Postmodernist

My family is all musicians.
My mom is a classically trained violist. My dad plays so many instruments that I don't even know what they all are. My brother plays piano. I play bass. My family has also always been involved in church music.
So a few weeks ago my dad brought home a book by a church worship leader called "Why I Left the Contemporary Christian Music Movement". The author is a former rock musician who transitioned several evangelical and baptist churches from "traditional" style services to "contemporary" styled services. The big differences being organ music and hymns vs. CCM rock-style music.
In his book, he maintains that CCM is generally a bad thing and urges churches to retread and go back to holding traditional services. He has a number of arguments, most that don't make sense to me, but my family has had some pretty neat discussions about it.
What we all seem to agree on is this:
The author associates ALL rock music with bad things that don't belong in church services, and he believes that the music- driven beats that virtually everyone enjoys listening to, is inseparable from evil, lustful desires.
As a musician, I am mostly taken aback by this claim.
Music is a wonderful thing, and, to quote Jack Black, "Rock is not the devil's work, it's magical and RAD."
My family decided that the author of the book has a personal issue with rock music: in his mind, he cannot separate it from immoral things, even if many other people have no problem with it. The problem with that is he seems to believe that people the world over are being influenced by rock music for worse.
One claim he made to support this is that rock music was born out of rebellion.
Which it very likely was.
But my mom, who has a masters degree in music education and seems to know all sorts of things about music history made the point that all art movements are born out of rebellion to the movement that preceded it.
So yes rock music is rebellious. But the romantic movement was rebellious against the classical period, which was rebellious against the baroque period, all the way back to forever. Each generation throws off the customs of the generation before it. It's just the way human society seems to work.

The deeper thing at work here is Modernism verses postmodernism.
The author appears to have grown up in the 70s, when Rock music was really taking off.
My dad grew up in the 60s, and made an off-hand remark about how ever since the 60s, music has been junk. Now i'm no psychologist or philosopher, but it seems to me that everyone loves the music they grew up with. My dad loves music from the 60s and earlier, and it can't just be coincidence that it's the music that was around when he was growing up. Old people listen to old music. Everyone knows that.
But the time period when my dad was growing up is considered to be part of the modernist movement. Like all philosophical and artistic movements, modernists revolted against the styles and thinking of their parents and grandparent's generations.

But the age we're in now is considered Postmodern. To quote the first sentence in the wikipedia article, "Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth."
That is to say, postmodernists reject the idea of objective truth, whereas modernists embraced it.
"Truth" to a Modernist is absolute; it is the way things are.
"Truth" to a postmodernist is all in our heads; it's how we perceive the way things are.
The author of that book is modernist; he believes in objective truth.
I am a child of postmodernism. That means that INSTINCTIVELY, I believe that the author, as a modernist, believes that his truth is the only truth.

It's different ways of looking at the same thing, and arriving at a completely different conclusion.
Growing up in church, I never believed that truth was relative. That's absurd. Truth is out there, it's fact, and it exists.
But as i've grown older, my ideas about truth have changed. I haven't ever studied postmodernism but maybe the people who label our society know what they're talking about. I still believe in absolute truth. I'm a Christian and I believe that Jesus taught Truth with a capital T.
But i've also realized that absolute truth isn't nearly as important as church people make it out to be. Because our society is postmodern. Truth isn't objective in our culture. Truth to each person on the planet is completely different, because each person perceives the world completely differently. And PEOPLE, it turns out, are more important than anything else on the earth.

Especially in an age where your insurance premiums are determined by an algorithm and not a friendly lady over the telephone, people out in the world are becoming more and more in need of being understood by other people.
Jesus's ministry was all about the people he taught.
If we don't try to understand people, if we don't realize that the truth we think is right isn't the same truth that everyone else thinks is right, we will be completely useless to help those people.
 And that's why I  have a personal aversion to CCM; not the style of music, but the Industry. Making music for other christians isn't inherently bad, but it encourages us to ignore the entire world. That's absolutely not what being a christian is all about.