Theology in the Raw - From Postmodernism to Metamodernism: Paul Anleitner

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

Paul Anleitner is a cultural theologian that writes and speaks on the intersection of religion, culture, philosophy, and science. He is the host of Deep Talks: Cultural Theology with Paul Anleitner, a YouTube channel and podcast featuring long-form discussions with leading voices and lectures on the cultural theology. Register for the Exiles and Babylon conference: theologyintheraw.com -- If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe to my channel! Support Theology in the Raw through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theologyintheraw Or you can support me directly through Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Visit my personal website: https://www.prestonsprinkle.com For questions about faith, sexuality & gender: https://www.centerforfaith.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey friends, the XLS conference is starting today. It's happening tonight. Uh, kick off at 6 p.m. here in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I cannot wait for this. If you are in the area and you still want to register, I believe there's still room. It's a big auditorium. So there's still some room if you want to attend live, but, uh, for the most of you, it's probably not an option. You can still attend via virtual stream. Just go to theology raw.com, uh, and you can get all the information there. And, or you can, can, or just go down to the show notes, we have some links down below. So my guest today is Paul Antleitner, who is a cultural theologian that writes

and speak who writes and speaks at the intersection on the intersection of religion, culture, philosophy and science. He is a host of deep talks, cultural theology with Paul Antleitner, a podcast featuring long-form discussions with leading voices and lectures on cultural theology. He is super, super sharp and insightful when it comes to thinking through our current cultural moment, as you'll see.

I really enjoyed this podcast. I think you will too. So please welcome to the show for the first time, the one and only Paul Antleitner. Let's start with this question. What is metamodernism? I saw you talk about this, and I was like, what the heck is that? And then I saw you unpack it. I was like, this is really brilliant.

So that's why you're here. Why don't we just start with that? Let's just jump right into the. I was like, this is really brilliant. So, uh, that's why you're here. Why don't we just start with that? Let's just jump right into the deep end. What is metamodernism and why should we think about it? Yeah, I'm laughing because right before we went on the air, I was talking about how people keep pushing me to be like, you got to make stuff simpler. No, we're just going right for the, for the jargon right away. If you define terms, I think people can handle big term. It's when people are just thrown around big terms and are pausing to explain what they mean.

For sure. Okay. So metamodernism is a term that describes, and the cement is still wet in philosophical circles about what are we trying to describe when we describe this feeling that we have moved beyond postmodernism. So you can think of metamodernism as a term that simply describes this like movement that comes after. We don't want to necessarily say the death of postmodernism because it's not dead, but it's probably become stale.

It's efficacy has waned. It's become a trope, right? So it's this term that describes what is happening. What are the flavors I sometimes use the flavors in culture in the way we're telling stories in film and music and even like the way we want to engage with the world that seems to be slightly different than what we were experiencing in the postmodern era and age. Now, maybe then that leads to an obvious next question of like, well, what was postmodernism? I mean, sure, many of your listeners-

Yeah, I was gonna ask you to give us a quick history and unpack postmodernism. Yeah, and of course I have to apologize to all your listeners who have done PhDs in postmodernism. This is, this is going to be not satisfactory to you and it might be over the heads of some that have never heard it before. We're going to try to squish that, that squishy middle there. You know,

postmodernism has been around in academia, um, in the arts, what we might call like high culture, high culture of, you know, architecture, theater, literature, since the middle of the 20th century. And a lot of people would even go all the way back to Nietzsche as kind of like the proto postmodern philosopher. Because what Nietzsche said in the late 19th century was he was describing this experience, this shift that was happening and is on the horizon for Western civilization, where it

appeared to Nietzsche that there was looming on the horizon this event that we could call, that many people call the death of God, that we were moving out of Christianity, or if you just want to call it Christendom, being the dominant story that we all lived in in the West to this sense that it was like no longer a tenable story to live in. And there was a lot of, a lot of factors behind that. Right. So you had Darwin, you had, um, especially as we got a little bit past beyond Nietzsche into the early 20th century, you had world war one and then world war two.

And many of these nations that are going to war are filled with baptized Christians. Right. And so you're going like, all right, was that story tenable? Was it, what was it doing if it didn't prevent all of that? This overwhelming sense of, especially coming out of the first world war in Western Europe, you had this deep sense of nihilism.

And Nietzsche was kind of foretelling this narrative shift, we could call it. Humans are storied creatures. So oftentimes I wanna talk mainly about the stories that we're living in that kind of help us maybe move beyond some of the jargon. So the Christian story or a Christian story had largely been the story the West had been living in.

And Nietzsche saw that that was coming to an end. And the reason why people consider him like the proto postmodern founder was that Nietzsche was calling into question the overarching story of our culture. And then if you get into the mid 20th century, a lot more of these ideas about, well, maybe the story we've been living in is a lie, begins to disseminate through the academy, through high culture. And so that was

maybe the biggest question underneath postmodernism was this skepticism with the modern story we had lived in. The modern story we had lived in came out of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. It was this idea that you as an individual have access to the truth, that you can actually ascend, you know, you can ascend the ladders of the status ladders of culture, you can actually put yourself in a position of power, you have access to truth, Descartes, I think therefore I am. You know, the, the, the revolutionary energy of the American revolution and the French revolution, which was seeking to like flip over the status ladders, right?

You had that story and then you get into the middle of the 20th century and you had people that were going, yeah, that, that modern story and also this like overarching Christendom story, maybe that's actually masking a play for power. Not only is it not correct, but many thinkers became even more suspicious of that story being a tool of what we might call like colonial hegemonic power, that this is propaganda, right? This is all stories are propaganda, all stories,

overarching stories that would attempt to tell you some story about the history of the world, you know, who God is, what your place is in that story, are stories that mask a play for power. So that's suspicion, kind of brewed in like academia and in high culture in the middle of the 20th century, you get into the 1960s, 70s and then the 80s, you have this weird pivot point. And for me, that pivot point is probably somewhere around the fall of the Soviet Union.

