1. Jacobsen describes the ending of the nineteenth century ended very positively. The Protestants moved into an era of modernity, the Catholics were looking to care for a new industrialized Europe and the Orthodox Christians were slowly regaining their control over their nations and churches. According to Jacobsen the first world war should never have been fought. During this war the German Protestants portrayed the war as a holy crusade against the Germans. The Russian Orthodox leaders explained that the war against Western Europe was necessary to defend Russia against the “antichrist”. The French Catholics were drawn to images of Christ. They drew the Sacred Heart of Jesus on their flag which portrayed their strong faith. The Anglican church told the British soldiers to kill all Germans. Whether they were old, young, good, or bad the Germans needed to die to stop the spread of a dictatorship. “Almost all the war rhetoric, on all sides, mixed God, glory, and gutsiness into a hot soup of righteous fervor” (122). Essentially all the major branches of Christianity in Europe were changing and shifting the Word of God in order to shape their own ideals. They wanted to sway soldiers, civilians, and governments with the Bible in order to get what they wanted. Pope Benedict XV spoke adamantly about how the war was silly. He said that due to five million civilian casualties that the war was “the death of a civilized Europe”. The laïcité was a law of required secularization. Due to these new laws church attendance dropped and people started straying further and further away from organized religion. The spread of communism was fast behind the iron curtain. Due to the armistice and lack of fighting this gave way to a huge wave of communism to sweep across half of Europe. Christian communities were vastly affected by the spread of communism in Eastern Europe. Mainly Christianity varied from country to country and ultimately the Balkan War in the 1990’s pitted the Orthodox Church and the Muslims against each other.
2. The decline of Christianity in Europe stems from wide spread secularization. Churches in Europe are left empty. Cathedrals that once help hundreds of Christians now stand empty. Jacobsen makes two conclusions. The first is that the Protestants have been more affected by secularization than any other denomination and that Eastern Europe is more secular than Western Europe. Due to immigration there has been a steady rise of Muslims in Europe migrating from Africa and Asia. Due to Muslim immigration larger and larger strictly Muslim communities have begun to form all across Eastern Europe. Due to the rise of Muslim immigrants Christianity has begun to take a dip. Due to the rise of Muslim immigrants Western Europeans began to evaluate their faith differently. This has lead to a renewed sense of faith and belief in Christianity.
3. European intellectual life has judged the relationship between reason, science, and faith to be controversial. For European Christians they want to seek truth in faith. Most believe that if they were required to pick between faith and truth they would pick truth due to Christ being truth, therefore truth>faith. Thinkers like Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Dun Scotus, and Martin Luther have asserted their own ideals in regard to reason. The most important of these is Luther he believed that Christianity should be explained in simple terms. In order for reason to come from Christianity, it must be kept simple so every man can understand it. Science is controversial in the European Christian community because for example some Christians completely reject the idea of evolution to where other Christians fully accept that evolution is an explanation of how the world came to be as it is now. This controversy has lead to divisions within the Church but the ultimate goal is to attain truth keeping in view Christ and His teachings. As for faith, faith in the Christian ideals have been steadily declining in Europe due to the rise of secular and scientific thinking/reasoning. More Christians are turning to science, reason, and truth instead of turning to their faith in Christ. This ultimately leads to the fall of Christianity.
4. I think that Post-modern ideals will lead to a further decline of a Christian lifestyle in Europe and the Americas. I think with the rise of science, truth, and reason Christian countries and communities are becoming more and more secularized. Christian communities will be forced to adapt to post modern ideals and ways of though instead of relying on their faith in Christ. Ultimately I believe that Christianity will continue to steadily decline, immigration will continue to rise, and science which can now in my opinion be considered a religion will supplement Christianity.

The optimism of a modernizing Christian Europe at the turn of the century did not last long. By the time World War I was underway, churches across the country were stoking the fire of religious fervor to goad young Christians into representing their God and their country on the field of battle. After the war, people had to reconcile their religion with the horrors of war. Some saw it as proof of the sinfulness of humanity. Karl Barth, a Swiss pastor, became a spokesperson for this feeling. He asserted that the Christian God could not be on the side of any one military state – He is so too different from humanity to be defined in that way. But not everyone listened to such theologians. Many still linked the church with the reckless violence that had scarred Europe.

