This was originally a comment posted on Roll to Disbelieve.

If I didn't know better, I'd think that evangelical leaders had extensively studied postmodernism and realized they could exploit it. Unable to cope with a reality that undermined their worldview, they denied the possibility of any objectivity apart from God's (the impossibility of objectivity is a basic tenet of postmodernism), and God's POV could be known, strangely enough, through them.

But there's more to it. IMO, the most central claim postmodernism makes is that any assertion of fact is also an assertion of power (I actually agree with this to some extent, but that's a topic for another day), and man have evangies rolled with that. Going far beyond what any but the most ardent of postmodernists would argue, they decided that assertions of fact were only assertions of power. You saw this as early as the Bush years, with their mocking of the "reality-based community" that didn't realize that the Bush admin, by their actions and speech, created reality.

Further, taking up the view that "in language there is only difference," they denied any connection between language and the real world. The meanings of words became nothing more than miniature assertions of power; if they could convince someone a word meant what they claimed it meant, or even that they believed what they claimed a word meant, that became a source of power. And since there was nothing to tether language to reality, there was nothing to require that a word be used consistently.

Postmodernism was, in part, an attempt to make it much more difficult to wield objectivity as a weapon against the marginalized. What the theorists didn't realize was that subjectivity does that just as, if not more, effectively.

I saw someone on /r/Judaism claim that Reform is antinomian:

Is there any value or behavioral norm in antinomian Reform that is not pretty much identical to that of secular Progressivism?

and I was surprised to say the least. Antinomianism is a distinctly Christian theological position, and the term tends to be more of an insult than a label people apply to their own theologies. Broadly speaking, antinomianism is the position that Christians are under no obligation to follow the moral law, although it's a lot more complicated than that in its specifics.

As a position, antinomianism is deeply bound up with theologies on original sin, salvation by grace vs. salvation by works, and a lot of other things that are explicitly Christian and do not apply to Judaism. So in that sense, obviously Reform can't be antinomian; Reform isn't part of the conversation in which antinomianism arose. And it's weird that someone in /r/Judaism would be using such a strongly Christian term to critique a minhag within Judaism. You have to wonder what sort of life would lead someone to be familiar with both Reform and obscure Christian theology. I mean, apart from my life obviously.

But it's still fairly obvious what they meant by calling Reform antinomian: Reform lacks any halakhic guidance, is unconcerned with the law of the Torah, and has no true moral principles outside of those found in "secular Progressivism."

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