When the Soviet Union fell, we saw this like moving into the American culture mainstream of this postmodern cynicism. So the flavors of that postmodern ideology were suspicion of stories, intense irony. So irony was a way that you could signal that you were aware that you were in a story. So you'd be highly ironic in your storytelling, also deeply cynical, and like what we could call a hermeneutic of suspicion, which simply means the primary mode we engage with all texts, whether it's a book, a film, whether it's a religious story we were told

as children is suspicion. And you start to see this move into American culture largely after the fall of the Soviet Union. Some people might suspect, well, maybe that was because we always just, during the Cold War, the Christian story was still useful politically in the US to keep us united together. When that happened and we were then the sole dominant force in the world at the time, that suspicion got turned on us. So you can see some real practical examples of this, Preston, when we start getting into

like the 1990s, like 1994 pulp fiction, which would have maybe just been like an obscure art house movie if it would have came out in the 70s or 80s, has like pretty widespread appeal. Quentin Tarantino is like quintessentially telling a post, doing a postmodern vibe there, right? It's morally ambiguous. You come out of, not recommending the movie by the way, to your listeners. You've never seen it before,

but morally ambiguous at best. Like there's nobody virtuous. It calls into question all of our sense of ethical norms And you get 1994 into the mid 90s and you start seeing even in silly ways Preston like people laugh when I talk about this, but here's a great example Hulk Hogan in the 1980s. I was a hulkamaniac as a kid, right? What was Hulk Hogan's thing? Yeah truth justice the American way of Superman packaged into a kid, right? And what was Hulk Hogan's thing? Yeah, truth, justice, the American way of Superman packaged into a pro wrestler where you gotta train hard,

say your prayers and take your vitamins, brother, right? That's the hulkamania mantra, waving an American flag. Then this really weird thing happens in the mid 90s, Preston. He dons an all black, you know, attire with three letters, new NWO, new world order. And he goes heel, right? And he tells all of his adoring young Hulkamaniacs that the person you thought he was all of those years

was a lie. That story was a lie. And this is the truth. This is a guy that represents the new world order. And you go, that's silly, it's pro wrestling. But pro wrestling's whole business is predicated on, can you read culture, can you read the room, and can you adjust the story in real time?

So those are a couple examples, right? Then we get into like 1999. 1999 is a huge pivot point for my generation, probably your generation. I don't know if our ages are, are close or not. Preston, I assume we are maybe still in our forties. I'm 49. Yeah. What are you?

All right. Okay. Well, 41. So close enough, right? So 1999, right? 1999, you've got Fight Club. And I was going to say, when are you going to bring up Fight Club? Oh, I'm so excited. There you go.

All right. Keep going. Yeah. Fight Club, fight club in the matrix, 1999, and especially for men, boys that were turning into men in that age group, those stories deeply resonate with us. Well, think about those stories. What are some common flavors? You have male protagonists who are completely disenfranchised with their jobs, right? They both work office jobs and even the aesthetic of their offices both feel the same. There's this kind of strange green film,

you know, over the top of the lens, or maybe they did in post-production, I don't know. These guys are completely unhappy with their pursuit of the American dream. And so what is the solution to that in both stories? Well, in Fight Club, what is it? It is to withdraw and it is to deconstruct. What is it in the matrix? The matrix is the same thing. You're getting red pill. What's the red pill? The red pill is waking up to that this is all an

illusion. It's all masking a play for power. You need to withdraw and then you need to deconstruct the system. So Preston, those films, I think the impact of them on my generation, not just those two, we could point to a dozen other instantiations of this in culture. And what we could see was a generation

that was taking in these cultural stories. And because we're storied creatures, we try to live in a story. And the story we've been living in, in American culture, for at least pop culture since the 90s, has been one of intense cynicism, deconstruction, highly ironic. This is a really long answer, sorry, Preston.

But this is all to say- This is great, no, no, no, it's fine. This is all to say that metamodernism is emerging out of this sense that if you've lived in that your entire life, this cynicism, this everything's ironic, everything is like, I have to smile and break the fourth wall with the camera and I can't actually say anything sincere because sincerity was the language of modernism. You know those modernists that thought they had the world objectively figured out and that they knew objective truth.

And so you could be sincere because you knew sincerely what objective truth was. The postmoderns come in and it's like, you don't have third person perspective on the truth. This is just masking a play for power. So it breeds in you the cynicism, this irony, and what happens to a person's soul that has lived with that their entire life? David Foster Wallace, the brilliant novelist who tragically took his own life in the earlier mid aughts.

Many consider him one of the novelists that were kind of transitioning out of postmodernism into early metamodernism. And even back in the nineties, David Foster Wallace was saying, you know, the early, the early postmodern writers felt really liberating, but you know what postmodern modern modernism is it is patricidal, meaning that it seeks to kill what comes before. And eventually, and I'm paraphrasing here slightly, he was talking about this in the mid 90s, eventually people are gonna wake up

and realize the cynicism is a prison. And he joked like, he's like, if Burger King, and this is like 1997, if Burger King is telling you, as part of their slogan, you gotta break the rules, if they're tapping into this postmodern thing to sell you a burger, postmodernism has lost all of its power. And so he was foretelling of a time in which people are going to break free and the true

rebels, the true revolutionaries are going to be the ones that have hope in the face of cynicism. That they're going to be post, he wouldn't use this term, this is maybe my term, I don't know if I'm the first to use it, but post ironically sincere. So they're gonna see all the irony, they're gonna see that like ironic self-awareness that we are so used to in everything from, you know, Wes Anderson movies, right?

