When I was in college (1996-2001), the primary cultural issue that Christians were mobilizing against was relativism. We were being called to stand for “absolute truth” in the face of a creeping postmodernism which taught that everybody’s beliefs are valid, and no one person or religion has a monopoly on truth. What’s true for you may not be true for me, but that doesn’t make your beliefs (or mine) any less true. The danger of this teaching, we were told, was that it compromised the unique place of Jesus Christ (or Scripture) as the source of all truth. Relativism reduced the majesty of Christ, robbing him of his uniqueness by placing him on the same level as other teachers of religious dogma. If Christianity was as true as, say, Buddhism, then it wasn’t really true at all.

What I see now is that creeping postmodern relativism was not the great problem we thought it was. In fact, it was merely an aftershock of the great cultural shift that had been taking place for decades. It was the symptom of something much deeper, something more far-reaching than anything we could have possibly imagined at the time. Fighting for absolute truth, noble as it may have been, was a fool’s errand. We had lost our grip on that long before I entered college, and it was certainly never going to come back, at least not in a form by which we Christians might have recognized it.

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