creeping and clawing toward the transcendent. We want space for personal experience that’s beyond the reach of deconstructive critique. To be clear: it’s not that we’re returning to a modern (much less a traditional) era of grand narratives. Instead, it’s as though we’ve felt the malaise of postmodern cynicism, and declared with an ironic wink and a knowing nod: I choose to believe anyway. I know it's naive. I know it’s cringe. I know there’s always a play for power. But so what? I’m in.
So Sayers is right: we need a fresh account of our new post-postmodern cultural moment, what philosophers, academics, and cultural critics are calling metamodernism. As Christians, it’s our duty to understand our milieu, challenge and console its aspirations, and contextualize the gospel. The challenge before us is immense, precisely because we’re leaving what was and entering into something plainly new and quite different. We will discuss what that means for church leaders and Christian ministry in our next essay.