Highly ironic, highly self-aware. We're gonna move beyond the point of using all of that irony to kind of deflect and protect ourselves from looking naive. And somebody is gonna have the guts to be like, I'm gonna say something sincere. And I think metamodernism is this shift that we're experiencing right now where people are going,

I'm gonna go through postmodernism. I'm gonna go through the irony. I'm gonna go through the cynicism to get beyond the cynicism, to get beyond the irony in hopes of finding a story that I could actually live in that would allow me to say something sincere and meaningful again.

So, I guess at what point did postmodernism, and we're still in, it sounds like you're identifying a transitionary stage and there's no clean break. It's not like you could say this year, you know, there's a gradual shift. Are you saying like from like 2000 to now has been this slow shift with the postmodern view of the world

is starting to wane, whereas this thing called metamodernism is starting to take shape? Yeah, I'd say that's probably fair to say, especially when we talk about pop culture. And so I'll probably focus more in on pop culture because that's the part of the bell curve where most of us live in, right? And those are usually our most formative cultural inputs for most of us.

You know, many people just maybe don't own a TV or they don't have Netflix or anything like that. Maybe some of your listeners are like that. But for most people, those are our formative cultural inputs. And I'd say that's true. You know, you could see that sort of stuff in maybe like Wes Anderson movies.

You could see hints of that. You know, we just lost this past week, Gene Hackman. You could look at a movie like the Royal Tenenbaums, which is highly, highly ironic. But the irony in the Royal Tenenbaums wasn't in service of like critiquing the system. So if you think of like postmodernism as raging against the machine, critiquing the system, it's got this energy of critique, which is usually pointed in a systematic way at things that people would perceive as being oppressive, right? So this is a narrative of oppression, and so we're going to critique it. That's the matrix, right? The matrix is critiquing

the system. So it's self-aware, it's's ironic and it's critiquing the system you could see in a movie like Royal Tenenbaums that like Quintessential Wes Anderson irony, right? But it was actually in the end like trying to get it saying something sincere about a family So you could see early glimpses about where it's really started to ramp up. I would say in pop culture where it's really started to ramp up, I would say in pop culture, Preston has really been in the last maybe seven to eight years. So some great examples of it in pop culture. I think one of the quintessential examples of it is the film.

And maybe this was three years ago, 2022, it won all the Oscars, right? Everything everywhere, all at once. I don't know if you saw that. I did. Yeah. Yeah, it's wild. Right. Okay. So even when you were watching that Preston, like were there some other films that came to mind as you were watching you go, Oh, this kind of feels like this, but it feels different in some ways. I don't know if there were any particular films that like stood out to you and you're watching that you're like, yeah, it kind of feels like this, but it's not that. I don't have the eye for that kind of stuff, but I'm sure if you identify some, I'm like, oh yeah, it's all. Yeah. Okay. So I'll throw out a few.

Cause a lot of people when they're like, Hey Paul, you should check out this movie. Everything every once there's no, it's unlike anything I've ever seen. And yet it's kind of like the matrix. Um, it's kind of got some of this, you know, it's tapping into like multiverse stuff that maybe Marvel has been trying to get at, but didn't do as good a job. And what you saw in everything everywhere all at once

was this highly self-aware, highly ironic, had all of the flavors of like postmodern film, right? The kind of like the self-aware humor, like you kind of know we're in a movie, we're in a story, we're in one story among many, that's what the whole multiverse thing is about, right? The multiverse thing is like, I have to be aware that I'm in one story among many,

so I don't look naive, don't look like the modernists who believe they lived in the only story. But all of that sort of like irony, the goal of that movie in the end was critiquing what I think what many people feel is at the end of a journey of living in a postmodern headspace, which is nihilism. And so in that film, they do this weird thing where they have like the, the everything bagel of nothing, which is this nihilistic baby. It's, it's so stupid even when you say it, right? It's so stupid. It's so like, it's so ironic. That's so like the postmodern vibe, but in the end,

what is it trying to get out? They were reaching for like, okay, if in the end everything is meaningless, do I get to like choose something meaningful to live in? And where would I find meaning? So it's this quest to reconstruct after a journey of a long journey of cultural deconstruction. Now you might watch that film and go, I don't agree with what they said we should reconstruct into which was kind of like, hey, just be kind to people. You know, in the end, it was Waymond, and I forget the actor's name.

You know, he was the guy that was also the young sidekick of Indiana Jones and the temple of. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He looked just like him too. It's crazy. Yeah. And so he, throughout the film kind of comes across as this like way too syrupy, sincere, kind of bumbling idiot because he's so sincere. And the funny thing is by the end of the film, the resolution of the film points to him and

his values as being the thing that everybody should embody. You can see that pattern also in like maybe season one of Ted Lasso, where Ted Lasso is surrounded by largely cynical postmodern influenced people who are deeply suspicious of everything, highly ironic, highly cynical, and what makes Ted Lasso stand out? That he is painfully, brutally sincere and wholesome in a world that is surrounding him with cynicism. And in that way, you get what

metamodal philosophers call oscillation. Oscillation is this idea that in metamodern storytelling and communication, we vacillate between the irony that we have been saturated with in our culture for the last few decades, but also this longing for sincerity. And so the way that you make sincerity stand out and feel truly sincere and truly wholesome is you juxtapose it against all the irony. Right? So Ted Lasso would be another one. This summer, we're getting a new Superman movie, right? Superman has been largely critiqued since the nineties. Superman, I've got the comic sitting back here somewhere. The

first death of Superman comic happened, I believe in 1993. And they killed off Superman in the comics. And one of the reasons why, as you like hear the storytellers and the comic writers, was people felt like the values of Superman were becoming passe. You know, the truth, justice, American way, this virtue, a sincere hero. They felt that that was kind of passe. They felt like, you know, yeah, of course, when we were in the Cold War, that made a lot of sense.

