From its title, University of Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith’s new book How Religion Went Obsolete (Oxford University Press, $34.99) may seem like other recent books charting a secular future for America and the rest of the world, but Smith has something different in mind. The book marshals survey research, qualitative interviews, and content analysis of religious and secular online and offline material to make the case for a growing “cultural mismatch” between younger Americans and traditional religion. RW recently interviewed Smith via email.
RW: When you refer to American religion becoming obsolete, can you briefly explain what you mean?
Smith: The normal term we use to describe religious losses is “decline.” That is fine, but it mostly describes features of organizations and individuals: decline in affiliation, attendance, beliefs, etc. In my book I really wanted to not just talk about organizational decline or measurable aspects of individuals, but instead to get at the larger cultural status of religion of late. And I don’t think “decline” describes well what has happened to religion in the broader culture. Instead, I think the idea of obsolescence captures what traditional religion has suffered in recent decades. Going obsolete means having been left behind or superseded by alternatives that most people consider more functional or relevant to life tasks. But the idea of obsolescence does not mean extinct or useless. Most technologies we have that have gone obsolete—slide rules, DVDs, electric typewriters, and so on—are still as functional as they were before, and some people still use them, just as more than a few Americans now still follow traditional religion even if at a macro-cultural level, it has gone obsolete among post-Boomers. So, bottom line, I think to describe what traditional American religion has undergone in recent decades, the term obsolescence is more accurately descriptive and flexible than simply “decline.”
RW: You revive the concept of “zeitgeist,” or spirit of the times, to explain your view that there is now a “cultural mismatch” between much of society and traditional American religions. Why is that?
Smith: People sometimes use the term “zeitgeist” informally, but it is not a concept that academics, like historians and sociologists, like much. It has a problematic theoretical history descending from Hegel and Mannheim. But I think the concept can be retrieved and rehabilitated to help us better understand how culture works in different times. I describe in my book a host of complex, long-term technological, economic, demographic, and other institutional changes and national and world events that all converged in the 1990s and 2000s that brought about, in my argument, what I call the Millennial zeitgeist. This was an era that had a set of distinct sensibilities, attitudes, interests, values, commitments, and aesthetics that wrapped up together into a particular spirit of the age. I spend a long chapter trying to describe from multiple angles what the Millennial zeitgeist was about, how it felt, the influences it had on younger generations.
Central to it was the experience of a cultural mismatch between the zeitgeist and traditional religion. They just increasingly became oil and water, so to speak. Part of that, I suggest, is that traditional religion itself was seen as failing to live up to the kinds of things that most Americans believe make religion good. Part of it was just religion getting “crowded out” by other opportunities and imperatives. And part of it was that religion became “polluted” culturally for a variety of reasons, including the broad effects of 9/11 and the interminable religious sex and money scandals. In the end, I think that to really grasp what has happened to traditional religion, it is necessary to understand the feel, the tone, the sense of the Millennial zeitgeist and the many ways traditional religion simply failed culturally to match up with it.
RW: Previous findings from your research on post-Boomer youth saw them adopting what you have called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD), where their faith is mainly concerned with being nice, personal growth, and having a distant view of God that doesn’t affect behavior. Has MTD just been generalized to the younger generations, even if Generation X is what you call the “hinge generation” of this development?
Smith: This is a very interesting question. When I first wrote about MTD, I limited [myself to the] claim that it was the actual, functional faith of teenagers. But the open question was whether it was broader than that, especially since another argument was that teenagers are more profoundly influenced by their parents when it comes to religion than just about any other factor. Subsequently I did a study of religious parents and found an awful lot of MTD among the adults too. Not all of them but many. So, if you now read chapter 2 of the current book, where I describe what in the eyes of most Americans makes religion good and useful, much of that sounds a lot like a generalized MTD. In short, I continue to think something like MTD is the default background operating religion of most Americans. In its teenage form, it was pretty stark. As those same Millennials grew up and had to figure out life, it of course became more complicated and, for some, unreliable. Bottom line: MTD has not gone away. It’s just that when you look at people’s actual beliefs and expectations of religion, it can get messier as life moves along.
RW: In your earlier work on evangelicalism, you portrayed the movement as a vital subculture that thrived in tension with society, but in your new book you argue that such tension has been detrimental to evangelicals and that they (and other religious groups) have played a part in their own obsolescence. How did this happen?
Smith: Great question. My original “subcultural identity theory” that I developed in my Embattled and Thriving book was based on my observations in the mid-1990s. Of course, none of us then knew where the evangelical movement would go. There was still a strong Christian Right political movement, but it was only one stream in the larger mosaic of evangelicalism. In my view, the “embattled” tendencies of that earlier era have pathologically mutated into what we now have in Christian nationalism. It’s still embattled but now speaking in a totally different register. Earlier, evangelical political activists insisted on the need to elect “godly and righteous” people to positions of political power. Now they champion an obviously massively ungodly leader who is a pathological liar, philanderer, and egoist. My belief is that contemporary Christian nationalism is itself really a symptom of a desperation that has set in precisely as a result of the kind of obsolescence of religion I analyze. It is not a movement of confident people but desperate ones. It is more interested in being protected by a strongman than advancing a godly culture. And, if that is true, then it means that the more conservative Christians head down this road of narrow political commitment, the deeper it will drive religious obsolescence among most post-Boomers. It’s a profoundly self-defeating strategy.
