Traditional religion in the United States has gone the way of the Western. Like the once-popular movie genre, the practice of faith has lost its cultural influence since its apex in the mid-20th century. Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith makes the comparison in his new book, Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America, to illustrate what he calls the “subjective feel” of the well-documented objective fact that only a diminishing proportion of Americans worships together anymore.
As “traditional religions” in the U.S., Smith identifies Roman Catholicism; mainline, evangelical and Black Protestantism; and Judaism. Each has a deep history, sacred texts and organizational structures that convey their doctrines and practices. He also includes Mormonism, despite its being “relatively young,” because Americans tend to categorize it as such, but he does not consider religions such as Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism in his analysis. “These are clearly traditional religions sharing many of the defining characteristics,” he writes. “Yet they are not traditional in the American context,” where they are viewed instead as “alternative” faiths.
By almost every measure, over the past 80 years each generation of Americans has become less faithful than the previous one. Less than 30 percent of Generation Z — those now between the ages of 13 and 28 — attend a traditional religious service at least once a month, according to the General Social Survey. For the “silent generation” born between 1928 and 1945, the attendance rate is more than twice that. A sense of personal affiliation with a given faith tradition has followed an almost identical downward trajectory. Confidence in clergy to be honest and ethical, along with trust in religious institutions overall, also has plummeted among U.S. adults since the 1970s.
Why has this happened? Smith’s research identifies a confluence of factors that gathered like dark clouds for decades, precipitating a “perfect storm” in the 1990s and 2000s. Historical events, socioeconomic factors and the technological innovations of those two decades entrenched people’s mass retreat from the faith communities of their parents and grandparents.
With the end of the Cold War in 1991, Smith argues, the importance of religion to American identity, in opposition to atheistic communism, faded. The September 11, 2001, attacks and the subsequent war on terror made an enemy of religion writ large. Even though the Islam of the perpetrators does not fit Smith’s criteria for a traditional American religion, more people in the U.S. came to associate orthodoxy of all kinds with zealotry and violence.
“For many Americans, (religion) went from being, ‘It’s a nice community thing, it helps raise your children to be moral’ to ‘Religion is violent, it’s a source of evil, it gets people to be extremists,’” Smith says. “And all of that violates everything Americans believe religion ought to be.”
Scandals among clergy and the politicization of evangelical Christianity also drove people to abandon religious institutions. And most important of all in Smith’s analysis, the digital revolution transformed society, weakening social structures, altering the nature of our relationships and turning the fissures already forming within many denominations into outright fractures.
Ken Woodward ’57, who reported on these trends for decades as the religion editor at Newsweek, invited Smith to his Chicago home for a conversation about the waning role of religion in American life.
Ken Woodward: You’ve titled your book Why Religion Went Obsolete. What’s the difference between “decline” and “obsolete”?
Christian Smith: It’s not just a matter of numerical decline. I’m trying to make a claim about its cultural significance; not just numbers, but the place of traditional religion in larger American culture, especially for post-boomer generations. And I mean by “obsolescence” exactly what we normally mean, something that used to be used, that used to be relied upon, that people used to think about, is supplanted or made outdated by another view of things, another technology or another development in style. For these post-boomer generations, religion is just something from the older days. It doesn’t feel relevant or connected to their lives.
The image I use to describe obsolescence is electric typewriters when I was a teenager. That’s how I learned to type. But then along come desktop computers,
and typewriters are not used now. It still functions; some people still do use electric typewriters. There’s nothing wrong with them, but they’ve just been supplanted by something else, and they’re harder to maintain and they’re harder to use.
KW: Your image of the typewriter — this seems to me an excessively utilitarian view of religion. “What does it do for us? What does it do for me?”
CS: (The French sociologist Émile) Durkheim said religion fulfills social functions in society; it does stuff for people. And so, part of my argument about obsolescence is, it stopped doing those things, at least in the minds of people. There’s a chapter that lays out what Americans expect from religion, which I think is different from what religions think they should be delivering. But this is what Americans want or expect from religion, and it stopped doing those things for them.
KW: That’s an important point. Because if you’re religious at all, you find yourself saying, as you’re reading this book, “Hey, but wait a minute.” And your answer is?
