In an insightful and thought-provoking dialogue, Travis Michael Fleming and Dr. Christian Smith tackle the contentious issue of why traditional religion appears to be losing its grip on American society. Drawing from Dr. Smith's extensive research, the conversation reveals a stark reality: traditional faith is not only declining but has become culturally obsolete.

The discussion frames this obsolescence within the context of significant cultural transformations that have rendered conventional religious practices less relevant to contemporary life. Dr. Smith articulates the difference between mere statistical decline and the broader cultural implications of obsolescence, arguing that the perceptions surrounding traditional religion have shifted dramatically. He outlines the rise of alternative spiritualities and the increasing preference for individualized, non-institutional forms of belief. This episode encourages ministry leaders to engage with these cultural dynamics critically, challenging them to find new pathways for relevance and connection in an ever-evolving spiritual landscape. It serves as a crucial reminder that understanding the cultural zeitgeist is essential for effective ministry in the modern context.

Takeaways:

• Dr. Christian Smith's research reveals that traditional religion in America is not only declining but has become culturally obsolete, reflecting a significant shift in societal values and priorities.
• The discussion highlights that the cultural obsolescence of traditional faith is not merely a decline in attendance, but a broader change in how religion is perceived and practiced in society today.
• Politics has emerged as a response to a perceived loss of cultural influence, indicating that current Christian nationalist movements may reflect desperation rather than strength in religious adherence.
• The podcast emphasizes the necessity for ministry leaders to adapt their approaches to effectively engage with contemporary cultural dynamics and the spiritual needs of younger generations.
• Dr. Smith's findings suggest that the traditional religious narrative struggles to resonate with today's youth, necessitating a reevaluation of ministry methods and outreach strategies.
• The episode underscores the importance of understanding cultural shifts and their implications for the future of ministry, advocating for deeper engagement and transformation within communities.

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Today's episode is brought to you by Terry and Sue Bodine. Thank you for fighting the good fight of faith.

Yeah, that's a great question. I'm glad you raised it. I would say politics is what you resort to after you've lost in the realm of culture.

Welcome to Apollos Watered. In the Ministry Deep Dive podcast, we tackle the big questions few are willing to ask about ministry, culture, and the challenges you face every day.

Ministry is hard. The road ahead isn't always clear. But with God, nothing is impossible.

We come alongside pastors and ministry leaders like you, exploring obstacles, uncovering opportunities, and sharing practical ways to thrive. Our vision is simple to see thriving ministry leaders and churches noticeably transforming their world. So let's dive deep together.

Refresh your soul, renew your vision, and get ready, because it's watering time. Welcome back to Ministry Deep Dive. I'm your host, Travis Michael Fleming. I hope everyone is doing well.

There has been so much talk going on right now in social media, online. I get the texts and it's is there revival happening?

I can't tell you how many people that I've seen talking about it, but people ask me, is revival actually happening? Well, here's my honest answer. I hope so. I really do.

I believe that there is a slight uptick in church attendance, maybe even even a stirring of revivalism. But whether that becomes a lasting move of God, time will actually, time will tell. That's all I got to say. Time will tell. I'm not against revival.

In fact, I long for it. But here's my issue. True revival can't be manufactured or scheduled. It's not just emotional zeal.

It's the spirit of God breathing new life into hearts and communities. And when that happens, it reaches men. It reaches women, young and old, every ethnicity and background. It spills out everywhere.

That's the kind of awakening that we need. But I've also been in moments like this before.

And my concern is that what we may be seeing right now is a similar thing to then. You see a surge of interest that doesn't yet reflect deep transformation. And it's a lot of light but very little heat. I don't want to be a cynic.

I'm a person who wants to see real and lasting renewal, the kind that only God can do when his people humble themselves, when they pray when they fast, when they turn to him wholeheartedly. That's why I wanted today's guest to join me on the show. Dr. Christian Smith.

He is one of the most respected sociologists of religion in America today.