And all this cynicism about Superman was a propaganda piece for the Americans in the Cold War. So we killed Superman in the 90s. And since that time, we've done this cyclical thing. And you can see it all over culture, where we've had even this deep cultural suspicion of Superman. You can see it in things like Amazon's series, The Boys. Again, not necessarily recommending it.

The things I'm bringing up, I'm not necessarily recommending to audiences. I'm just pointing to their cultural influence. In The Boys, you have this character, Homelander. People have probably seen him at Homelander memes if they spend any time on social media. He is this blonde-haired, blue-eyed, dark Superman archetype who puts on this facade of being genuine and sincere, but he's actually rotten to his core. You know, we've been living with these like postmodern critiques of even Superman for decades, because we're deeply suspicious that power could ever be virtuous, right?

That's at the core of the postmodern critique. Can power ever be virtuous? This was Nietzsche's critique that came out of the death of God is when God dies, what's going to happen? When God dies, what you'll be left with are people and their will to power to fill the vacuum of God. So, we've had this deep suspicion that everybody in positions of power or competency have gotten there by malevolent means. So I think even this summer, another vibe shift thing that we're gonna see is we're gonna see like a painfully wholesome,

sincere Superman that might give like Ted Lasso vibes instead of like the kind of dark, cynical Superman that we've seen really, especially in the last like 10 years or so in pop culture so those those are some of the evidences of and ways you could kind of pick up on the the flavors of metamodernism and culture I meet so many people who don't feel fulfilled in their current stage of life but they start they struggle to make a change because they're just unsure of where to start and who to trust. If this is you, then I highly encourage you to check out an awesome opportunity for you

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just go to ELIC.org forward slash T-I-T-R. That's E-L-I-C.org forward slash T-I-T-R to win one. Can you say a quick word about Creed? I thought I heard you talk about how Creed documents this whole movie. Now I laugh every time. I laugh every time this comes up because you know how this goes, Preston. You're a legit scholar, Preston.

And so you've written academic papers and works of real academic rigor. For many years, I was working through things like The Problem of Evil and wrote a book on that. And it took me talking about Creed for people to be like oh I'm gonna follow and track with this guy now. Oh absolutely. Has it attracted a bunch of people? Oh my guess I think the probably the biggest bump in people paying attention to my work has been revolved around my creed prediction. So for those that aren't familiar with this prediction, I started noticing these meta-modern trends moving away from like

irony and to what I've called like post-ironic sincerity. And so in like the summer of 2023, I started picking up on the trends to, um, even in music and in pop culture where I noticed, especially among Gen Z, that they were really growing exhausted of the constant like cynical irony. And I started to even notice, you know, I'm not on TikTok. I'm, I'm on Instagram, which is like TikTok, like three weeks later, right? That's, that's usually where the stuff ends up. And'm on Instagram, which is like TikTok like three weeks later, right? That's usually where the stuff ends up. And I started seeing, it came up on my feed, like these super earnest

Gen Z videos where young people were like sincerely singing Creed songs. And I thought, that's really, really strange. Like for my, you know, for our generation Preston, you know, Creed was super popular when they first came out, but then they became associated with corporate butt rock. And, you know, they were like the poster child for what you should be cynical about in music. And so for probably like the aughts throughout the 2000 teens, people's probably first level of engagement with Creed was probably through Creed memes that were making fun of the band, you know, making fun of Scott's tap,

you know, making fun of their syrupy sentimentality and all of that stuff. But I started noticing like in Gen Z in particular, like there was this spark of sincerity and I was like, oh, that's totally meta-modern. So I put this chart together and maybe I'll send it to you so you can, you know, put it up in post editing on this, but I called it the stages of Creed is awesome chart. So in modernity, Creed is awesome was said

totally sincere, right? Like mid nineties, if you hadn't got caught up in all the post-modernism stuff, you really, really liked Creed. I mean, so much so that Creed even did that infamous halftime performance, the Dallas Mavericks on Thanksgiving Day, where they had like Cirque de Soleil guys dropping from the ceiling and flying through on banners.

I'm sure many people have seen that performance. That was like peak Creed. And from that point on, you moved into like the postmodern critique, which is kind of like, Creed is nothing more than corporate butt rock. But then that kind of shifted into this ironic laughing at Creed where people are going, Yeah, I love Creed. Creed is awesome. LOL. But they were still making fun of them. The meta modern shift that I started to notice was people going, LOL, Creed is awesome. And they were like, kind of being sincere about it. While being self aware that you could say, maybe objectively, you know, people, whatever the objective metric is for music, people will say music people say well objectively Creed isn't a good band But I'm still going to like them anyways So in the fall of 2023 I start noticing this stuff and I make this prediction where I go I think Creed is going to have a massive massive year and that was in like September of 2023 Then all of a sudden I see on the news

And that was in like September of 2023. Then all of a sudden I see on the news, Texas Rangers blasting Creed higher in the, uh, in the clubhouse to pump them up for their world series run. And I don't know if you remember that. Yeah, I know. It's like most of these guys are already at the age where they would have never listened to them originally and all of a sudden they're blasting them in the, uh, all over the field at like, I don't a sudden they're blasting them in the, uh, all over the field at like, I don't know if they're doing it during seventh inning stretch or

to start the game. I couldn't remember what it was. And then I start noticing all over like culture that there is this resurgent interest in Creed. And then they announced a reunion tour and then they went on tour and lo and behold in 2024, this is a true statistic. I'm not making this up. Creed had its highest grossing year as a band in the year 2024. And it wasn't people just laughing at them, right? There's been some of that where people are still like, Creed, you know, but it was a true wave of post ironic sincerity. It is what I've called

embracing the cringe. You might still feel Creed is cringe, but you know how you get beyond those feelings of like, I can't like anything. You embrace the cringe and they did it as well. Like they were self aware. So they didn't change their vibe. They stay when they're reunion, they came back as who they always were. And did the same exact songs, same exact songs. I think even right now on the hard rock charts, Creed's one last breath is the number one song right now.