CS: This is what most people out there think. So there’s a gap between what religions believe they’re about and what people sitting in the pews are demanding.
KW: You have a long list of things that people say, in your study, that religion is good for. Altogether it sounds very much like the phrase you made famous in one of your previous books: “moralistic therapeutic deism.” They say that religion helps to make people good, helps them to cope with life’s problems, helps them feel happy and calm.
CS: When we go out and talk with people, that’s the presupposition running in the background of their minds.
KW: Readers like me, who came of age in the 1950s, will surely argue that there are other, stronger reasons for being religious. One would be group identity. “This is my crowd. These are my people.” Does traditional religion no longer provide group identity?
CS: For some people, it clearly does, but I think it’s more challenging now to get an identity from religion than it used to be. The boundaries are more porous. People are involved in many other communities. The internet has opened up people to the entire world. So, it’s still there, but it’s just less effective and clear.
KW: Would you say that other identities have superseded this? “I’m female.” “I’m LGBTQ.”
CS: Yes, exactly. The rise of identity politics. If you look at what people think matters for being a good American or for having a strong personal identity, very few younger generations are going to say, “I’m Catholic” or “I’m Jewish” or something like that. It’ll be much more around sex, gender, political affiliation. That’s what people get excited about now. It’s virtually sacralized politics.
KW: It seems to me that one of the goods — of traditional Christianity, at least — has always been the way it understands and embraces human mortality. You’ve got a God who dies. Since we all must die, why not include preparation for death as one of the things that religion historically has been good for?
CS: If I were writing a theory about religion, I would say that. As a sociologist, I go out and talk to ordinary Americans; they don’t bring that up. First of all, many, especially younger generations, aren’t thinking about death, and they don’t want to think about that. Second, if they do, increasingly they just think, when you die, you die. Or if you’re good, you go to heaven, but that doesn’t require being involved in a religion. If you’re not a horrible person, that’s what will happen. Or a lot will say, “I don’t know what happens, and I’m not going to think about it. I’m focused on this world.” That itself is part of religion’s obsolescence: not preparing for eternity.
KW: You write that emergent adulthood is a new, more recent stage in the life cycle created by massive social and cultural forces, the cumulative effect of which is “the postponement of settling down.” Let’s talk about some of those forces and their effects. Higher education for the masses: The longer you’re in school, the longer you’re likely to postpone marriage and family. What’s the difference between getting married at 21 and getting married at 29?
CS: With regard to religion, many American young people — the majority, I would say, from my studies of teenagers — view religion as something that a real adult does, a grown-up adult does. So, if you’re getting married at 19 or 21, settling down, having children, that’s a key marker of adulthood that then clicks in their head, “Well, maybe I should start looking for a church or temple or synagogue.” If that gets delayed another decade, then they think, “Well, I’m not really a full adult. I’m still searching around. I’m not settled.” Then religion gets postponed. By the time you’re 30 years old, your identity is much more set, your practices, your habits, your values are much more set, than when you were 19. And if religion was not part of the formation of that crucial decade, it feels less necessary or essential.
KW: How important is the birth of that first child in terms of getting religion?
CS: It is important, but it used to be much more important. That used to be a crucial time when a couple would say, “Hey, wait a minute. Now we’ve got to raise somebody else. It’s not just about us. How are we going to do this?” For many, that would be a turning point of returning to a congregation. Increasingly, people are having fewer children or no children, and it’s delayed. And again, if religion is obsolete, why would you want to socialize your kid into that? There are other clubs, there are other organizations, there are other activities that are demanding or that are opportunities that people would rather get their kids involved in.
KW: There’s been a lot of talk recently about overprotective parents.
CS: Intensive parenting. In the ’90s and 2000s, increasingly, there was almost an industry of pressure on parents. You need to be involved in your kid’s life. You need to get them scheduled up. You need to expose them to every opportunity they can have. And so it went from an older model of, like, “let the kids go out and play, just come home for dinner,” to every afternoon and evening was scheduled up, helping with homework, much more responsibility on parents to ensure better outcomes for their kids. One of the things that does, which I argue in the book, is it crowds religion out. Your kid’s part of a traveling soccer team, you can’t always be at church activities. (They) get crowded out by all these other demands and activities.