Known for books like Soul Searching and Souls in Transition which which have largely shaped how we understand the faith of young people in the United States today. This is the guy who coined the term moral therapeutic deism, describing the shallow, self focused faith shaping much of our culture.

Now I wanted to bring Dr. Smith on for you, for you out there today because I wanted you not to get hype anymore. I want you to get the facts. I want you to to understand the facts. Because he doesn't care about hyper spin. He follows the truth even when it stings.

And his newest book, why Religion Went Obsolete. The Demise of Traditional Faith in America digs deep into the cultural shifts that that have made traditional religion in America.

Christian faith specifically feel irrelevant to many Americans. And what his research is, was found is sobering. Christianity and religion in general aren't just declining in many ways.

They become culturally obsolete. Now I know you might be saying to me how is that so? Well, faith still influences society, that's a given.

But it's often been instrumentalized uses as a tool for political or social power rather than the transformation that it's supposed to bring. Now I've written a lot about this on my substack the Deep Root Society.

Just go to Substack the Deep Root Society and you can become one of the subscribers there. But if you want to get full access to everything, then become one of the paid subscribers because that's.

You can see all my essays and reflections and that really supports our work because we want to see real and lasting change. So here's the question we're going to be talking about today. What's really happening beneath the surface of American religion? Well, let's find out.

Happy listening. Dr. Christian Smith, welcome to Ministry Deep Dive.

Thanks for having me. Look forward to talking.

All right, now I walk through this with you. Are you ready for the Fast5?

We'll see how I perform.

Okay, well let's do something a little bit easier. Let's go on the Wayback Machine for a bit and if you could bring back one thing from your childhood, what would it be and why that I.

Remember playing out in the. Playing out in the backyard woods and creek and tree swing and tree forts. Just because it was a great way to grow up before.

Where'd you grow up at the suburbs of Philadelphia, north, north side of Montgomery County. Bucks County.

That sounds like a lot of fun. That was way before cell phones started.

Ruling and that was before kids lives got all scheduled up and. Yeah, we just ran out and played.

Awesome. I love those days. I remember those days now. I read through your biography.

You went to Gordon College.

I went to Gordon Conwell. So we both were on the north shore of Massachusetts.

What is the one favorite place that.

You liked going to when you were in. At Gordon College? I know that's way back, but we're going to keep going with that.

Yeah, no, there are a lot of places. Crane beach in Ipswich. Singing beach in Manchester. There was a great restaurant in Beverly called. They had the best Sicilian pizza.

What was the name of that? Best Sicilian pizza I've ever had in my life. I can't remember the name, but it was in Beverly. Yeah.

Okay.

Okay, I'll think of it halfway through our podcast.

Yeah, yeah, you'll think of it and you'll just announce it.

I'll just drop it in here.

Conversational Tourette's, sort of. You'll just come up with that in the middle of it. All Right, here we go. The next question that I have.

Favorite thing to do when you are not writing now. Yeah.

Go outside and do physical labor. Building something or gardening or. Yeah, it's therapeutic to get out of my head and out of. In front of a screen and do something that shows real.

A physical accomplishment of something.

I took. I took a few. I built my own fence one time. One of the most therapeutic things. You know, I heard Churchill did that. Except he did with rock walls.

But he was terrible at it. Yeah. They had to rebuild it once. He would le.

Yeah.

Okay. Number four, if I wasn't a sociologist, what would I be? And why?

A political theorist.

Okay.

Why?

Oh, I just like thinking about how, you know, what a good society is like, what a good political order is like. I already am interested in a lot of it, so it's very close to the kind of sociology I do. So it's. I'm kind of dodging the question.

I would be something very similar to what I already do. How's that?

Did you know this is one of the questions, but did you know you wanted to study sociology? I mean, that's not what a little kid grows up and goes, I want to be a sociologist one day.

Most people have no idea what it is. And I didn't really discover it until my junior year of college.

Okay.

And then I was like. Then I latched on, like, this is it. This is me. I Want to be my professors? Yeah.

That's awesome. All right, here we go. Number five. If I were a 70s band, my group would be what, the.