RW: But you don’t see secularization as the end point for the U.S.; rather, you see a process of “re-enchantment” taking place. The secularization theory seems to be rebounding among sociologists of religion today, but how far is that view from your critique of religion as being obsolete?
Smith: Most people inside and outside of academia today automatically view these things in old binary terms: religion vs. the secular. And the assumption is a zero-sum game: the more one loses the more the other gains. It’s like two teams on an American football field struggling to push the ball back and forth toward their end goals and to prevent the other from doing the same. But I think that is a simplistic and misleading binary. When we adopt it, we remain blind to the much more complex cultural options developing now. A major one is “re-enchanted culture,” or what I also call “occulture” (meaning, a culture of the occult, the latter word meaning “things hidden”). Most people dismiss “mere” spirituality—manifesting, karma, paganism, alternative healing methods, channeling, paranormal interests, magic, astrology, crystals, etc.—as trivial. Research on this project forced me to see they are anything but trivial.
The consequences for religion and secularism are this: religious decline does not equate to secularist gains. Most Americans find secularism, whether rightly or wrongly, to be a shallow, empty, boring approach to life. People want some larger purpose, mystery, intrigue in life. And if they think they cannot find that in traditional religion, then various forms of re-enchanted culture become attractive. That’s where most have gone who are not into religion. It offers easy and intense versions, it offers light and dark sides, it allows easy entry and exit, it does not require institutional memberships, it is highly compatible with consumer capitalism, and it allows individual autonomy and control without external authorities. That is extremely appealing to so many younger Americans now. That’s my view. If traditional secularization theory is “rebounding,” therefore, in my view, that is a mistaken conclusion of presupposing the old simplistic binary. What I hope to show in this book, but especially in a follow-up book I am writing now, is that we need to change our lenses by which we see the world and that helps us realize that the world is a lot more complicated than simply religion vs. secular. Again, traditional religion has gone obsolete, I am convinced. But that does not mean secularization theory is true. We need more agile ways of thinking that make real sense of the world we actually live in, rather than old theories inherited from 19th century evolutionary thinking about modernity.
RW: Secularization theorists might argue that many of the trends you point to are evident in other Western countries, so how much are these changes related to the distinct nature of American religion and society?
Smith: One of the points of my book is that the obsolescence of traditional American religion was a very particularly American process. It is not good enough just to list some allegedly abstract universal forces or laws of modernity, like differentiation, rationalization, etc., as a way to explain these kinds of outcomes. We have to get down to the specifics of cases, and when we do, they vary greatly across those cases. Of course there are some parallels. The internet played a huge role in all of this and that is obviously a global force, not American. But many of the causal mechanisms by which the internet affected religion do not fit the standard, abstract list of social forces. Furthermore, many of the crucial events helping to produce religious obsolescence, according to my story, are very particularly American: the rise of the Christian Right, 9/11, missteps by American evangelicalism. So, if we want a genuinely plausible explanation that makes what actually happened intelligible, we need to get away from a “hypothesis testing” approach to secularization theory. We need to focus on actual forces and events in particular contexts that explain specific outcomes. And when we do that, we find the world is incredibly more complicated than the traditional secularization theory suggests.
RW: You don’t view this zeitgeist and the trends that created it as being easily reversed. But some observers are arguing that there is a “vibe shift” taking place with the growth of populism and nationalism, and the related values of solidarity and a de-emphasis on globalization. Do you think such societal changes are having any effect on the zeitgeist and the state of religion in general?
Smith: The world is definitely shifting, especially in the last 10 years and especially around politics and economics. My general sense, however, is that it is usually nearly impossible to know what is happening and what it means while it is happening. It requires some distance and perspective to sort out what is going on. I say in the book that none of us in 1991 or even 2000 really had a clue that religion was going obsolete. Retrospection makes that clear. So what is happening today? I don’t know. I personally do not see evidence of any religious revival on the horizon. But certainly, zeitgeists do not last forever; by definition they don’t. Whether or not the Millennial zeitgeist is morphing into something else, I cannot say. My book is a work of historical cultural sociology, an explanation of known facts from the recent past that helps makes sense of the current situation.
But things may be changing in ways that will only become clear in the future. Feel free to get back to me and make me eat my words on “no religious revival on the horizon,” if things go that way. But I just cannot see it. I think the most likely future, if I was forced to make a guess, would be a continued growth in re-enchantment and occulture, growing desperation among what remains of traditional religion, and ongoing social disruption. But really, in the end, the future is anyone’s guess. Which is why I prefer to focus on explaining and better understanding what we do know has already happened.