Unbelievable. And that came out in 2001, maybe or 2000. So they experienced this huge cultural, uh, rejuvenation and what was behind it. It wasn't people. There were some people still laughing at them, but it was an a wave of sincerity, not the same sincerity we had in 1996 that was like, Oh, yeah, this is objectively good. This is the shift precedent. It's hard for people to like maybe wrap their mind around.

And some people get this right away. When I say it, it is a self aware. I am ironically enjoying this, but it's so much ironic enjoyment that I've moved beyond it. Just being ironic. And I've moved beyond it just being ironic and I actually really enjoy it. How else would I compare this? Again, I've called it embracing the cringe. I've called it self-aware cringe. So Creed was non self-aware so they didn't know that they weren't cool and then they became

aware that they weren't cool and embraced it. And in doing so, they gave people permission to be like, dude, I don't care what anybody thinks. I'm just going to objectively tell you right now, I love Creed and Creed is awesome. They make me feel good. They give me good vibes. Right. And that set people free from their cynicism that was like, I can't actually say that I like Creed because I have to tell my friends I actually like Radiohead. You know, that was kind of the way you signaled to people that you had good musical taste.

It was like, do you like Creed? No, I don't like Creed. The snooty, the high culture, like Radiohead is like... The hipster thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Creed's a low level, like, you know, you yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It creates a low level. Like, you know, you're, you're just eating like burgers and fries. You haven't gotten to sushi or, or, you know, Thai food or, you know, like, I never understood the whole anti-Cree.

I just, I, and I'm not, again, I'm not a sophisticated music listener, although I am a big Rush fan. I had a follower of the podcast say, find you a woman who looks at you or talks about you the way Preston talks about Rush. It's classic. Anyway, I've always loved their music. The distortion guitar is powerful. In fact, when I watched your video, I haven't listened to Creed in years. Watched your latest video documenting this as at the gym. And I said, I'm going to share, I want to like, I know a few other songs higher and others and everything. And I went down like the top songs and that whole, for an hour at the gym, I did nothing but listen to

Creed. I'm like, this band rocks, dude. Bangers, they're bangers, total bangers. And I'm like, this bad rocks, dude. They're bangers. They're bangers, total bangers. Oh, dude, it's great to hear. And I'm tired of saying they're not, right? That's the thing is like, I think people, they feel this sense that they can't ever feel anything sincere unless it meets some sort of approval by whether you want to call them like cultural elites or whether, I don't know what the case, you can use all sorts of terminology, but people are exhausted with that feeling

Preston. And so Cree is just like one expression of people going, I don't care if it's formulaic. I don't care if they're not doing like time signature changes like rush does, right? Like I don't care if they're, you know, modulating seven or eight different keys. I don't care if they're, you know, modulating seven or eight different keys. I don't care if their songs are formulaic. I feel good when I listen to it. I feel positive when I listen to it. And that's the thing that I, this is the shift that's happening is people ready to feel something hopeful, ready to feel something sincere again. And

it is, it's not a sort of like I'm closing my eyes to the problems of the world. That's not it. It's this recognition that yeah, okay. So the world always has suffering. It always has problems. And I can spend my entire life raging against the machine and not make a single dent in whatever I think the machine is. And all I'll be left with is my own cynicism, my own oftentimes like isolation. I don't know how many times you work with a lot of churches, Preston, right? And you've probably heard plenty of, uh, like sad and tragic failed church plant stories.

How many of those over the last couple of decades have come from a place, I'm not saying all of them, but I'm saying I've lived through a couple of them myself, Preston, where people who kind of, I think, ingested this sort of fight club, matrix, rage against the machine ethos, which was like the highest good that we can do is critique. ethos, which was like the highest good that we can do is critique. And so what happens to a lot of people that are in churches and they've been in a church that maybe has been around for a while and has some tradition to it, and you got programmed your Gen X, your millennial, your Gen Z, and you've been programmed through culture to think your highest good is to critique tradition. Well, what are you going to do? Oftentimes, people go, well, I'm going to rage against the machine. I'm not saying this is always

the case, but I've seen, even in church planting, this happen where people go, I think the highest good for me is critique. The highest good for me, they wouldn't put in these terms, is to reject the old way, to reject tradition, to reject the system. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to gather a community of people who, like me, want to rage against the machine. And it often feels like really good for the first year of that church plant's existence, because oftentimes people are still huddled around this like, yeah, my old church did this. They had this tradition or this thing. And then they get to the point where they've run out of the old things to point at.

And I've seen this over and over. That energy of the highest good is to critique, gets turned inward on each other in the community. And over and over, I have seen how communities that have organized around deconstruction, that energy eventually turns inward and the deconstructive energy destroys the very community that was centered around that. It has nowhere else to go. They cannibalize themselves.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So I'm curious, everything you're saying, it's just the nagging thought in the back of my mind is, is this related to the, and I'll just say the appear, I don't know if it's real. I think it's real, but I'm not sure I would love your thoughts. The appearance of the resurgence of it's, it's kind of cool to be conservative now. Is that actually a thing or, you know, if somebody voted for Trump in 2016, they didn't say anything. Like they were like, oh, I don't know.

Like, I can't vote every, but now it's like, they're kind of like, no, I did, I like to deal with it. Like, I don't, is that, is that a thing or, and is that related to this at all? Cause that could be totally off. Yeah, totally. There is a point of connection there and I want to be clear about something.

