Modernism refers to a structural phase in philosophical thought. It's key intuition was that if you could understand the relationships between various phenomena at one moment in time that you could infer the causal structures of those relationships.
So Freud said that his field of study could be understood by the invisible structure of unconscious desire, Marx said that his field could be understood by the mainly political structures of the economy, Darwin said that his field could be understood by biological structures of evolution and Neitzsche said that his field could be understood by the structures of the will to power. In anthropology it was Levi Strauss and myth. In Linguistics it was Sassure and and the signifier. In theology it was Schliermacher and religious aesthetics.
In each of these thinkers there is no appeal to a God, an absolute, or a center to the structure itself, it was not the center that mattered, but the structure, and the structure was viewed as dynamic. So the only thing a thinker could do was study "the way things are now" which is to say, to identify the current position and function of those structures. Or to look at "how this came to be" or the history of a certain aspect of the feild. (Philosophers use "synchronic" and "diachronic" to explain these who views).
Modernism tended to elevate the synchronic ("the way things are now") over the diachronic ("how this came to be") which is how it cames to be incorrectly asserted that modernism only cares about up-to-date-ness or the "modern" world.
Note here that God is of little use to "modern" scholars. Freud could not use God to explain a psychosis anymore that Nietzsche could use God to explain the will to power. God was not referenced by the structure as so was not needed in the theology. You can't imagine Marx saying "the working class poor of the world will rise to seize the means of production, oh, except for the Polish, they are cursed by God".
They each believed their structures to be universal and they did not reference God to prove that universality. The structure doesn't reference heaven. (This is precisely the point where Barth disagreed with Schliermacher - and why his Romans changed the trajectory of theology, by reattaching the event of the word to the divine.)
Post-modernism was one of the responses this prevading belief in structure. This is why, in philosophy, post-moderism and post-structuralism are almost synonyms.
Barthes and Derrida noted that all modernism relied on a belief in languages ability to explicate the structure, where they saw it was too dynamic a tool, always inserting its own tensions and fissures into meaning without the permission or intention of the author. This meaning could not be fixed long enough to pursure a synchronic investigation and certainly could not be reliably communicated as the structure changed in the telling.
Lacan and Foucault problematized the assumptions of gender and power along with a slew of feminist post-structuralists (Irigiray, Cisoux). Lyotard noted that to try to percieve the grand narrative was to make claims language and thought could range over history, which he asserted was false.
If we were to study synchronically, it would have to be a "local" study (and this is where the "everyone has a valid opinion" misreading of postmodernism comes from.). One cannot assume that language and thought will be structred the same "over there" any more that I can assume that language and thought will be structured the same "back then". It must be noted here that the "grand narrative" (or metanarratives) that these writers spoke of were the modern narratives of power, evolution, economy etc. that we discussed above. Thus the thinkers were beyond modernity or post-modern.
Again there is little use for God is this thought was God is viewed as an attempt to "fix" language (as in keep it in place), and attempt to set up an authority over meaning that is non-local. This is usually oppressive and should be deconstructed.
For the most part people don't know or care about all this. They don't think "I was gonna tell this person about Jesus, but now I'm worried I'll posit an opressive, non-local, grand narritive that undermines authentic gender performativity." Rather there is a complex system, in any cultural context, that defines what is sayable without justification. As someone put it "The doctrines of (post)Modernism may not be a danger to us, the spirit of (post)Modernism may".
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