A religion may appear to its adherents to be the single universally valid religion. The postmodernist, however, says this is a socially constructed belief, reflecting the bias and interests and values of the social history behind it. A postmodernist could perhaps say that this or that religion might actually be universally valid, even though there is no outside objective place to stand in order to figure out which religion that is. So in practice believers can go on believing in the single universal validity of their own religious tradition. But they should not expect an outsider to agree (especially if that outsider is a postmodernist).

A postmodernist will likewise say that every moral code is a social product. Many of us already believe in individual rights. Postmodern has its own distinctive way to justify these rights. The "modern" thought of the Enlightenment grounds rights in the individual. "All men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" says the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence. Postmodernism instead emphasizes the social origin of ideas. They would point out that the Declaration of Independence was the product of Enlightenment theories, formulated in Europe, by people with a common religious heritage. Therefore this declaration of rights is valid in those societies which support it, but not necessarily in other societies.

To an extent postmodernism is cultural relativism given philosophical justification. Cultural relativists argue that every culture has its own beliefs and practices that constitute a well-functioning social reality ("functionalism" is another name for this viewpoint). This is taken to imply that the beliefs and practices of a society can be judged only in terms of how well they function in that society, not in terms of whether they are compatible with the beliefs and practices of other societies. This leads to the further conclusion that European and North American imperialists and colonialists should not impose their norms and habits on other cultures. Every culture should be respected as it is.

That includes a culture’s religious beliefs. If a group that is called "primitive" from a European-American perspective happens to believe that the spirits of the ancestors offer guidance through dreams, then the European-American visitors to that group should respect those beliefs and not call them superstitious or wrong. The same would be true about belief that all illness and death is caused by sorcery, or that certain animals are sacred and must not be killed. Missionaries should not try to replace one society’s traditions with outside traditions.