A vibe shift is underway in American politics and religion. Traditional values seem to be making a comeback, and progressive ideas are being eclipsed. It’s easy to get excited about some of the cultural shifts. But it’s important to appreciate how far we’ve strayed from anything resembling traditional faith or values. It’ll take a vast shift to reverse these decades-old trends, which now have deep roots in contemporary culture.
Christian Smith, a professor of sociology at Notre Dame, is the man behind terms like “moralistic therapeutic deism” and “pervasive interpretive pluralism.” His book Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America is a deep dive into U.S. religious data from recent decades that helps us reckon with the massive cultural changes.
Smith’s thesis is simple: Traditional religion in America hasn’t merely declined numerically but has become useless and irrelevant in the minds of most people. Due to long-simmering forces in “deep culture,” younger Americans don’t hate or oppose religion so much as they consider it irrelevant (xiv).
Cultural Avalanche
As Michael Graham and Jim Davis show in The Great Dechurching, more people have abandoned churches since 2000 than the total of those who became Christians from the First and Second Great Awakenings and Billy Graham’s crusades combined. Church closings overtook church plantings in the 2010s, and the size of most congregations shrank. In the 1970s, 44 percent of Americans expressed a great deal of confidence in organized religion. By 2021, Gallup found that just 19 percent felt that way. Today, the majority of Americans aren’t members of any house of worship, and just 3 in 10 attend services weekly.
We didn’t get here overnight. Thus, any reversal will likely require both time and also deep cultural change to reverse the long and complex process that brought us to this point.
Among other vivid metaphors, Smith, a Roman Catholic, compares antireligious cultural forces in America to an avalanche. An avalanche seems sudden, but it results from months of accumulating snow on steep terrain. The catastrophic shift doesn’t start until a trigger (like a falling rock or skier) sets it off. “Significant social transformations,” Smith writes, “do not happen overnight. They do not necessarily come with advance warning, either. What can appear to be dramatic transformations are usually the result of trends, events, and forces long in the making” (365).
An avalanche seems sudden, but it results from months of accumulating snow on steep terrain.
Antireligious pressures accumulated in America in the 1990s as the cultural assumptions of Protestant liberalism and expressive individualism were mainstreamed. The avalanche was likely triggered by religious scandals and other forms of “self-destruction” (229), as well as by cultural shocks like the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. What remained in this cascade’s aftermath was the “Millennial zeitgeist,” a set of durable attitudes and assumptions about the world that rendered America’s largest generation resistant to religious appeals and certain that they had no need of institutional faith (though they ended up being very “spiritual”).
That’s the simplified version. Smith’s account includes many more slow-building factors about which other books have been written, including the deinstitutionalization of marriage and family, the emergence of the concept of adolescence as a period of exploration, the decline of organizations in general, popular postmodernism, the demands of the neoliberal economic order, multiculturalism and the accompanying influx of foreign spirituality, and, of course, the internet.
Religious Self-Destruction
One especially significant contributor to cultural pressure was “the relegation of religion to custodian of morality” (127). This idea overlaps with Smith’s description of moralistic therapeutic deism. It’s the notion that religion is “not primarily about divine worship, timeless truths, sacred historical traditions, eternal salvation, theological doctrines, or the like” (107). Instead, religion is about teaching people to be good.
This unbiblical view of religion was disastrous in the 1990s and 2000s when many religious leaders proved themselves immoral. Smith provides a handy table of dirty laundry that got aired out on national news. The list includes the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal along with numerous high-profile scandals among conservative Protestants. Each revelation eroded public trust in religious leaders, even those serving faithfully. Many young Americans now assume the supposed custodians of morality are all hypocrites.
Yet it’s not just scandals that have eroded trust in religion. Smith highlights other problems like biblicism, purity culture, and the failure of baby boomers to pass down institutional power. Additionally, he argues that “Me-and-God Spirituality” taught a generation that what matters is one’s personal relationship with God, not participation in an institution (254). Even religious arguments against the New Atheists backfired, confirming for many Americans that Christians were more interested in controversy and culture wars than in helping people be moral.
As Smith tells the story, by the second decade of the 21st century, the LGBT+ movement was picking up steam and Christian attempts to evangelize, engage the culture, or influence the direction of politics sounded like clanging cymbals to young Americans. Organized religion hadn’t done its only job. Instead, it had become bossy and controversial. At some point, Smith contends, young people stopped listening.
No-Win Situation
If all this sounds a little unfair to religion, well, that’s because it is. This is what it means to be on the wrong side of the vibes. This is what it means to be swept up by an avalanche of forces decades in the making and against which there’s little any individual can do. Now, religious Americans are faced with a predicament in which any move we make confirms our critics’ worst suspicions. As Smith puts it,
Once deep culture becomes structured in certain ways, it can be nearly impossible for culturally mismatched traditions and institutions to find spaces in which they make any sense. . . . American religion faced repeated no-win situations not because the “nones” were being vindictive or irrational but because deep culture worked to limit religion’s realistic options. (368)
By the end of the book, readers will be waiting for Smith to outline solutions or a plan to turn religious fortunes around. He offers none. His account is relentlessly descriptive, not prescriptive, and his research is sociological, not theological.
Consequently, the gospel’s power, the potential future work of the Holy Spirit, and even God’s promise to preserve his church are notably absent. Smith criticizes what he considers the naivety of “theological and program idealism,” which assume that if we just get our doctrine and outreach efforts right, we’ll succeed and take back the culture (19).
Surprising Signs of Reversal
If history tells us anything, it’s that vibes shift. Zeitgeists change. The unexpected happens. This is where Smith seems too fatalistic. The timing of his release—amid an apparent shift—makes the book feel a tad dated and Puddleglum-y.
Smith denies any sign of change on the radar screen. He suggests that decades-old trends will only intensify. Yet there are signs to the contrary. Harvard’s Cooperative Election Study from 2023 shows Gen Z men trickling back into church. As Ryan Burge points out, American men born after 1975 get progressively more religious than their predecessors with each year: “The weekly attendance rates for men born around 2000 is 25% —that’s about three points higher than men who were born twenty-five years earlier and 2–3 points higher than young adult women.”
Religious Americans are faced with a predicament in which any move we make confirms our critics’ worst suspicions.
That’s hardly a blank radar screen.
Moreover, history reminds us that religion isn’t a mere victim of cultural circumstances. Religion exerts influence on cultural circumstances. As Smith’s account shows, radical cultural change is possible, even change that favors despised minorities fighting at a disadvantage. That’s how we got here.
A century ago, few would have predicted the radical shifts against traditional faith in America. It’s good that we have thorough, well-written books like this one to help us understand what has happened. But the subtle signs we see that decades-long trends are reversible suggest American religion isn’t finished yet. Whether there’s a lasting shift remains to be seen. So far, it’s a small movement. But avalanches are triggered by small movements.
Why Religion Went Obsolete offers valuable sociological analysis to shape the efforts of faithful pastors and church leaders as they build and revitalize religious institutions. However, sociological trends aren’t the only considerations for Christians. There really is a God at work in history—a God without whose rest the human soul is restless—and with whom all things, even the entrance of unlikely converts to the kingdom, are possible.
The Gospel Coalition