When World War II was collected from the promissory note that was the Treaty of Versailles, Christians around Europe believed it was a “just war”, a war to defend the defenseless from evil. But many more Christians did nothing – could do nothing – to prevent the atrocities of the Nazi regime. It was not only a failure by Christians, but by God. How could He have let the Holocaust happen?

These wars contributed to the decline of Christianity in the 20^th century, but there were other factors. In many countries, there was a drive to secular society rather than a church centric society. The French policy of Laïcité forcibly removed religion from government. Great Britain’s church attendance was below 20% by the year 1900. In the Eastern Bloc, communist governments held churches on a short leash. Some churches were even disbanded and priests assaulted.

This decline in faith has been cited as a reason for the deterioration of the traditional family unit in Europe. The rate of single mothers in Europe has skyrocketed. Many couples choose to forgo marriage.  Further, to sustain a population, each woman in the society must bear two children, on average, during their lifespan. European women are averaging 1.5 children. This means that the ethnically European population will slowly begin to dwindle as immigrants with higher birthrates continue to out-produce their native neighbors.

Immigration has also caused religious instability in Europe. A large portion of immigrants are Muslims, a faith that has not existed extensively in western Europe before now. The appearance of obviously non-Christian peoples in Europe has come as a culture-shock to Europeans, who have existed for a thousand years as an exclusively Christian continent.

But a still larger percentage of immigrants are Christians, as well. These foreign Christians boast some of the most growth in churches across Europe, such as the Blessed Kingdom of God for All nations church in Ukraine, founded by a Nigerian immigrant in the 1980s. These churches are not “European” in nature, but a new breed of Christianity.

Europe has a long history of written philosophy, theology and rhetoric that use reason as a pillar for understanding faith. More recently, though, the propagation of reason into science has cause some troublesome waters. Scientifically proven facts, such as evolution, come into conflict with the idea of a creator God. Some Christians have accepted this, and others still have not. The age of the Earth, according to science, is nearly five billion years – much longer than the Bible says. As of 2006, 70% or more Europeans believe in evolution, a testament to the deterioration of Christian authority in Europe.

In the past few years, the trend of postmodern thinking has brought up the issue of truth and the question of its attainability. Some believe that the truth is not available for humans to understand, if it exists at all. This is simply preposterous. The very idea that we cannot find or understand truth is a disgrace to our ancestors, whose thousands of years of work have put us in this rational world in which we can begin to explain things based on reason, based on truth. We have gotten here on the backs of rationality and empirical reasoning. To abandon these central tenants would be to move backwards. This postmodern thinking is too presumptuous. We have not moved out of the modern era. There are issues to solve at this time, with the thinking that has gotten us this far. But many believe themselves “progressive” and seek to leave behind the work that has been done in the hopes of attaining some more perfect existence that cannot yet exist.

I do not believe that European Christianity will defend itself as it stumbles on in this 21^st century. Europe is already being enveloped in a postmodern, politically correct society that will bend and bend until it is no longer Christian. I doubt that the majority of Europe even cares. It will be swallowed up by collective religious apathy or by the increasing immigrant populations blossoming in Europe’s urban centers. The number of Christians in Europe, is expected to decrease by nearly 20% over the next half century while unaffiliated and non-Christian faiths are expected to grow significantly, some by up to 90% (http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/europe/). The transition may not happen very quickly, but European Christianity is on its deathbed.

Twentieth Century Europe was a breeding ground for many new ways of thinking and living. Russia and France being one of the steady holders of this change. The World Wars play into how Christianity has developed because in a time of death and destruction there was Christ to look to for strength and encouragement. Though there was much disagreement between Western and Eastern Europe and how church and state should play in to how people must govern their lives, “French Catholics sewed images of Sacred Heart of Jesus to their flag, indicating that faith and the nation were one.” (Jacobsen 122) Though the Western Christians were more concerned with the spread of communism and the “Western European antichrist.” (Jacobsen 122) There was great decline in believers in Europe in general do to so much war and death and the secularization of the church; there was a lack of attendance as well “Sunday services was already below 20 percent in 1990.” (Jacobsen 126)  The French Revolution caused an uproar, not only in the sense of great dismay, but also the disorder of the church. The term Laïcité is written within the French Constitution it is a state driven term that implies that both the state and the church are unified.

