Pass it on
We have returned to a pre-Christian subjectivity where every individual is their own arbiter of truth. The result is not liberation; it is fragmentation. The question is no longer "what is true?" but "what is true for me?"
Before Christianity transformed the Western understanding of truth, the pagan world had no concept of a unified truth that applied to everyone. The gods were local. Truth was tribal. What was true for Athens was not necessarily true for Sparta; and there was no framework for adjudicating between them because there was no sovereign truth above them both. The Christian claim; that there is one God, one creation, one truth, one revelation; was revolutionary. It created the intellectual conditions for science (a universe governed by consistent laws), for law (justice grounded in transcendent morality), and for the very concept of objective truth that modern skeptics take for granted.
We are now undoing that revolution. The postmodern turn; the claim that all truth is socially constructed, that knowledge is inseparable from power, that objectivity is a mask for privilege; is not a new insight. It is a return to pre-Christian tribalism dressed in academic language. The result is predictable: a society that cannot agree on what is true cannot agree on what to do. It fragments into competing narratives, each with its own facts, its own authorities, its own definition of reality. Social media accelerates the fragmentation by feeding each tribe its own version of events, algorithmically optimized for engagement rather than accuracy.
The solution is not to shout louder. It is to recover the foundation that made truth possible in the first place. Truth exists because God exists; a God who is there, who is not silent, who created a universe that can be known and creatures who can know it. Without that foundation, truth dissolves into power, persuasion, and preference. With it, we can argue about what is true without arguing about whether truth exists at all. The question is not whether objective truth is out of fashion. The question is whether we can afford to live without it. And the evidence of the last fifty years suggests we cannot.