And I've said this over and over again over those last, you know, six months as I've had more conversations with people who have been interested in the political application of this, um, is to say, there will always be whatever changes happen in the zeitgeist of culture, there will always be political impacts to that. What I would attempt to point people in the direction to is this deeply held belief that politics are downstream of culture. It's downstream of our theology and our philosophy. It's downstream of the way we try to make meaning and make sense

of the world, and then we find that political application. So where's the points of overlap? I think mainly I would point to, Preston, is that in many ways the progressive wing of the Democratic Party became ideologically centered within the postmodern ethos. And so, when people were tired of deconstruction, when they were tired of the sense that all we can do is continue to fracture ourselves Into smaller groups and identities that sense that we don't have a shared story at all that you can't have a shared story At all that all you have is your own identities I think a lot of people just grew tired of that and they associated that with a particular And they associated that with a particular political movement.

And there is a lot of overlap there. And so, I mean, even just simply like you could ask yourself a very simple question 2022, our movie theaters were kind of come out of COVID. We've come out of this really intense time, incredibly intense time of political division polarization. Um, you know, my church is not that far down the road from where George Floyd was killed. You know, we had the impact of the that and the impact of the riots afterwards deeply affect our city and Minneapolis is still recovering from that.

You're kind of come out of the middle of that and the theaters are dying. You've gone through COVID. You have this intense like sense that man, we've really done wrong in terms of how we talk about race in this country. It's our perpetual problem. So what we need to do is we need to continually critique our old stories and we need to continue to have movies that maybe represent, you know, diversity, equity and inclusion, even in the movies that we have. Right. And so, you know, there's been a lot of questions about, well, wow,

why did we have in a Star Wars story where I've been waiting since a kid, I was a kid to see Luke Skywalker again. And the first time I get to see him, why is he instead of being a beacon of hope and virtue and light, like he was when I saw him as a kid. Why is he like a disgruntled, failed, miserable old man who's got to have a teenage girl tell him how to get out of his funk? Like, why is that? So in 2022, we're in the midst of that and the theaters are going to die. And there was one movie that everyone pointed to said, this movie saved the movie theaters.

It was Top Gun Maverick with Tom Cruise. Yeah. That movie subtly. Yeah. Go for it. Yeah. How would you see it? I was shot. I mean, I don't, I don't know a second part two to a blockbuster. I mean, I mean, culture changing movie. I mean, I'm a child of the eighties and it between that and Rocky three and four or four in particular. And I mean, there's a few of these just historic culture shaping movies, Top Gun is one of those. And this second one, it felt very similar.

I was shocked. I was like this. Okay. Why were you shocked? That's, that's the question. Why were you shocked? I would suggest this Preston, you were shocked and I was shocked too, because I, you and I have lived through, um, this period of postmodern influence in our cultural stories. When we go to the movies, when we turn on Netflix,

and one of the primary flavors of postmodern storytelling was this tactic that we could call subversion. So subverting a story is to take your expectation of it and to flip it. And typically, it's to flip it in the form of critique. So we go back to Luke Skywalker. I'm going into The Last Jedi going, man, I can't wait to see how this beacon of hope,

the one that resisted the ultimate temptation as a kid, I can't wait to see how this beacon of hope, the, the, the one that resisted the ultimate temptation as a kid, I can't wait to see how as an adult, he's training the next generation and I go into that movie and what does Ryan Johnson do? He does the postmodern move, which is to subvert my expectations and go, well, what if you considered him being a part of the problem? Like, what if he's actually disillusioned? We see this all the time with a lot of like the Disney fairy tales. Maleficent did this as well. How do we take

the mistress of evil from the Sleeping Beauty and when you go into a movie that's supposed to be about her, we subvert your expectations for that and show you how she was actually a tragic case of being a victim herself, and she's misunderstood. So when I go into Top Gun Maverick, you know what I'm expecting? And I'm expecting to get lectured. I'm expecting Maverick to be lectured throughout the movie about how he is the problem. And what it did was it didn't sand off all of that character's like flaws. It still highlighted this is a character that's still in development and it showed the ways in which he struggled with his own weaknesses, but it wasn't subverting him and making him the object of scorn and ridicule and suspicion. Instead, it highlighted him in this really aspirational way, which is to say,

you know what? even with your character flaws that you're still growing and going through, you can be a beacon of hope. Like you can actually point the next generation in the right direction. That would be a tactic I would call Preston. I would call that tactic. What happened in Top Gun Maverick. I call it the meta modern inversion of our postmodern expectations for subversion. So that seems like a mouthful, right? I didn't know how to respond. You asked me,

why was Ionic? I honestly don't know why. It just felt like, you know, you had those very binary cold war narratives in the 1980s, good guys, bad guys, whatever. And I was just, and part of me is like, yeah, but they were so good. So powerful. But I'm like, now looking back, I'm like, yeah, but it's a product of its culture. We moved on. We're in a more decolonial kind of mindset, which is probably good. It's good to like, you know, to kind of valorize the American white muscular person and everyone else is better. So, yeah, that's probably, we reinforce that. And so I was maybe shocked that they didn't, yeah, what you're saying, they didn't flip the narrative, except for here's one. And actually because of my, I don't know, my thoughts on foreign policy and nationalism

and everything, I was actually very happy with the bad guys. Who are the bad guys? The enemy. We don't know. We don't know the skin color. We don't know if they were Easter. Right? I mean, they, I'm correct if I'm wrong.

There was no ethnic demonization. There was no, we don't know who the enemy was. Whereas in almost every other heroic movie, most of the time, the terrorists are all Arab. The bad people are all Eastern European, Russian, you know, and it's like, it just does reinforce that kind of nationalism. And as much as I'm like, that's a good movie in action. It's like, I don't like that's where we get this whole like, you know, if we see a Palestinian, oh, there must be a terrorist, you know, it's like that is reinforced in, in our culture.