KW: A big factor affecting religion in this country is what you call the “deinstitutionalization of marriage,” which has been going on for decades. I recall back in the mid-1980s, 20-somethings started talking about their first marriage as being a “starter marriage,” much like their parents would have talked about their first house as a starter home. So how has the decline of marriage as an institution affected traditional religion?
CS: In American culture, traditional religion and family are so closely intertwined. So much of traditional religion has been set up and is oriented towards serving a traditional, nuclear family — two married people, heterosexual traditionally, with children, maybe a grandparent around. It’s in the discourse, it’s in the schedules, it’s in the structure of everything. And so people who are not in traditional families — singles, divorcees, same-sex couples, people cohabiting, people without children who are older couples — they feel less comfortable in religious congregations. Not all of them, but they can feel like “this is not set up for me, this is not serving what I would like to have, this is for other kinds of people.” And so we know, statistically, people who are in traditional families are much more likely to be involved in traditional religious congregations. So as the family turns into these other forms, you have other people that feel less need for it and feel less at home in traditional congregations.
KW: How has women entering the paid workforce affected things?
CS: A larger point about these questions is this: The outcome of religious obsolescence didn’t happen overnight. It wasn’t a quick, sudden turnaround. There are long, deep, historical trends that made it possible, that set it up.
Women entering the workforce, which was a huge sea change in the ’70s: A lot of it was driven economically by families needing more income, but the way it affected traditional religion is, you had less of a volunteer labor force. Traditionally, a lot of stay-at-home women did a lot of work in the Church, and now they’re working in jobs. If you have a greater and greater percentage of women who are working double shifts, basically — all day at work, then they come home and do lots of housework and cooking and so on — they don’t have the time or energy to be investing seriously in church.
KW: How has mass consumerism contributed to the obsolescence of traditional religion?
CS: People that grow up in this, this is just the normal life. They have so many distractions. They have so much drive and pressure to earn incomes, to go out and spend money, to buy things, to have experiences. What I argue in the book is, it changes a notion of a self, that the good life becomes the goods life, what you buy, what you possess. It’s not just a matter of how much we own. Ultimately, it’s a matter of the kind of self that gets formed.
KW: Another trend I wanted to mention in this context is the cultural shift toward “expressive individualism,” a term I associate with the late sociologist Robert Bellah. What is it and how does it impact traditional American religion?
CS: The individual unit is the most primary entity of society. They are about themselves, and the expressive part is sort of Romanticist, like, “I have a unique personhood.” Usually it casts itself as against society, or society is against it. Institutions and people and authorities are a threat to the self, and so the self needs to resist that, and it needs to express its true essence. It’s always suspicious of authority. Authenticity is crucial. And so anything in a traditional religion that has an authority, that has a structure, that has an organization, is usually seen in relation to expressive individualism as a threat, as threatening the self.
KW: You make a distinction between utilitarian individualism and expressive individualism.
CS: This comes straight out of Bellah’s Habits of the Heart. Utilitarian individualism is, “I want to get ahead. I want to beat everyone else. He who dies with the most toys wins.” It’s much more oriented toward money and material success. Expressive is more about plumbing the depths of the soul and figuring out who I really am. This goes all the way back to the ’60s counterculture, discovering myself and then living up to my true self, and not being violated or not being compromised by society around me.
KW: You also cite the development of a new form of capitalism called neoliberalism. Can you explain briefly what neoliberal capitalism is and some of the ways its rise affected the turn away from traditional religion?
CS: The short version is that neoliberalism was a return to the original liberal capitalism, which is hands off, totally laissez-faire. This is the late 19th century, before the trustbusting and especially before labor unions and the New Deal. So, neoliberalism basically said, “We need to get back to that.” And Reagan and Thatcher were the first people that really pushed that hard in the ’80s — break down the unions, get rid of government regulation, put as much social responsibility on the market as possible. We need more competition. We need greater production and growth. And then in the ’90s that went toward globalization. Under Bill Clinton, we had NAFTA, and technologies made economic production much more globalized — free trade. So, this was open world, open market, “get government out of things,” and so on. That had various consequences that most people don’t think about, but it made competition in careers a lot more intense.