Either the Rolling Stones or Aerosmith.

Okay. Why?

Oh, I just. I'm the youngest of three boys. My two older brothers played that stuff, so I grew up on it, and I like it. I mean, they're totally degenerate.

I'm not saying morally I want to be like them, but I like the music. I like blues based music, rock and roll.

Oh, I love your honesty. All right, well, let's get. Let's get into the book. Let's get into the book. I want to know, why did you write this book? Why religion went obsolete.

The demise of traditional faith in America. What was the reason behind writing this book?

Yeah, I mean, I've spent my career studying a lot of things, but especially American religion. Studied the spiritual life, religious and spiritual lives of teenagers and young adults for a good long time, and then religious parents.

And that just sort of built up to the fact, you know, in the 90s, in sociology of religion, there was a.

A confidence that American religion was exceptional, that things were still strong, that Europe could become secularized, but we had a different system and religion would be strong here. But it was clear from studying teenagers that something was going on in the culture that was big.

And then as the statistics started coming out more and more, the rise of not religious, spiritual but not religious, decline in church attendance, it became clear something really big was going on. So the more I looked into that, the more I thought, this is explaining.

We were much better at showing that there were declines in belief and practice and attendance, but there weren't a lot of good, I thought, good explanations or in depth explanations about what caused that. The why question. Not the what question, the why question. And so I just got more and more interested in that.

And it occurred to me that most of the explanation was not what was going on inside of churches. Exactly. To really understand what was going on in churches, I thought you'd have to look around the out what was going on outside of churches.

So I had a hunch that there were big cultural changes around religion that were going on that needed better understanding. And Lilly Endowment of Indianapolis funded this.

And they also had been hearing from lots of people on the ground that the, you know, the narrative, the Christian narrative, the message just wasn't gaining traction like it used to. Pastors were telling them this. It was getting harder and harder simply to connect with people. And so our interests aligned.

And I said, hey, why don't you let me try to figure this out and I'm not going to focus internally. I'm going to focus on big picture cultural, social changes.

So what was then the methodology that you used in order to ascertain this? I mean, you did a lot of interviews, there were a lot of surveys. How did you go about deciding how to even develop these, the criteria?

And it's focused on cultural meanings, macro cultural meanings, not public opinion, people's beliefs especially, but sort of macro assumptions and outlooks and dispositions in the culture. I actually call it a zeitgeist. So in order to get at that, you need multiple forms of Data. We conducted 209 interviews with post boomers.

This is focused on post boomers. Boomers are a very different kind of generation.

So beginning with Gen X, but especially millennials and now transitioning to Gen z, we did 209 in depth interviews with people all over the country. We conducted eventually two surveys asking a lot of very specific questions, informed by the way we were thinking what may be going on.

We conducted four focus groups with religiously marginal millennials mostly. And that was really interesting because focus groups normally ask people a question like what do you think of this product?

Or how do you feel about that? And then they have to explain.

What I did in the focus groups was I had like 40 or so images of religion, traditional religion, alternative religion, religious people that represented a different sort of spectrum of, of, of religion and things sacred in the culture. And I instructed the people in the focus group, I don't want you to explain anything to me from your head.

I want you to tell me what is your emotional reaction in your gut when you see this image, your first feeling? And then tell me, why did you, why do you think you felt that?

Because I think for a lot of people, their relationship to the church or synagogue, whatever it may be, isn't really initially a rational thing. It's a, it's a feeling, it's a gut level, an experience or an association. So that was yet another way to try to get at that.

We get some really interesting reactions to that. And I also did a huge amount of research, sort of macro cultural discourse.

We got this huge body of, of published and me media and television, media and magazines, newspapers, put it together in a huge corpus and did long keyword searches of hundreds of different kind of words that were associated with what I thought matter. It's a little abstract here, but and just to see how they change over time, is there a growth or decline in public references to these kind of words?

So just an example.

After 9 11, religion became much more associated religion broadly, not just, you know, radical Islamists, but became much more associated with violence. So I wanted to see references in the media to the words religious violence and how much that changed. It's a.

