The Challenge and Opportunity of Metamodern Christianity – The Gospel Coalition

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Metamodernism is our cultural moment and has been since the late ’90s, and especially since September 11, 2001—a date that put the final nail in the coffin of postmodernism.
Most normal people don’t use and will never use the term “metamodernism.” But that doesn’t mean they aren’t living the reality of it, carrying the disposition that metamodernism describes. What’s that disposition? You can read Luke Turner’s influential essay for a concise overview, or the piece I wrote last year on the “metamodern mood” and its implications for the church.
Metamodernism is what came after postmodernism, which is what came after modernism.
But metamodernism doesn’t simply want to replace modernism and postmodernism; it seeks a synthesis or integration of the two, with the metamodern mood constantly oscillating or toggling between modern and postmodern postures.
Once you understand metamodernism, you start to see it everywhere—in pop culture, in politics, in how we talk and think. Let’s consider some dynamics of metamodern Christianity that will be important for church leaders to understand and address. Specifically, we’ll drill down into one big challenge and one big opportunity I’m seeing.
Some people who talk about metamodernism want to characterize metamodern Christianity as a kind of new pinnacle of learning, where we’ve taken all that’s come before and arrived at a new height of enlightenment in how we view God and reality. But I think metamodernism generally, including metamodern Christianity, is closer to a new pinnacle of consumerism.
It’s not that we’re brilliantly synthesizing all the periods and philosophies that came before us (because most of us don’t know enough of that history to be able to synthesize it anyway); rather, we’re increasingly comfortable picking the bits and pieces we like from different eras and cobbling together our own custom “bespoke spirituality.”
This kind of à la carte religion resists buying into an entire, cohesive system. It prefers a salad-bar approach: a little bit of Baptist theology, a little bit of Anglican liturgy, a smidge of Catholic aesthetics, and a splash of Pentecostal worship energy.
There’s a new phenomenon called “aesthetic conversion,” which is very metamodern. You see it often with twentysomething graduates of evangelical colleges who grew up Baptist or nondenominational but, after college, feel drawn to the more aesthetically pleasing vibes and tradition of Anglicanism, Orthodoxy, or Catholicism.
I recently heard a story of an Anglican church full of former Baptists, many of whom had young children or babies. When the priest announced the opportunity for infant baptisms, however, none of these new converts signed up. They had retained their Baptist conviction on adult baptism, even as they’d ditched the Baptist vibe for the Anglican aesthetic.
Aesthetic conversions and bespoke spirituality are byproducts of our new media environment. Online life presents us with an unprecedented array of spiritual expressions, traditions, beliefs, and truth claims. We can’t unsee all of this. And if we like what we see, we have FOMO if we’re not allowed to incorporate some of it, in some way, into our personal religious quest.
In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor calls this the “nova effect.” It’s the rapid explosion of spiritual options we’re aware of—a trend already in motion prior to but significantly accelerated by the internet. Gone are the days of coherent belief systems we inherit from our parents. Gone are the days of stable religious adherence across time. We’ve simply seen too much. On a daily basis: endless perspectives, countless ways of living, voices who challenge our paradigm or provide options we’ve not considered. And the logic of consumerism—which reached a new pinnacle with the invention of the iPhone—conditions us to assume reality is ours to curate and filter as we see fit.
Gone are the days of coherent systems of belief we inherit from our parents. Gone are the days of stable religious adherence across time. We’ve simply seen too much.
Derek Rishmawy summarizes it well when he writes, “Nobody simply inherits packages of beliefs anymore; we choose to believe (and even construct) the packages for ourselves, often as part of our self-actualization project.”
This poses a challenge for churches and anyone doing ministry in the metamodern era. How do you build a coherent, unified local church out of individuals used to DIY spirituality? How do you tell the couple who expresses interest in joining your Anglican church that it’s important for them to be convinced of Anglican doctrine, not just attracted to Anglican liturgy? How do you convince a metamodern believer that it’s important to land in a stable set of convictions and a long-term community, rather than frequently and fluidly rethinking beliefs and following one’s ever-oscillating mood?
For as many challenges as churches face in this new era, there are also significant opportunities. The metamodern generation is hungry for the sort of meaning, purpose, and moral framework Christianity is well positioned to provide.
The post-truth world has become untenable for Gen Z. They’ve grown up with the internet as their gateway to knowledge, but they’ve come to see that nothing is trustworthy and it’s nearly impossible to sift through the glut of information to find kernels of truth. Yet a hyperskeptical, postmodern hermeneutic of suspicion is also untenable. Postmodern nihilism and the relativizing of meaning is untenable. So metamoderns are hungry for truth.
Christianity is a good place for truth. We claim to preach and live by the one unassailable truth: God’s Word. As a trusted tradition of truth that has been more or less stable for 2,000 years, Christianity thus holds great appeal for metamodern people.
The caveat, however, is that even as metamoderns seek truth and are hungry for something to give their lives real meaning, they also retain their postmodern skepticism and are hyperaware of the ways people wield “truth” as a weapon of control or hypocritically espouse truth without living by it.