The old model from the New Deal to the ’80s was more along the lines of, you get a job, you get a career with a corporation like General Motors or Whirlpool or whatever. You may not like your job, but it’s pretty secure. They’ll take care of you, you remain loyal to them, and then you’ll retire eventually. The mid-20th century model lent itself toward settling down. You stayed in your job, you stayed where you lived, and you found a religious congregation you were part of, and you could be there your whole life, basically, and you raised your kids there.
Whereas, neoliberalism is transient. It’s mobile. You change jobs. Your company may have to move you. You may not even have a real job, you may be a part-time or a contract employee. That gave young people — they weren’t stupid, they saw the world they were growing up in — a mentality of “always be ready to move. Don’t put down your roots. Always be ready to go. Always be looking for a next job. Always be upgrading your skill set,” which is all about transience, change and mobility. Traditional religion doesn’t work with transience, change and mobility. It works with settled-down people — at least the way it has operated.
KW: You devote several pages in your book to what traditional American religions did to themselves; namely, scandals like the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy, the scandals among the Protestant clergy, the transformation of otherworldly evangelicalism into a political force, and so on. In these and other ways, you write, “religion picked up a collection of damaging cultural associations, like burrs attached to clothes.”
CS: One of the reasons I wanted to include this is, there are some people within religions who think, “Oh, it’s always somebody else’s fault. It’s the secular humanists; it’s the liberals; it’s the gays. They’re out to kill us. And we’re just doing the right thing.” Part of the story of this book is that religion has contributed a lot to its own demise. There’s responsibility to go around. So it’s really false, wrong, to blame others. Religion has tarnished its reputation terribly. In the words of another sociologist I know, it’s become polluted. It’s a polluted thing in the eyes of most of the younger generations. And once you get polluted, it takes a lot of cleanup work over time.
KW: You make a very good point that (young people) don’t have within their memory the time when religion was good, where religion was positive, certainly the kind of thing that I grew up with in the ’50s.
CS: No, they don’t know that. Now I’m going to sound like a grouchy old guy, but even great college students, there’s so much they don’t know from history. (You) just can’t assume that they know this, that or the other thing. So even the best are not being adequately educated. And if you don’t have roots in history, where you have a reference outside of your existing life, you’re in trouble.
KW: That was a nagging thing in the back of my mind as I read this book. These young people that you talk to directly didn’t seem to know a lot about religion.
CS: That’s one of the points. Part of the zeitgeist is, they feel entitled to critique religion without knowing almost anything about it; or they critique it thinking they know things about it that are objectively false. And so, you’re not even having a conversation about the facts.
KW: Not surprisingly, you include the digital revolution in your list of proximate causes. You write that most traditional forms of religion are organized around a pre-internet model, top down, and that is antithetical to the wired culture, the networking culture. “Networking” seems to be in contrast to hierarchy. Any other ways the internet inhibits traditional religion?
CS: The internet enabled people to find new communities, to form new groups that were different from religion. If they had questions or doubts about their faith, it enabled them anonymously to ask them, to get answers, to find people who had left their religion. In my own life, if I wanted to learn something about another religion, I’d have to go to the local library, or go to a brick-and-mortar bookstore and get a book, or ask the pastor. Whereas, the internet, in just a few clicks, you can find out anything from all around the world. So, for very many young people, it completely opened up the world, the amount of information became overwhelming. Part of that, too, is the internet overwhelms people, it’s just too much.
KW: It gives you very quickly — Wikipedia being an example — about all you want to know and not as much as you really ought to know.
CS: And for very many young people, if you don’t already have a background to know how to judge and discern whose voice makes more sense than another voice, it can be very hard to sort through what’s reliable and what isn’t. The pre-internet world had gatekeepers, editors who told you, “Here’s what makes sense; here’s what’s worth listening to; here are the good books.” In the internet world, the gatekeepers are liquidated. It feeds into this idea of, there’s any number of points of view, relativism, who knows what’s true. And, as we’ve seen politically, that just sends people off in a million directions, when you get algorithms that start to feed people what they believe or want to hear, et cetera.