It's a very indirect indicator of cultural change.

So of course we're talking about American traditional religion, which I found to be a very interesting description, one that I had. I had not. I had done that when I'd studied African traditional religion.

It was the first time that I'd used that type of nomenclature or descriptions for my own faith, which is true.

But what do you mean by not.

Only the decline, but the cultural obsolescence of American traditional religion?

Yeah, so the first. Let's focus for a second on traditional.

There are different kind of religions in the US What I mean by traditional is what most people call organized religion, institutional religion. So mainline Protestantism, evangelical Protestantism, Catholicism, Black Protestantism, Mormonism, etc.

There's other versions of religion out there that are actually growing.

And this is the second part of my argument, and that is alternative religions, new religions, you know, New age paganism, alternative healing, manifesting chakras, enter body energy sources, crystals, vampire monster, like that. It's a whole alternative that's growing. But what I call traditional religion is. Is in decline.

So, but I use this language of obsolescence or the traditional religion's gone obsolete, meaning this. Most of the time we talk about decline and decline.

References kind of organizational metrics like, oh, we have fewer members this year or this decade than we did in the past. Or a survey may find, oh, fewer people say they attend church or they pray or they believe in God. That's that references decline.

In my analysis, I'm trying to get at something bigger or different, and that is the cultural status of traditional religion. How, how do people think or what are the assumptions in the broader macro culture about the place of religion in society and people's lives?

And so the argument I make is that it's more than just decline. Religion has gone obsolete.

By obsolete, I mean what most of us mean is that something that was previously used is now considered pass or Outmoded or surpassed by something else that's better or different. And so the reason I like obsolete, that kind of language is because obsolete things it. That doesn't mean they're extinct.

There are plenty of obsolete things still around and people use them, including me. I use, you know, I still have CDs that are obsolete now. I prefer that to, to streaming.

Obsolete things can even be better than the thing that replaced them. Vinyl records have greater musical fidelity, you know, than streamed music. So it's not saying that the obsolete thing is bad. It's not extinct.

There are still people that practice it. But obsolete means in terms of the majority of people, the broad culture, it just feels old fashioned or less functional or less useful.

And so less people think of it, less people employ it. And so for those who still do, it's harder and harder to use it. There's less support, there's less of an infrastructure.

Another metaphor I use in the book is I learned how to type on electric typewriter and it was great. It's fine, it functions. It was a great skill to learn. Electric typewriters still work. There are probably still people out there that use them.

You could write whatever you wanted on them, but it's harder to use them because you need to. There are fewer and fewer supplies of the ink ribbons or there's just less support for it.

And so analogously, people who still want to practice traditional religion, in a way the society and world around them is not as understanding, supportive, simpatico with doing that. Just one little tiny example.

Suppose you want to take your young teenage kid to, you know, membership class or Bible study or youth group or whatever. But they're also a good soccer player, basketball player, oops.

Well, the team doesn't respect that, you know, your schedule of, of the church meeting. So they're on the traveling team, they miss, they can't go to youth group hardly during the season.

So whereas when I was young, you know, most things are closed. Maybe I'm dating my, how old I am, but most things are closed on Sunday.

And there was a certain general respect of like okay, Sunday, we, everyone sort of chills out. So yeah, that's just. The culture is just less supportive, less in tune, less matched with people who want to do traditional religion.

Hearing you say that, I know that there's going to be pushback, especially politically, because you see so much about Christian nationalism in the news.

We've talked about it on the show, we've gone through that and it seems like Christianity, at least from a political view, is More, I don't want to say powerful, but it's, it's, it appears.

To me that the people that I.

Interact with are, are looking at Christianity as an instrumental tool in order to convey a certain idea of cultural, or trying to recover a culture capital or use the last vestige of cultural capital. They have to somehow exert influence upon society itself. So that seems to almost go in the, in opposition to your research. What do you say to that?

Yeah, that's a great question. I'm glad you raised it. I would say politics is what you resort to after you've lost in the realm of culture, in my view. So it's a great question.