Since there was a decline of practicing Christians in Europe in the mid twentieth century due to the World Wars, attendance was key to the Catholic council. Families were torn apart by death and destruction though they found peacefulness in God and the teachings of scripture. Europe is in a process, and has been for over a couple of century, there is a large influx of demographics. As more immigrants from the Western world move into Europe more melding of different demographics appear. It revitalizes Europe as a whole and gives new light to different ideas of thought. When it comes to the family life, the secularization of the church influences how individuals view the Protestant idea of marriage (that it should be between a man and a woman). It challenges individuals to take a reform, if you will, to a newer perspective on something so longly outdated. Advocates such as John Paul II and Benedict XVI who spoke out against things such as human rights are a prime example of the traditional way of thinking. (Jacobsen 134) In 1948 as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights came into play there was a more passionate and open conversation about what is right for the people.

European theologians have had a strong emphasis on the idea of “truth” and how one must not only look to God for the one ” true truth” but towards science as well. For example Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species, this book brought about much more thought of how we have come to be on this earth. The apostle Paul believed it “he clearly considered good arguments and sound philosophy to be compatible with Christian faith.” (Jacobsen 136) This being a reflection of the past and how even the Paul thought it might be good for the community to think “outside the box” like Martin Luther did as well during the Catholic Reformation.

The future for European Christianity is looking bright. Since Europe was founded on ideas from both the Enlightenments, individualism and individual thought has highly influenced the modernity of European Christians. I believe that the future for Christianity in Europe is on the up and up, hopefully still holding fast to the idea traditional values as the catholic church would recommend.

Christianity had a huge impact on World War I in many different ways. One of the major roles of Christianity was through the countries involved in the war who used Christianity as a means of propaganda for backing their involvement. The portraying of the war as a  “Holy Crusade” really encourage the people of these countries to back the warfare going on in Europe. On the opposite end the Pope at the time, Pope Benedict XV, was against the war and saw it as millions of lives being loss. He went on to question the world and the followers of Jesus asking them how they could be so willing to kill their neighbors. Another role that came during and after WWI was the questioning of Christianity during the war. People didn’t understand how God and world could allow people to go out and kill one another on such a large scale. Soon after WWII broke out and the world was right back to where it was considering it a war of justice. Compared to WWI, Christianity played a lesser role but the questioning and separation grew stronger and I think the biggest reason for this was the Holocaust. Why was God doing this to the world? This trend of separating one self from the church did not end after the wars and would rather spread widely across Europe.

Secularization would contribute hugely to the decline of European Christianity. It would lead to major changes in European Christianity and everyday life for example it led to a drop in church attendance. This has lead to a dramatic increase in Europeans belief in God all the way up to today where Europe has some of the lowest numbers in church attendance around the world. The family life and Christianity have parted ways. Families are not baptizing their children in numbers that they use to, less and less children are being brought up within the church, and there has been a growing trend of people deciding not to get married. The rise in immigration has lead trends to both a destabilized and revitalizing Christianity in Europe. First destabilized, there has been rising number of immigrants coming to Europe who are Muslim which has challenged the dominance that Christianity has always had in European society. Immigration has also lead to revitalizing Christianity through immigrants from Africa and Asia who have brought and grown their Christian beliefs across Europe.

Across Europe Christianity have a significant commitment to truth and want to prove what is true through Christianity. The idea of proving what is true through Christianity hasn’t created a great divide in European society but has caused trend in discussion over religion and science having to become more align and accepting of one another. The European intellectual have judged the relationship between reason, science, and faith has grown and become a big trend throughout European history where science was something that was against God and punished by the church where now in more modern times the Church is losing its grasp on European society resulting in the decline in Europeans being involved with Christianity.

As we have learned throughout the course modern European life has been tremendously shaped by the enlightenment ideals of rationalism, empiricism, and skepticism. These forces have lead and will have an impact on the future of European Christianity. These ideas will threaten the future of Christianity if it does not become more giving or accepting to modern ideas. Truth will ultimately have to still be backed by facts and not opinions or interpretations. If Christianity doesn’t modernize then the modern European world will keep stepping further away from Christianity. This stepping away from Christianity will open the doors for a very different society that history has never seen before.