The internet, I think, is probably the most important of every factor we’re talking about. If there had not been the internet, things could have turned out somewhat differently. In the book, I spell out nine different causal mechanisms whereby I think it really changed things. Simply crowding out: The amount of time people spend online, on social media, it’s huge amounts of hours a day.
KW: If you walk down Michigan Avenue in Chicago or any Main Street in the United States, you see people talking and gesturing to people who aren’t there. They’re not present. They’re not in the public; they’re just outside.
CS: The idea of real interaction between real, human, embodied people is gone; it’s liquidated. So, everybody’s ties, connections, networks and communities are virtual, instead of the idea of, “Oh, it’s time to go to church. Let’s get dressed and go somewhere.” That’s a whole other world.
KW: How important in religion is the idea of being next to real people?
CS: In traditional religion, I think it’s important. I think it always has been. This is a dilemma that our society is struggling with. Now, people want to have community. People are feeling isolated and alienated. But that takes real connection, and not just to somebody’s avatar. It takes getting together and engaging with people; and ideally, one thing traditional religion did is,
it put different kinds of people together — people of different ages, people of different stages of life — whereas most people now on the internet, you select for people very much just like yourself. It doesn’t really lead to an authentic, rich community.
KW: By the end of the 1990s, you write, “a series of sociological trends that we’ve been discussing were converging to erode the ground on which traditional American religion stood, and the following decade, religion’s obsolescence was assured.” Some of (the trends) are obvious, like the acceptance of same-sex marriage and the mainstreaming of LGBTQ people, but I confess I was unaware of the emergence of what you called the third sexual revolution. The first in the 1920s and the second in the 1960s were about liberation. What’s the third sexual revolution all about?
CS: The third sexual revolution, largely a result of the digital revolution, is this: sex being much more open, more pornographic, more democratized, less shame about anything.
KW: You add that with it comes “a loss of innocence and of boundaries, with the unchecked commodification of sex and the treatment of people as bodies to be consumed.” That’s pretty rough.
CS: Well, I think that’s part of the individualism. It’s part of the neoliberalism. Life is a big marketplace. Life is a place where you satisfy your consumer desires. And it’s also part of emerging adulthood. “Before I settle down, I want to explore and be crazy and try lots of things,” and so on — enabled by a technology that didn’t exist in the ’60s and ’70s.
KW: Obviously, this is an inversion of the morality taught by traditional American religion. But isn’t it possible that this total transformation in sexual mores and lack of shame might trigger some kind of turn toward a more traditional view of human sexuality?
CS: I think it already has, among a small minority. There has been, for some decades now, a small minority of people who’ve been through party culture, and they say, “You know what? This is empty. I don’t want to live like this.” And so they return to Catholicism — often more traditional versions of Catholicism — or Eastern Orthodoxy. But this is a smallish group. . . . Most American young people are not doing that.
KW: You mentioned another inversion with respect to evangelicals. You write that the actual legacy of the evangelical emphasis on personal salvation — accepting Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior is the standard phrase — ironically, has been to push Americans away from the Church. How so?
CS: They were successful in communicating that phrase to the broader culture, but a lot of people didn’t use that to become evangelicals. They started using that discourse to explain why they don’t need to go to church. “I have a personal relationship with God in my living room or in the yoga studio. I don’t need a religious congregation. I don’t need the denomination or organization or the Vatican. I can just do it, me as an individual with God.” That’s part of the notion of spirituality. So the irony is, the discourse evangelicals use to emphasize a certain way of being a Christian was adopted by others, using the exact same discourse to justify why they don’t need to be part of church at all. Evangelicals certainly didn’t intend that. Totally unintended consequence.
KW: You write, and this is devastating, that “religion became obsolete because of its own fossilized cultural forms that it was unable to shake.”
CS: That’s what it looks like to me, sociologically. Part of what’s at issue, I think, sociologically, is that people who are religious leaders tend to be surrounded by more religious people. The shrinking minority of young people who are invested, I think they realize that they’re in trouble; I think they realize that the culture is changing around them. . . . Religious leaders, I don’t think there’s really an adequate awareness of how obsolete they have become. Any message to religious leaders is, “get out of your office, get out of your church building.” Just spend three months wandering around talking to real, ordinary people to really come to terms with these big cultural changes that have gone on, and then think about, “What does that mean for what we’re doing?”