And I was, I was actually like, you, you were able to maintain this powerful good and evil, whatever narrative without demonizing an actual real life ethnic group. So I was- That's a great point. And I don't think people even know it. I got to talk to my kids about it and they're like, I didn't think about it. I didn't think they were hiding. Sometimes if it gets so obnoxious, you know, it's like, oh, okay,

you're being you're so trying to treat colonialism that it's just becoming annoying, you know, but they did it in such a creative way. It wasn't it was helpful. Wasn't annoying. It's important to say like the critiques I want to be cautious because I've been talking about what I've perceived as the negative impacts of postmodernism under culture But it's also important to note that those many of the critiques were valid. Mm-hmm Like sure the stories are used as propaganda to keep people in power Like we need there was something about the matrix that was important to be like hey You know not everything that you see, you need to have

a lens of critical reflection on, right? You shouldn't just accept things hook line and sinker, you know, even the Hulk Hogan going heel and NWO was like, Hey, you know, a lot of stuff came out about that guy behind the scenes was not a beacon of virtue. You know, he actually was probably putting on a show and you're like, okay, we need to be aware of that. But I think the thing that I think the thing that feels refreshing is for you to have that awareness, but to say here's the problem. And this is interesting because even I was, I've been reading a book recently on the, you know, the decline of postmodernism and I have to apologize to the author who I'm, I'm forgetting their name on, but they had highlighted that even as you could go back even as early as the 1980s,

and you could see in the academy, um, collisions happening between feminists and the postmodern philosophers. And this was a really interesting nugget. I hadn't even thought of that because for a while there was a lot of overlap between the feminist movement saw a partner in postmodern philosophy because postmodern philosophy was like, you've got to question these stories. You've got to question the way texts are used to enforce narratives of control. And the feminists were like, great. Like we've been saying that too about the patriarchy and the way women have been oppressed.

But then this weird thing happened in the 80s where some of the first critiques of postmodernism came from feminists because the feminists realized that postmodernism had no way of positively reconstructing. All it was was a sledgehammer. So when the sledgehammer was useful for the feminists to be like, yeah, we're critiquing this story, the art and feminists are like, yeah, but we've got to tell a new story that we can live in that would somehow like affirm, you know, our viewpoint and perspective, no matter what you make of feminism. And post-modernism has no, when you say that all stories mask a play for power, that in it of itself is a story that you begin to

wonder, does that story mask a play for power? Are the people telling me that all stories are covering up attempts to grab at power, mask a play for power. And this really interesting. There's been research done. Steve Stuart Williams is a scientist, you can find him on Twitter really interesting, like a lot of biology and cognitive science stuff. He highlighted a recent paper that demonstrated the strong correlation between authoritarian views and postmodern views.

It was like this really weird thing that you go, well, wait, I thought we were supposed to be critiquing all stories. But there's been real concern about whether or not this sense of like, we're always always critiquing is a way in which in that vacuum of power, something else rushes to fill that void. So getting back to Top Gun, I think the thing people felt refreshed by was if you compare Top Gun Maverick to the original Top Gun, you had a more diverse cast, right? You had female pilots, you had African American pilots. I don't think in the first Top Gun movie you even had African

American pilots. I could be wrong. Maybe they were there, but just kind of like in the background. You had that guy, again, I don't know his name because he didn't play a major role, but who filled in for Goose as Maverick's wingman. Or maybe he was an air traffic control. No, he was a pilot. Anyway, yeah, but definitely very, very white. It could be. I mean, the point being like it was integrated in such a way that it didn't feel preachy and you could tell, oh man, there's been enough cultural change here, but this isn't a zero sum game. And that's the thing that I think people felt really refreshed by Maverick didn't have to be bad in order for a female pilot to be good at her job

right, like these things could happen simultaneously where he could be a highly aspirational figure a leader as a male who happened to have white skin and These other people that maybe had been neglected in the past could also find a sense of incorporation into this shared story together. So how that connects to like your political question, Preston, and I think a lot of people, I mean, honestly, if you're just come out and you said, man, Top Gun Maverick was awesome. It was really, really refreshing. You were to ask, I mean, matter of fact, if you really, really love Top Gun Maverick, who would It was really, really refreshing. You were to ask, I mean matter of factly,

if you really, really love Top Gun Maverick, who would you be more likely to vote for? I mean, sometimes it's as simple as that, right? Like you come out, it's really, you know, patriotic. It's like, we're gonna build stuff. We're gonna do things in the world, you know. Obviously you're right in highlighting some of the, maybe the, the, the kind of political, what would be the word?

I want to use my language carefully to describe the sort of militarism. You know, there's obviously there's a military industrial complex, you know, people could certainly see a critique of Top Gun at that, but you know, what one maybe just feels like the most aspirational. So I think there's some political overlap in so far as I think people are ready for like, hey, tell me that not everything in the world needs to be deconstructed and tell me like a direction that we're actually going to go that gives me hope, it gives someone else hope.

It actually points to there being like, you know, virtues that people in power are not always malevolent. I don't think, I'd be clear here, I don't think that there is a one-to-one correlation between like maybe this particular administration embodying that. But I would say in general, what people have sensed as being the vibe shift being more conservative is I think what they're trying to get at is this sense of we've moved past

the postmodern hyper progressive, let's fragment, let's critique all stories. That was the thing that was associated with more recent progressive movements and activist culture. So I would see what's happening maybe more so as like more of a rejection of that than necessarily people going, oh, I'm all for, you know, whatever, you know, MAGA represents in all of its variations and forms, right? There is a constructive versus deconstructive parallel here. I mean, we look at the Democratic Party, the whole energy behind Biden and then Kamala was,

we're not Trump. There was not a lot of like, you don't think of them as like moving forward, constructing, having their own identity. It was, we're not Trump. We need, you don't think of them as like moving forward, constructing, having their own identity. It was, we're not Trump. We need to get this guy out of office because he's, you know, Hitler and terrible and fascist and everything. Whereas, and for people listening, I'm just referring to the messaging here so you can...