Christianity can be considered the central conflict in the First World War, and a supporting reason in the Second World War. The First World War was fought with religion at the forefront of the fight. The churches of most countries involved advocated for the fight for Christ, telling soldiers they were doing gods work. The first world war was a crusade for both secular and religious power. In the end though, the soldiers fighting did not even know what cause they were fighting for. World War Two was waged less with religion in mind and more with the concern to preserve national pride. When Germany invaded Poland a tangled web of alliances was engaged. Hitler’s quest for control over the European continent and the religiosity of its people meant that the Jewish population, long labeled Christ-killers by Christians, was to be persecuted. What followed was the most horrific event in human history. The post-war Europe was faced with trying to figure out why the wars were justified of God planned out history. The Holocaust was determined to “an expression of sin and human choice, and therefore not gods will” (electronic copy). Following this, France adopted a policy of laïcité, or “governmentally enforced secularization” (electronic copy). After WWII, Russia was given control over most of Eastern Europe, but the individual territories and countries had control over their churches. Countries such as Albania declared national atheism, whereas Poland was devoutly Catholic. While Russian government declared atheism before the Iron Curtain fell, after 1990 Russian government aligned itself closely with the church.

The secularization of modern Europe has contributed to the drop in recent church attendance. Between secularization and immigration, modern Europe looks very different than the Europe of even a century and a half ago. Only half of Europeans say they believe in God, “and secularization is deeper and more evenly dispersed across Protestant Europe than in either Catholic or Orthodox Europe”. In addition, Eastern Europe is generally less secular than Western Europe, “even though Eastern Europe experienced decades of forced secularism under communist rule, while Western Europe became secular with no coercion at all” (electronic copy). The number of immigrants to Europe, specifically Western Europe has increased greatly over the past few decades. Though there has always been a Muslim population in Eastern Europe, the Muslim presence in the western part of the continent is relatively new. In fact, “in France, the number of religiously practicing Muslims is now roughly equal to the number of Catholics attending Mass every week” (electronic copy). These immigrants practice their faith publicly, but in Europe the social and sometimes even legal rule is that there is to be a “nakedness” of the public sphere (electronic copy). European individuals have drifted away from church because of the progression of secularism in the region. However, because this has taken place so “unreflectively”, many Christian beliefs and attitudes are still practiced unconsciously, making anything different appear bad (electronic copy).
In addition to the Muslim presence in Europe, there is a large number of African and Asian immigrants in Western Europe, who have set up their own churches. These congregations draw sometimes thousands of people, revitalizing and changing how European Christianity looks. Baptism numbers are declining and there are less and less priests marrying couples. There are more children born to single mothers and even less babies being born in general. Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI spoke out often against birth control and said the declining birthrates were due to a “dimming of hope” (electronic copy).

European Christians place great emphasis on truth. They want to prove Christianity as true. The apostle Paul preached to people not to be deceived by holly arguments, but declared that sound reasoning and good arguments were in line with Christian beliefs. Truth comes from the ground up, as according to Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas both philosophized. If you can experience it with your senses and have argument and proof, then it is in line with God as well. Aquinas believed the existence of “of God could be proven on the basis of evidence-based, logical thinking. By joining reason with revelation, mere belief could be turned into solid, demonstrable knowledge” (electronic copy). Christianity’s beliefs in the order of nature of the universe could be considered the foundation of modern science. Though there was a tense relationship between the two in the past, with scientists labeled as heretics and put to death, the proof of these discoveries forced the Church to recant its statements.

Post-modernism and the opinions that come with it have cast a cynical lens to Christianity. European Christians believed in their ability to rationalize God to the point where Eastern Orthodox believers considered their actions tantamount to idolatry. The focus was moved away from God as the Creator and onto the natural earth. “Pavel Florensky, an Orthodox theologian asked “how the fullness of God and God’s relationship to the world could possibly “be packed into a narrow coffin of logical definition?” (electronic copy). The only way to know God was through personal meditation. Focusing on God could illuminate what it meant to be human without sacrificing the truth of science and rationalism. For both postmodern Christians and Orthodox Christians, “true truth” is the truth of our own fallibility and of humanity’s need for divine aid. This belief teeters on the edge of commitment to Christian ideals in hand with modern objectivity while also posing the risk of “sliding back relativism that rejects the importance of science and rationality and declares that anyone can believe whatever he or she wants to believe regardless of evidence and reason” (electronic copy). Ultimately, the belief that truth is not made of opinions, but of proven facts, will continue to influence post-modern European Christendom. Though truth has existed alongside God before, the lack of faith in the Church and the lack of verity of God will most likely further distance Europe from Christianity, making way for a different Christian empire.