KW: I’ve had theologians say to me, “I hear kids talk about being spiritual but not religious, but I never know what they mean by spiritual.” What do young people tell you?
CS: They don’t necessarily know what it means, either. One of the beauties of this category is it can mean all different kinds of things: “I pay attention to what’s going on inside of myself.” Or, I think for some people, it’s a rejection, explicitly saying, “I’m not one of those hardcore, crazy, atheist, materialist, naturalist, shallow people.” It’s like, “I have a rich inner life. Maybe I meditate or I reflect on things.” That’s what some people mean by it, all the way across to more hardcore spiritual: “I read lots of texts of ancient scriptures, I meditate, I do yoga, I go on retreats, I get into nature.” So, part of the beauty of it is, it’s not really well defined. People can make it mean lots of things, but I think it’s an identity that says, “I’m not traditionally religious, and I’m not a hardcore secularist.”
KW: You’ve mentioned before that the young people you’ve been studying don’t want to be thought of as atheist or simply secular.
CS: Most don’t. In the 2000s, there was the New Atheist movement, and they had a significant influence on a lot of young people; they did change some people against religion. However, there was a kind of reaction against that later, where a lot of young people came to believe, “Those New Atheists are just as fundamentalist as the religion that I don’t want to be a part of; they’re just as certain about what they believe; they’re militant, they’re zealous. I don’t want New Atheism any more than I want my pastor telling me what’s right or wrong.”
KW: There’s been a lot of talk in various ways about “re-enchantment” and occult culture. Didn’t G.K. Chesterton address himself to this? When you stop believing in God, you start believing in everything.
CS: A culture of re-enchantment comes in historic waves, and it was really big back in his day; it was revived, and then it sort of went underground. It was revived in the ’60s, went underground, and now it’s really come back again. One of the key pieces of this story that this book barely gets into — I’m actually writing a book about this now — is the rise of what we call “occulture” or re-enchantment. It’s this whole big umbrella — sort of like religion, but it’s not traditional religion; sort of secular, but it’s not really hardcore secular — that young people find attractive. It takes the edge off not being religious anymore, because you still might pray, you still have rituals, you still have people that share your beliefs, but just not in a denomination, not organized, authoritative, with clergy.
KW: Two-thirds of Americans don’t have a four-year college degree. Do you see any break between those who do have one, or at least went to college, and those that didn’t, that went out and made a living?
CS: There are some demographic differences across these types. Becoming part of a religious congregation, settling down, tends to be associated with getting a four-year college degree. Going on to grad school and getting an advanced degree tends to be more associated with becoming not religious, maybe even atheist. Occulture, somewhat disproportionately, is attractive to people with less education, and to females. So, the religion of “occulture,” the re-enchanted part, the paganism, the esoterica, that’s more attractive to minorities, to women and people with less education. I don’t want to overstate that, because there’s broad appeal everywhere, but these are just minor tendencies.
KW: Toward the end of your book, you list these attitudes among what you call thematic tones of the present age: “Elite standards liquidated, gatekeeper authorities broken down, popular antinomianism” — that is, resistance to established rules — “the democratization of genius, tempered economic prospects, distrust of social institutions . . .” all of these characterizing the zeitgeist of young people today.
CS: The connection that I make is back to the baby-boomer parents, the people that raised the generations that are leaving traditional religion. They were the first Age of Aquarius, you know, the counterculture ’60s and ’70s. So, in a way, they raised their children with their values. The difference is, if you grew up in the baby-boomer era, you were still socialized in the former era. You still had roots in another way of living, and so they had a tie to the past that their children didn’t. So their children picked up a lot of the liberation, individualism, expressivism, et cetera, but they didn’t benefit from the way their parents had been raised. They were raised in a totally different setting, technologically, politically, culturally.
Christian Smith is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology and principal investigator for the Global Religion Research Initiative at Notre Dame.
Ken Woodward was religion editor at Newsweek for 38 years, retiring in 2002. He is the author of several books, including Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Ascent of Trump.