The messaging was very much like, we're not Trump. And that's what we're running on. We're running on not being Trump. And we'll just say the opposite, whatever he says. He says, we're going to get a vaccine. And we're like, no, we're not going to take the vaccine. And then he's out of office and like, no, everybody needs to get a vaccine. And if he's not going to wear a mask, we're going to wear two. Everything is just very much reactive and deconstructive.

And the messaging from the Republican Party or the Trump version of that is very constructive. We're doing, we're going to, you know, 20 executive orders on opening day. She's like, we're doing, doing, we're going to take, you know, without the corruption in it. Yeah, yeah. Yes. Whether you agree with them or not, it is like, hey, we're going to build stuff.

We're going to send people to Mars. I mean, that sort of like aspirational, whether you think it's a good direction or not, I think a lot of people just find it, have found that as maybe somewhat refreshing in some regards. But I think we dig down deeper here because what I always go to, and maybe this is Young who said this first that, and I think the apostle Paul would agree, they would have some overlap on this, that people don't have ideas so much as ideas have people.

So I'm far more interested in the ideas that animate people, right? Than naming the people themselves. And I do think on one level, there has been this like, you could see whatever the Republican party has come to today is very different than what it was in the past, right?

But you have seen historically, at least since the Cold War end, the kind of political right has been modernist values and the political left has been postmodern values. So the political right has been meritocracy, very modernist value. You can earn your spot in life. You work hard enough, you train hard, you say your prayers and take your vitamins. Hulk Hogan meritocracy, right? That's traditionally been associated with a more conservative disposition, right? Highly conscientious. We know this from all the research on Big Five Personality Test. This has been duplicated over and over again that, uh, measures, you know,

five different personality traits, conscientiousness, people that score high in conscientiousness and orderliness tend to skew politically, politically conservative. So what are they longing for? They're longing for structures of order and predictability. The postmodern movement has been a movement that critiques those structures, right? And we also know from big five personality tests,

and this has been duplicated over and over again, maybe we could find some papers at some point to link so people know I'm not just making this up, that people that score really high in openness to experience tend to skew more towards the political left in America. Why is that? Well, there's a lot of reasons, but if you're really, really high on you want things to be ordered and you're really, really high in openness to experience, which means like maybe there's something beyond the order, there's going to be some tension there. And I think a lot of the

artists, the people that were in theater and philosophy, they score high in openness. And there was something about the postmodern movement in its heyday, which is like, we're going to tear down every wall possible, right? What was the very ending line of Neo and the Matrix? I want you to imagine a world where there are no rules and no boundaries. And on the surface, that sounds like, oh man, really high in openness. But then you step back and go, that would be terrible. Like if there are no rules, who's gonna stop this guy from coming in

and stealing my stuff and murdering my family? But it sounds to someone that's high in openness as like a, it's the openness of possibility as you take down things. So that's where I'd say like traditionally there's been this tension. Where I think it sometimes gets misidentified is meta modernism isn't going back to modernism. Meta modernism

is this dance we are trying to do to figure out how do we take the best of the modern and the best of the postmodern in a way that allows us to find meaning, hope, and sincerity. And it's not like we're getting rid of postmodernism. We can't get rid of it. We've been living in it. Right? Like I can't get rid of English out of my head, even if I were to learn a new foreign

language. It's in there. Right? Unless, you know, I had some sort of, you know, massive brain injury. English is going to be in my head forever. If you grew up in America since the 90s to now, postmodernism is going to be in you. So it's trying to figure out how do I navigate. Maybe there are some things, like you were talking about,

I should be aware that if we turned Top Gun or this action movie into Americans are good guys and people with brown skin are bad guys, that that's a story that's probably covering up the complexities of truth. That postmodern cynicism might do you some good, but if you were just left all the time thinking there's no good in the world and that everybody that's in a position of power is instantly evil and malevolent and you're always suspicious and you're always alone

because you're suspicious of everything. That's not a tenable place to live. It's a void of meaning and we gotta have meaning and we gotta have a meaningful story to live in. Oh man, so good. Man, we gotta wrap things up. I always say this at the end of every conversation. Like we're just getting started.

It's because I have such amazing guests on theology and they're, ah, we could keep going for hours and hours. You do. It's one of my favorites, man. You got one of my favorites out there. Speaking of which, tell people where they can find you. You have an awesome, I mean, you're primarily YouTube, right? I know the, is it podcasts and YouTube, but is YouTube your primary kind of focus or? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, yeah, I don't know. I've tried to give a little more attention to YouTube in the last year, especially when it comes to,

like that format allows, you know, so the last video I did was maybe a critical reassessment of the messaging in the matrix. And so when you're talking about that, it's just sometimes more helpful to have video. You don't wanna have guests on for interviews like what we're doing together in long form discussions. Those sometimes go up on YouTube,

but yeah, I also have an audio only podcast. So you can search for Deep Talks, cultural theology. If you put that in your search in Spotify or YouTube, you'll come across both. And then probably most active on X, the artist formerly known as Twitter. So yeah, you could connect with me there and you could have dialogue together and chime in and share your thoughts on these sorts of things too.

Yeah, I would highly recommend. I mean, your YouTube channel, it's just, it's a set people that do YouTube well, it just looks good too. Like even like your lighting, your, your mic, the way you present things, it's just very clear and compelling. And, oh, thanks, Preston. Yeah way you present things. It's just very clear and compelling. Oh, thanks, Preston. Yeah, you're doing a great job.

Wasn't always like that, and I'm working to improve it. Thanks so much, Paul, for being on The Audreau again. Really appreciate you, man. Thanks. You as well, Preston. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network. break down these walls by digging deeply into God's Word in a way that you can really understand it. If this sounds like the kind of journey you want to go on, please join us on the Hearing Jesus podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, so I'm launching a new season on the podcast, The Doctor and the Nurse. World renowned brain coach, Dr. Daniel Amon, joins me as a co-host as we dive deep into

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