European Christian communities responded immediately to World War I by tying up their national identities with their religious identities. Germans, Russians, the British and the French all used Christian rhetoric in promoting war efforts; some saw it as a righteous crusade for Christ, to save the world. But the war took millions of lives and was, as Pope Benedict XV described it, “the suicide of civilized Europe” (Jacobsen, 122). The hate-filled violence laced with religious zeal led many in Europe to question Christianity and a theology that could lead brother to kill brother. While a more humane theology emerged from several Christian pastors and scholars, average citizens were already too weary of the church and began separating themselves from religion in general. When World War II followed, religion played a very different role. Rather than Christian fervor promoting the war, fervor was sadly lacking in the protection of the Jewish people and minorities under Nazi threat. Reflections on both WWI and II, and especially the Holocaust, resulted in deep theological questions that endure to this day for many Europeans. Efforts to renew Christian thinking and practice were important but ultimately too little too late, and church decline in Europe continued significantly. Government-imposed secularization, known as Laïcité, contributed to this decline. France began enforcing church and state separation laws prior to the wars in 1905, and idea that spread in Europe in the postwar era. This resulted in a variety of national religious identities, including officially atheist nations (such as Albania) and communism. After World War I, atheist Russian leadership took disillusionment with the Christian church to an extreme and closed, destroyed, arrested or killed nearly all that represented Orthodoxy. This attitude toward Christianity spread post-World War II and communist countries frequently and oftentimes violently marginalized Christians (Jacobsen, 127).

In many ways, the increasing secularization of Europe has led to a decline in church. For instance, it is no longer socially acceptable to invite people to church in some areas. Christianity when practiced as other-worldly and overly spiritual does not fit in with the modern mindset of sensible practicality. In this way, it is understandable that Christianity has declined. However, some believe that while Europe has shed much of its religiosity, certain Christian values are actually increasing as evidenced in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Jacobsen, 130). Marriage and family size has also been steadily declining in Europe, and some see that as an additional threat to traditional Christianity, as fewer babies being baptized means fewer people are being born into a religion. Family structure looks differently than it did in the past, with those having children not always choosing to get married. Church ideals on family as being closely tied to morality in a community are conflicting with mainstream modern life, leading to questions on whether Christianity can adapt to this or not. Immigration to Europe has led to a rise in the Muslim population, challenging European secularization. It is yet to be seen if that challenge will result in further religious decline in the public sphere, or if it will spur a return for some to Christian belief practice. European Christianity is also being influenced by a huge influx of African and Asian immigrants, many of whom are Christian and are starting growing churches.

European Christianity has long held that reason and faith are intertwined. From Augustine of Hippo to Thomas Aquinas to Pope Benedict XVI, theology in Europe has had a rational and philosophical element to it. It is likely that this will continue and even increase as more and more Europeans seek university educations. In the same vein, science and theology are not outright opponents in Europe, but most tend to think that Christianity can (and should) be reimagined to fit with evidence-based science. In some ways, while secularism may seem a threat to Christianity, it does not seem to pose a problem for many Europeans who are deeply dedicated Christians – rather, their faith may be more flexible to accommodate modern ideas.

On the other hand, postmodernism questions whether the truth can be known at all (or if truth even exists). This is potentially a problem for Western Europeans who depended on reason, science and faith to successfully lead them to truth. Eastern Europeans who embrace Orthodoxy have less of a problem with this idea, as they have long believed that human ideas and reason could only attain a very limited view of God. According to many Eastern theologians, humans have limitations when it comes to understanding, and place a greater emphasis on immediate experience (Jacobsen, 143). Postmodern ideas will likely continue to jeopardize traditional Western theology, but if Western European Christians can allow flexibility to their faith (like they did with reason and science), then postmodernism does not need to be the “threat” some think it is. In other words, if the church can embrace their faith with humility and openness, it may look different than it has in the past, but can still offer hope to the changing world.

