Decline and fall? Christian Smith on the demise of traditional faith
(iStock)The fact that Christian Smith has written an extremely important sociological study of American religion with Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America is hardly news. He has already produced a succession of insightful and carefully nuanced studies of religion in the United States over the course of three decades. What is news is that he believes that he has documented the demise of traditional faith in the United States: “The evidence offers multiple empirical indicators of a larger latent fact about traditional American religion: that it has not only suffered weakening and decline, but also has become obsolete—at least among Americans under the age of 50, which is to say nearly all of America in the not-distant future.”
Smith also wants to be clear about what he means by “obsolescence.” Obsolete doesn’t mean useless or destroyed; rather, as Smith applies the term, traditional religion (by which he means institutional or “organized” religion) is obsolete because increasing numbers of people feel it is no longer useful or needed—precisely because something else has superseded it in terms of function, efficiency, value or interest.
But what might have been yet another tired narrative about “religious decline” is anything but tired. There are a number of features of Smith’s book that make it extremely important, not the least of which is that he offers an alternative narrative to the “secularization thesis” about the disappearance of religion in modern societies.
As Smith recounts the story, something more interesting and complicated has transpired that requires a more creative conceptual explanation: Traditional religion’s losses do not automatically translate into secular gains, as the older (ham-fisted) advocates of the secularization thesis argued, as though the narrative was based on a zero-sum scale. And Smith seeks to offer just such a creative conceptual explanation by moving beyond (and behind) statistics to explore the cultural environment (the “zeitgeist”) that has both contributed to and been affected by that decline.
Smith explores a number of important cultural and economic factors over the course of four decades that abetted traditional religion’s cultural decline: the end of the Cold War, during which American political leaders had utilized traditional Christian images and symbols to mark off how U.S. religiosity offered the antidote to Soviet godlessness; the triumph of neoliberal capitalism by the end of the 20th century, whose hyper-competitiveness demanded a new, intensified work ethic that included the “triaging” of endeavors that did not lead to immediate economic advantages; the digital revolution, which became a “time and attention suck” and provided alternative, flexible and immediate ways of finding community without having to leave your house; and the emphasis on multicultural values at all levels of education, which—implicitly, anyway—emphasized the belief that no belief or community was better than another and that everything on offer was acceptable (except intolerance).
And by no means least in the list of factors explaining traditional religion’s obsolescence was the widespread cultural acceptance of being “not religious” as an acceptable identity option, a cultural stance that had been professed by 5 percent of all Americans in 1972 but by 30 percent of Americans in 2020.
Smith documents his thesis by pressing a number of “big data” arguments that track significant cultural changes over time: that each successive generation born across the 20th century was noticeably less affiliated with traditional religion than the previous generation; that the previous expectation that young adults would become more religious as they grew older and started having families stopped and was reversed by the baby boomers; and that the 20 years from 1990 to 2010 represented the “convergence of perfect storms.”
Indeed, he dates the eye of those storms to the year 1991, which launched a new zeitgeist in which the “cultural tide turned on American [institutional] religion’s fortunes.”
To name just one example from that fateful year of 1991, he offers data on the “not religious” respondents reported in national polls. The number of those who described themselves as “not religious” remained relatively low and stable from 1972 to 1991: 7 percent of all American adults and 12 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds during those 20 years. But the number of American adults describing themselves as not religious increased from 7 percent in 1991 to 29 percent in 2021; and the growth was even more dramatic among 18- to-29-year-olds, up to 43 percent.
As Smith observes, these numbers are staggering, for few important social phenomena show such steady change over such a long time. And the years since have shown no reduction in the growth of the number of self-identified not-religious Americans, especially among younger adults.
For Smith, an even more difficult group to measure is those who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” National surveys began asking that question only in 2005, and no survey has asked that question consistently (or in the same form) over time, but data from the first two decades of the 21st century show that between 20 percent and 35 percent of all Americans claimed that identity. Based on that admittedly rough data, Smith concludes that one in four American adults have come to consider themselves “spiritual but not religious.”
One of the more interesting sections of Why Religion Went Obsolete is Smith’s exploration of a new publishing genre he calls Good Without God. In Chapter Seven, he shares some of the surprisingly numerous titles available in that genre, including: God Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Believe; Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values; and Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions. To say the least, this makes for interesting reading.
Smith’s larger point is nuanced but extremely important: Traditional religion’s concerns—with nurturing a vibrant spiritual life of inner peace and openness to transcendence; with finding a community of like-minded souls committed to living the good life and working to effect ethical change; with finding lasting values that can be passed on to the next generation; with finding answers to life’s most important questions—have not disappeared. It’s just that increasing numbers of Americans, especially younger Americans, no longer seek for answers to them in the teaching and structures of institutional religion.
There are, moreover, a number of surprising intellectual insights along the way as well. For instance: “far from representing failure, the decline of Liberal Protestantism may actually stem from its success. Liberal Protestants have lost structurally at the micro level precisely because they won culturally at the macro level.”
Or, on the relation of religion to politics in the United States: “American politics itself became increasingly invested with quasi-religious importance. Politics became sacralized on both the right and the left. Political struggle took on a quasi-religious fervor and, for those participating, a quasi-religious identity. The more this sacralization of politics occurred, the more American identities migrated from spaces of traditional sacredness, such as religion, to this other realm.”
On the importance of evangelical values in American culture itself, Smith writes: “The ironic migration of ‘personal relationship with God’ from evangelicalism to individualistic spirituality is emblematic of a larger unintended evangelical influence on American culture that also contributed to traditional religion’s obsolescence—namely, the valorization of individual subjectivity as the seat of authenticity and authority.”
Smith’s book is a new and important way of understanding the fate of institutional religion in the United States.
This article also appeared in print, under the headline “Decline and Fall,” in the July/August 2025, issue.
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