Is Christian Fundamentalism and Creation Literalism Actually Examples of Postmodernism?

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Postmodernism is embraced by the political correctness movement because this trendy contemporary philosophy allows for neglect of the intent of the communicator. For example, in the last day of school before winter break a teacher in a public school says to her students, "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year." Her intent was to wish her students a joyous holiday break, and since Christmas is one of the two holidays occurring during the break, she included the "Merry Christmas" phrase.

Enter postmodernism. According to the ACLU, the teacher acting as a representative of the local government agency that operates the school district just forced a religious preference onto her students with the word "Christmas" and thus violated the separation of Church and State. Although her intent was to express a harmless traditional greeting as a temporary farewell, the ACLU and advocates of political correctness are concerned only with what the students interpreted in her saying. They care nothing about the surrounding events (students packing their stuff to go out the door just a minute before the bell rings and winter break starts), nor do they care about the fact that the teacher was saying this as a temporary farewell.

An aspect of postmodernism is to ignore the intent of the message and to take the message to mean what you want it to mean. Thus, the audience can choose to be offended.

Creationists are doing this in two ways:

  1. Neglect of authorial intent in the Genesis text, and thus interpret the text to mean what they want it to mean.
  2. In their interpretation of scientific data, they funnel in data that supports their theory and filter out data that does not. Instead of following scientific protocol and adjusting their theory to the results of the data, they are adjusting the data to their theory.

The irony here is that fundamentalistic Christians speak out against postmodernism as though the philosophy is their enemy. Yet, their theological and scientific methodologies are very postmodern.
