Is relativism a threat to christianity?

Paul Valadier's perspective

Abstract

For centuries, Western morality has been based on the belief in a superior being, an absolute foundation, a being-in-itself or a legislating reason. This perspective has contributed to the construction of a reactive morality, that is, one that denies the principle of the permanent historical construction of moral values. When this principle of truth and foundation was diagnosed as dead, human beings found themselves alone, lost and helpless. The expression used here to understand this situation is relativism. What is the source of moral choices? What role does religion still play in this process? Paul Valadier, paying attention to the Nietzschean diagnosis, tries to tackle the issue by proposing a reading in which the religious and the moral try to reconfigure themselves to this new situation of loss of self-referentiality, of ecclesiastical centering, making sense of the characteristics of the present time as possibilities for a new configuration of morality and religious experience.