European churches hyped up the First World War in religious terms; preachers and theologians from many European countries portrayed the conflict as a “holy crusade for Christ” or necessary to “defend Mother Russia,” among other things (Jacobsen, 122). All in all, there was a wave of righteous fervor that swept throughout Europe and incited people to support a war that never should have occurred. Pope Benedict XV came out against the war, asking how followers of Jesus, who profess love and mercy, could hate each other so much that they are willing to kill their neighbors. After the first war, there was a movement among theologians to distance themselves from the “mindless nationalism” of the European nations (Jacobsen, 123). Scholars like Karl Barth and several French theologians emphasized the otherness of God and sinfulness of humankind. Russian Orthodoxy had to deal with communism and was brought to the brink of extinction. WW2 had a much less religious component, but many Christians still considered it a just war (123-4). However, European Christians failed to protect the Jews. When people learned about the horrors of the Holocaust, they started asking questions like, “Was God controlling history, or not? Why would God allow the Holocaust to happen?”

Laïcité was the policy of governmentally enforced secularization that arose in Western Europe in the early 20^th century. This originated in France with the Law of Great Separation in 1905. Religion became less important in people’s lives, as shown by decreased church attendance.

Under communist rule, Christians were marginalized and persecuted, and, in the extreme case of Albania, religion was banned entirely (Jacobsen, 126). Churches were destroyed and pastors were arrested. However, after the fall of communism, Eastern Orthodoxy made a comeback that is continuing into the present day, with new churches being built and communities appearing in many countries formerly behind the Iron Curtain.

The idea of secularization and retreat from traditional Christian ideals arose in the period of Enlightenment in the late 18^th century with the French Revolution. These revolutionaries had a radically different view of how truth should be sought. They advocated employing reason rather than faith or doctrine, which was in direct conflict with the Catholic Church, the dominant force in European religious life at the time.

The effects of secularization are especially apparent in Protestant European countries and less apparent in traditionally Catholic and Orthodox countries. It is interesting to note that Eastern European countries are less secular than Western countries despite spending time under the Iron Curtain where secularization was the law. Less children are being baptized, less couples are getting married in churches, and more babies are being born out of wedlock. Catholic leaders have come out against this decrease in fertility rate and advocated for remembering that God encourages the creation of new life (Jacobsen, 134). Also, they have called for a return to the traditional family, prompted by the LGBT and abortion movements.

Immigration has shifted the religious demographics in Europe, primarily considering the recent influx of Muslims in Western Europe. This primarily stems from the difference in how visible religion is in public life. European Protestant Christianity is mostly a private affair, with few outward expressions of faith, while Islam (especially its daily prayers) takes over the public and private lives of its adherents. Violent acts perpetrated by radical Islamic extremists have adversely affected Europeans’ sense of safety, but the cultural divide between European Christians and Muslims has, in a way, made Europeans more self-aware since they had unconsciously drifted away from God. Immigrants from Africa inspired by the missionizing efforts of Europeans during the colonial and postcolonial periods have planted large Pentecostal churches in Europe, and situations like these only figure to increase in occurrence.

European Christians have a greater acceptance of reason than other Christians because of their long history of being receptive to philosophical ideas. They argue that using reason is recommended in the Bible by the Apostle Paul. Augustine concluded that faith and reason are necessary and work together. As Jacobsen notes in his text, Europeans have always had an affinity for systematic theology, or a “rational examination of Christian belief” (Jacobsen, 138). While reason has been portrayed as being compatible with faith, science and faith have been in conflict. One source of conflict is the timeline of the origin of Earth, which Christianity traditionally claimed to be seven, twenty-four hour days and science claimed to be much longer than that. European Christians have shown a willingness to reimagine Christianity in light of new scientific claims, and this distinguishes them from other Christians around the world. Most European Christians now accept and embrace evolution as a viable explanation for how humans came to be.

If people do not believe truth is attainable, then they will have nothing to strive for on a daily basis. When people diverge from a previously-held common goal, society has the opportunity to become fragmented with a general loss of motivation to constantly seek out answers. I foresee the further decline of European Christianity with little chance of a return to a previous state of religiosity. Modern European Christianity was never as vibrant as African Christianity is today, and European culture has become so secular that they might be more likely to embrace the postmodernist idea of truth possibly being unattainable.