Why Younger Generations Stopped Trusting the Church (p2)

In part 1 of this article series, we wrapped up with the collapse of modernism. The world that reason and science promised never arrived.

Instead, the very discoveries that promised utopia also made it possible for mankind to wipe itself out entirely. Two world wars, the holocaust and atomic weapons... this was enough for the culture to realize that the big story of progress and promise science offered was never real to begin with.

So what grew out of the wreckage?

An entire generation looked at the smoking crater left by the 20th century and made a vow: never again. Never again will we trust a big story about where humanity is headed. Never again will we let institutions (governments, universities, churches) tell us what's true without questioning their motives. Never again will we be naive enough to believe anyone who stands on a stage and claims to have the answer.

That vow has a name:

Postmodernism.

Now before your eyes glaze over, stay with me. This isn't going to be an academic lecture. I promise. But if you want to understand why younger generations seem unreachable, you need to understand the world that shaped them. And postmodernism is the single most important thing that happened to Western culture in the second half of the 20th century. Most church members have never heard of it. But they feel its effects every single week.

So let me break it down as simply as I can.

Postmodernism is, at its core, a gut reaction. It's what happens when a civilisation gets burned badly enough that it stops trusting anyone who claims to know anything with certainty.

The philosopher Jean-François Lyotard captured it in one famous sentence. In 1979, he wrote: "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives." [1]

Let me translate that.

"Metanarratives" are big stories. Grand overarching explanations of where humanity came from, where it's going, and what it all means. The Enlightenment progress story, that reason will save us, was a metanarrative. Marxism, the idea that history is moving toward a workers' paradise, was a metanarrative. And yes, Christianity, the story that God created the world, humanity fell, Jesus redeemed us, and he's coming back, is a metanarrative too.

Postmodernism looked at all of these and said: we don't believe any of you anymore.

Why? Because every big story, when you dig underneath it, turns out to serve somebody's interests. The story of "progress" served the interests of empires that colonised the world in its name. The story of "scientific objectivity" served the interests of people who got to define what counted as objective. The story of "God's plan" served the interests of religious institutions that used divine authority to control populations.

Every truth claim, postmodernism argued, is really a power play. Whoever controls the story controls the people.

And once you see it that way, the question changes. It's no longer "what is true?" It's "who benefits from this version of the truth?"

That question — "who benefits?" — became the default lens through which an entire generation learned to see the world.

Truth = Harm

Now I need to be fair here. Because it's tempting, especially for church folk, to hear all this and think postmodernism is just relativistic garbage that destroyed Western values. And if that's your take, I get it. I've heard that sermon a hundred times.

But postmodernism did genuine good in the world. And we need to be honest about that if we want any credibility when we talk about its failures.

Postmodernism exposed how "objective truth" had been weaponised throughout history.

Colonisers didn't show up in Africa, Asia, and the Americas saying "we're here to steal your resources." They showed up saying "we're here to civilise you." They had science, philosophy, and theology backing them up. They had "objective" arguments about racial hierarchies, cultural superiority, and the divine mandate to spread Western civilisation. All of it framed as truth. All of it designed to justify exploitation.

Slaveholders didn't defend slavery by saying "we enjoy having free labor." They defended it with Bible verses and scientific theories about biological inferiority. They had truth claims. Rigorous ones. Published in journals and preached from pulpits.

Churches didn't silence women, marginalise minorities, and punish dissenters by saying "we like being in charge." They did it by saying "God ordained this hierarchy." Another truth claim. Another power play.

Postmodernism pulled the curtain back on all of this. It gave marginalised voices permission to say: your "truth" has been serving your power for centuries. We're done accepting it at face value.

And as Adventists, we shouldn't be allergic to this. After all, our entire movement is built on the rejection of tradition and man-made dogmas. We are the people who looked at centuries of inherited theology, stuff like Sunday worship, the immortality of the soul, eternal hellfire etc., and said "show us where the Bible actually says that."

We questioned the grand narratives of Christendom when it was deeply unpopular to do so. We challenged institutional authority. We refused to accept truth claims just because a powerful church had been making them for a thousand years.

In a very real sense, the Protestant Reformation, and the Adventist movement that grew out of it, was doing something postmodern before postmodernism had a name. Which means when postmodernism comes along and asks the same questions, we shouldn’t be defensive. Instead, we need to sit with the fact that the church (and sadly, our church included) has participated in some of this power play game. We've used truth claims to control people. We've used "the Bible says" to shut down questions rather than engage them. We've confused our cultural preferences with divine mandates.

Postmodernism forced the world to ask harder questions about who gets to define truth and who benefits from those definitions. And those are questions worth asking.

But here's what postmodernism couldn't do.

It couldn't build anything.

If every big story is a power grab, then no big story is worth believing. If every truth claim is really just someone's agenda, then truth itself stops meaning anything. If every institution is corrupt, then there's nothing worth belonging to.

Cynicism became the only intellectually respectable posture. Sincerity became embarrassing. If you actually believed in something you were interpreted as either naive or dangerous. In this world, non-certainty became the trend.

And the data backs it up.

In December 2025, Pew Research Center released a major study on why Americans leave their childhood religion. The findings were sobering. 35% of Americans have left the faith they were raised in. Among those who are now religiously unaffiliated — the "nones" — 78% say they can be moral without religion, 64% say they question their former religion's teachings, and 54% say they don't need religion to be spiritual. Most who leave do so before age 30. [2]

Notice something interesting: These aren't angry atheists on a crusade against God. These are people who stopped trusting the institutions and narratives that claimed to represent God. They didn't slam the door. They just... drifted. Because in a postmodern world, drifting away from any grand narrative is the most natural thing you can do.