And so, as we welcome in metamodern truth seekers, we need to do everything we can to build trust with them and model lives of integrity and humility—coherence between our beliefs and our behavior. Metamodern people desire truth. Give it to them. But they also need to see how, in practice and over time, it leads to goodness and beauty.
Postmodern deconstruction—tearing everything down and rejecting modernism’s naive belief in progress—has proven unsatisfying and unsustainable. Metamodern people recognize that it’s in our nature to build, solve problems, and bring order out of chaos. That’s a good starting place for the church to reach them.
Christianity offers a compelling telos. For 2,000 years, it has proven to be the greatest-ever catalyst for innovation, progress, and building. Universities, hospitals, the arts, science, literature, and so much more in Western civilization are a direct outgrowth of Christianity’s missional hope. Christianity says, God made the world on purpose, and it’s going somewhere. He made people to be agents of ordering chaos—spreading Eden, bringing more and more of the world into alignment with God’s design for human flourishing.
Even as metamoderns seek truth and are hungry for something to give their lives real meaning, they also retain a good bit of postmodern skepticism and are hyperaware of the ways people wield ‘truth’ as a weapon of control.
Metamodern people are drawn to a positive vision like this. The internet makes them aware of problems—injustices and suffering everywhere. Yet it leaves them overinformed but underactivated, a combination that leads to angst and anxiety. We’re created for tangible action: to get our hands in the dirt, solving actual problems, ordering actual chaos. This usually means getting involved locally.
Local Christian churches provide channels for this. Every church provides opportunities to collaborate to address suffering and order chaos in whatever shape that takes locally, in proximate households and neighborhoods and cities.
The caveat is that even if metamodern people might be drawn to Christianity because it gives them a missional purpose and an outlet for their activism, they need to be taught that creedal belief, communal worship, and personal holiness matter too. Before the fruit comes the root, the gospel. Christianity isn’t just about building and doing. It’s about abiding in the vine and receiving a purposeful identity in Christ, rather than trying to achieve it through works.
The postmodern nihilism and hedonism of the ’80s and ’90s have given way to a desire for meaning and health. It’s interesting that teen pregnancy peaked in the early ’90s and has been going down ever since. Teen alcohol use is down as well. This generation is more mindful of health and betterment; they want programs and guides for flourishing. This is why life-optimization gurus like Jordan Peterson are so popular among young men. It’s why neo-Stoicism is popular among men and wellness is a big value for women.
But many of these secular paradigms don’t provide sensible, sustainable frameworks for growth and flourishing. Christianity does.
The disciple-making paradigm of Christianity, with a 2,000-year history of changing lives for the better, appeals to metamodern people eager to move beyond nihilistic despair and adopt practices that help them grow.
This “pull” also comes with caveats, however. Christianity isn’t just about wellness or bettering your life. Following God’s truth does lead to flourishing, but it won’t inoculate you against suffering. As we welcome in metamoderns looking to improve their lives as part of the Christian community, we have to be honest about the cost of discipleship and challenge people to bear with the nonlinear, bumpy road of sanctification, which can often feel like two steps forward, one step back.
Metamoderns long for meaning, purpose, and stable truth, which draws them to modernism. But they also hold on to the postmodern freedom to abruptly shift, rethink, reevaluate, and redirect their interests.
The former could be a factor driving Gen Z’s renewed interest in church. But the latter will no doubt be a challenge for durable Christian formation, which requires what Eugene Peterson called “a long obedience in the same direction.” We’ll have to work with metamoderns to cultivate endurance and commitment to the church even when moods shift or troubles come.
But be encouraged—there really is hunger out there right now. The vibe shift is real. Gen Z’s return to church and newfound interest in Christianity is a great thing . . . perhaps one of the greatest evangelistic opportunities of the last century. Every revival movement comes with discipleship challenges, but God can shape and use metamodern souls as much as he did postmodern, modern, and premodern souls. In every generation, God is at work, and his gospel grabs people no matter the prevailing cultural mood.
In his book The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, British journalist Justin Brierley opens with a quote from Matthew Arnold’s 1867 poem “Dover Beach,” which is an artifact of modernism and the receding of religious belief that was already accelerating in the Western world:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar . . .
If religious faith was in a “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” in modernism, and that roar hit a crescendo in postmodernism—when faith in anything felt lost—there are signs that metamodernism might be a return of the tide. The metamodern moment seems ripe for revival.
Lord, may it be so.
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The 75 songs on this playlist are all recordings from at least 20 years ago—most of them from further back in the 1950s and 1960s. Each song has been thoughtfully selected by TGC Arts & Culture Editor Brett McCracken to cultivate a fun but meaningful mix of vintage Christmas vibes.
To start listening to this free resource, simply click below to receive your link to the private playlist on Spotify or Apple Music.
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Brett McCracken is a senior editor and director of communications at The Gospel Coalition. He is the coeditor of Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age and the author of The Wisdom Pyramid: Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, Uncomfortable: The Awkward and Essential Challenge of Christian Community and several other books. Brett and his wife, Kira, live in Santa Ana, California, with their three children. They belong to Southlands Santa Ana. You can follow him on X or Instagram.
Beyond the music and the romance of ‘The Sound of Music’ lies a moral universe that still speaks to a disordered age.

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