The Christian nationalism, it seems really important. So aren't I wrong? In my view, the current Christian nationalist movement is not a sign of religious strength. It's a sign of religious desperation.

The Christian right has been around for a long time. For the longest time, the Christian rights message was this is in the era of, you know, Jerry Falwell Sr. And the Christian Coalition.

So the message was we need to elect godly people to office so that they can, you know, keep a moral integrity in the laws and ways of living in this country. That message has been replaced by we're happy to support an extremely ungodly individual as President of the United States.

I don't want to get into politics in my view or whatever, but I think these are just sort of objective facts. We're happy to support a very ungodly person who will protect us, who will be our champion and use power to do that.

That's really, in my view that's 180° on some points, not the values underneath it, but the strategy, 180 degree change from what the old Christian right message.

And I think that reflects, if people are not fully conscious of it, I think that reflects still a gut level awareness like, wow, we're in trouble, like we're losing, like we don't have the respect. We're in danger here. And so current Christian nationalism has recently had a lot of political visibility and some influence.

But I don't think it's a reflection of strength. I think it's a reflection of desperation in a political, in a particular political moment when that mattered.

And I think it's actually going to work against itself.

Meaning the, the majority of younger Americans, there are some younger who are into MAGA and so on, but the majority are going to look at that and say if that's what religion is, forget it. I'm really out of here. This is ridiculous. I want nothing to do with it.

So its effect, I think, is going to be to narrow the population that views evangelicalism as viewed through the media views evangelicalism in any positive light. And I think in the long run, you know, politics is not really interested in principle or truth. It's interested in power.

And so there's nothing saying it's going to be helpful or supportive or protective anytime in the future. So my bottom line is that looks like evidence against my argument, but I actually think it supports my argument.

I think it's a reflection of obsolescence and a desperation.

Dr. Smith Research challenges us to see beyond church attendance numbers and emotional highs, to get beyond the headlines, to get beyond the links, to get beyond all the social media hype that we see online, to notice the deeper current shaping faith in our culture today.

It asks the really hard questions, are we actually understanding the world that people are living in, or are we ministering in a world that's no longer gone? I mean, seriously, think about it. This isn't the time of Billy Graham anymore. How many times did Billy Graham have to deal with pluralism?

I know he did. Some.

See, this is why we have to be very careful in understanding the ministry models that have been developed in other centuries, because they were developed in the backdrop of that culture. We have to understand the backdrop of our culture. This is why we developed Missioholism.

By the way, Missio Holism is a holistic framework inspired by those at the forefront of ministry on the mission field.

And it's a holistic framework that helps ministry leaders engage the gospel, the kingdom, the church and culture in ways that are deeply transformative.

It's about connecting spiritual formation, community and cultural engagement so that ministry resonates with the world that people actually live in, bringing real change to hearts, homes and communities. Our next Blueprint cohort, which will be the final for the year, lays out the groundwork for making your ministry Missio Holistic.

It equips leaders to think holistically, to see culture clearly, and begin applying these principles in ways that make a tangible difference where you are.

And if you want to learn more about Missio Holism and how to start making your ministry truly missio holistic, go to apolloswater.org feel free to reach out with questions or to explore it further. That's why we are here.

And for those ready to take that next step and they want to make their ministry miso holistic, that they want to see a transformation, real, lasting transformation.

And be sure to join us next week when Dr. Christian Smith continues to dive deeper into the cultural shifts shaping faith in America and what that means for ministry leaders like you today. You do not want to miss this conversation, so until then, keep diving, keep growing strong and as always, stay watered. Everybody.

Thanks for joining us. On today's episode of the ministry Deep Dive, a podcast of Apollo Was Watered, the Center for Discipleship and Cultural Apologetics.

We hope it helps you thrive in your ministry and in today's culture. Let's keep the conversation going. Check out our ministry@apolloswater.org and be sure to sign up for one of our ministry cohorts.

Connect with others in the battle. We need one another. And remember, keep diving deep and as always, stay watered. Everybody.