So what did this do to the church?

Here's where it gets personal for us.

The church — and I'm speaking specifically about the Adventist church, though this applies broadly — kept preaching as though the per-modern world (and to some degree the modern world) was still intact. As though people still trusted institutions. As though "the Bible says" still carried automatic authority. As though presenting a logical chain of proof texts would lead a reasonable person to a reasonable conclusion.

Think about how we typically share our faith. We say things like "we have the truth." That's a grand narrative claim; exactly the kind of claim postmodernism taught people to distrust. We say "the Bible says" as though that settles the argument. But for someone raised in a postmodern world, the question isn't "what does the Bible say?" It's "why should I trust the Bible more than any other ancient text, and what power structures benefit from me accepting its authority?"

We present systematic theology as though the rational organisation of truth is inherently persuasive. But for someone who has been taught that all systems serve somebody's interests, a neatly organised belief system doesn't feel trustworthy. It feels suspicious. The more polished it looks, the more it seems like someone is trying to sell them something.

Picture it like this: In 1955, a person sitting in a prophecy seminar trusted institutions, believed in objective truth, respected logical arguments, and was probably already a churchgoer interested in which church had the right answers. In 2025, the person you're trying to reach has been raised in a world that taught them every institution lies, every truth claim is a power grab, and every authoritative voice has an angle. If you somehow manage to convince them to come to a prophecy seminar, the entire structure: old songs, polished looking people on stage, a preacher in a suit and tie, and a Power Point presentation that frames history inside a neat, metanarrative container is enough for them to say, “no thanks.”

But honestly, the most likely scenario is you’ll never get them in the room to begin with.

Because the world they live in is nothing like the world we live in.

The World they Live In

If you want to see what postmodernism looks like in everyday culture, think about the 1990s and 2000s — the era when most of today's young adults were either born or raised.

Seinfeld, one of the most successful sitcoms of the 90s, was famously described as a show "about nothing." No moral lessons. No character growth. No redemptive arcs. Just four self-absorbed people observing the absurdity of life with detached irony. It was brilliant. And it was the most postmodern thing on television. The message, whether intentional or not, was: meaning is an illusion. Just laugh at the chaos.

Then came the internet. And the internet is, in many ways, the ultimate postmodern machine. Everything gets deconstructed. Every authority gets questioned. Every institution gets memed into absurdity. Nothing is sacred. Context collapses. A Bible verse and a cat video exist in the same feed, carrying the same visual weight. Truth and satire blur until you can't tell the difference, and after a while, you stop trying.

This is the water younger generations have been swimming in since birth. They didn't choose it. They didn't study Lyotard in university and decide to become postmodernists. They just absorbed it through screens, through culture, through the air they breathed. When they seem apathetic about your truth claims, they're not being rebellious or lazy. They're being consistent with the only world they've ever known.

And that's important for us to understand. Because our instinct as church members is to blame the younger generation. "They don't care about truth." "They're too worldly." "They just want to be entertained." But that's like blaming a fish for being wet. They didn't build this world. They inherited it.

But here's where it gets hopeful.

Postmodernism is cracking.

It's been cracking for a while now. Because here's what nobody tells you about tearing down every story and every institution and every truth claim: eventually, you're left standing in the rubble with nothing to hold onto. And human beings are not built for that. We are meaning-making creatures. We need a story to live inside. We need something to believe in. We need something bigger than ourselves to belong to.

You can deconstruct everything. But you can't live in the wreckage forever.

The cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker noticed something shifting in the early 2010s. They described an emerging sensibility, something they called "a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism." [3] People who wanted to believe in big stories again. People who longed for sincerity, meaning, and hope. But people who couldn't un-know what postmodernism had taught them. They couldn't go back to blind trust. They couldn't pretend the critiques didn't matter.

They were caught in between. Wanting to believe. Terrified of being burned.

That ache for meaning combined with a deep suspicion of anyone offering it is the exact emotional landscape younger generations are living in right now.

And here's what makes me excited as a follower of Jesus: this is an extraordinary moment for the gospel. An open door the size of a continent. A generation that is starving for exactly what Jesus offers: meaning, hope, belonging, a story worth embracing.

But that longing exists alongside the deep suspicion of anyone who claims to have the full truth. Two seemingly opposing truths living in tension simultaneously.

In this new, comtemporary landscape, the question isn't whether Jesus has what they need. He is what they need.

The question is whether we can learn to share him in a way they can actually receive.

That's Part 3.

See you next week.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), Introduction. Originally commissioned as a report on the state of knowledge for the government of Quebec, this book became one of the most influential philosophical texts of the late 20th century. Lyotard's one-sentence definition of postmodernism has been quoted, debated, and applied across virtually every academic discipline for over four decades.

[2] Pew Research Center, "Why Do Some Americans Leave Their Religion While Others Stay?" December 15, 2025. Based on a survey of 8,937 U.S. adults conducted May 5-11, 2025, as part of the American Trends Panel, combined with data from the 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study (36,908 U.S. adults).

[3] Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, "Notes on Metamodernism," Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, Vol. 2 (2010). This essay is widely considered the foundational academic text describing metamodernism as a cultural sensibility emerging after postmodernism. Vermeulen and van den Akker argue that contemporary culture oscillates between modern sincerity and postmodern irony, between hope and suspicion, without settling permanently in either.