During an interview at Cambridge University William Lane Craig was asked how postmodern students reacted to his “rational approach.”  He said:

Frankly, I don’t confront many students who are postmodernists. For all the faddish talk, I think it’s a myth. Students aren’t generally relativistic and pluralistic, except when it comes to ethics and religion. But that’s not postmodernism, that’s modernism. That’s old-style verificationism, which says things that are verifiable through the five senses are factual, but everything else is just a matter of taste (including ethics and religion). I think it’s a deceit of our age to say that modernism is dead.

Craig echoed similar sentiments in To Everyone An Answer on pages 21-22:

[E]nlightenment rationalism is so deeply imbedded in Western intellectual life that these antirationalistic currents like Romanticism and postmodernism are doomed, it seems, to be mere passing fashions. After all, no one adopts a postmodernist view of literary texts when reading the labels on a medicine bottle or a box of rat poison…In the end, people turn out to be subjectivists only about ethics and religion, not about matters provable by science. But this is not postmodernism; this is nothing else than classic Enlightenment naturalism–it is the old modernism in a fashionable new guise.

I think Craig is on to something here.  I have often said that many people are modernists when it comes to everything except for ethics and religion, at which point they become postmodern.  But as Craig pointed out, this subjectivism concerning religion and ethics was characteristic of modernism as well.  It’s simply taken on an exaggerated form.  This doesn’t mean our job is any easier.  Religious and ethical subjectivism is still prominent in Western culture and threatens the very foundation of the Gospel.  What this means is that we are often guilty of being too liberal in our use of “postmodern.”  Postmodernism is a diverse set of ideas about a wide range of things, only some of which are being lived out in our culture.  This doesn’t mean we can’t identify aspects of our culture as postmodern, but it does mean we shouldn’t be so quick to say modernism is being abandoned by society.  It isn’t.  It’s being tested, critiqued, and refined, but not abandoned.