Travis Michael Fleming and Dr. Christian Smith continue their conversation on Dr. Smith's latest book, Why Religion Went Obsolete.

They discuss how the decline of American traditional religion (i.e. Christianity) is not attributable to a singular cause but rather a confluence of multifaceted cultural, social, and technological transformations that collectively create a "converging perfect storm."

Throughout their conversation, they explore the historical context of these changes, elucidating how shifts in family dynamics, the rise of neoliberal capitalism, and the impact of digital technology have redefined the religious landscape.

They then discuss how the implications of these transformations affect pastors and ministry leaders today, urging them to do a thorough examination of how some of the more recent ministry methods inherited from Boomer church leaders and approaches may no longer work, but rather how a missioholistic one might.

Their conversation is a call for thoughtful engagement with these pressing issues, inviting listeners to reflect critically on the future of faith in an increasingly complex world.

Takeaways:

• The discussion emphasizes that the decline of traditional religion is not solely due to secularization but is influenced by various cultural shifts and technological changes over time.
• Christianity's adaptation to modernity has led to a narrow understanding of its teachings, reducing religion to moralistic and therapeutic ideals rather than a comprehensive worldview.
• The rise of neoliberal capitalism has fostered an environment that promotes individualism and competitiveness, which contradicts the communal and stable aspects traditionally associated with religious practice.
• Multiculturalism has introduced complexities to religious discourse, leading to a perception that all beliefs are equally valid, which can undermine the conviction necessary for religious adherence.
• The podcast highlights generational shifts, indicating that younger generations are less likely to engage in traditional religious practices due to societal changes in family structures and mobility.
• In light of these cultural changes, it is crucial for pastors and ministry leaders to engage thoughtfully with their communities and adapt their approaches to remain relevant and impactful.

Read Travis' review of Why Religion Went Obsolete.

Sign up for our Blueprint cohort.

Keep up with updates from Apollos Watered: The Center for Discipleship & Cultural Apologetics.

Get Travis's book Blueprint: Kingdom Living in the Modern World.

Join Travis's Substack, Deep Roots Society.

Help support the ministry of Apollos Watered and transform your world today!

Today's episode is brought to you by Chris and Kara Alale.

May the Lord bless your faith and cause a legacy to last for generations.

So all the point is, all these things come together.

I use.

I use the image of converging perfect storms.

So a perfect storm is, you know, two or three storms coming together at the same time.

A converging perfect storm is like four or five perfect storms hitting at the same time.

And if you're sitting in a boat out in the ocean with converging perfect storms, you're in trouble.

So the perfect storms are cultural changes that affect ordinary people's dispositions, assumptions, presuppositions, what they feel comfortable with, what the vibe is.

And it all went against traditional religion making stuff.

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.

Last week, we started our conversation with Dr. Christian Smith, sociologist at Notre Dame, about his book, why Religion Went Obsolete.

Today we are continuing that discussion.

A lot of people have tried to explain to me why they think Christianity seems to be losing influence in our culture.

And they've asked me to explain it to them.

They want one factor.

Well, it's not that easy.

There's actually a confluence of factors, a perfect storm, if you will.

And other people come to me and they say, travis, you're wrong.

You don't know what you're talking about.

Religion isn't dying.

It's just changing shape.

Well, maybe.

But I think what we're actually seeing is that we've started treating our politics religiously and treating our religion politically.

And that's where things get deformed.

Still, in spite of that, I see God doing a work right now, and I think that he's doing something beautiful in the middle of all the cultural upheaval.

I see him raising up his people and his prophets in quiet ways.

I see people returning to prayer.

They're learning how to listen to God.

They're trying to take a stand for justice.

They are praying more.

And I see leaders that are willing to get into the.

To do the hard work of spiritual formation.

And God is doing a work not just overseas.

I mean, we talk about that all the time.

You know, what is God doing overseas?

You see him working in China in pretty amazing ways.

You see what's going on in Nepal.

There's some really cool stuff happening globally.

But I do think that God is doing something among the nations here.

I think God has brought the nations here to help renew the church or to be reached with the gospel.

And I think if we just have the eyes to see and join God in what he's doing, we'll have our eyes open just wonderfully.

I think we're actually seeing a rise of two Christianities, too.

One that relies on power and control, the crusader mode, which we've talked about on this show before, and another that relies on a cruciform love and faithful witness, the missionary mode.

And they're both going on simultaneously.

And to the broader culture, religion might feel obsolete, and there might be some cultural pieces to that.

But I don't think that the struggle is.

Is external.

Like, I don't think I've seen some people say, oh, it's secularization, It's.

It's Islam or something like that.

You know, I think it's less Big Brother and it's more Aldous Huxley's comfort and distractions.

That.

That's what I think.

And today we're going to dig into this further with Dr. Christian Smith.

We're going to be looking at the cultural, social and technological currents reshaping Christianity in the west and what pastors and ministry leaders need to understand to engage their communities.

Well, we're going to be talking about generational shifts, what's going on between the generations, as well as one of the subjects that I think is most overlooked as we talk about these issues, neoliberal capitalism, plus postmodernism, multiculturalism, and the digital revolution, which has done so many things in shaping us today that I also think it just gets skipped over.

We have to be able to pay attention, to identify what these shaping factors are and what they're doing, doing and how we respond to it, because all of them come together to form a perfect storm.

And the church finds itself in this crazy world trying to figure out what do we do?

And that's what we're going to be talking about today.

So let's dive in now.

Let's get into actual kind of pulling apart.

We're zooming in.

If we, if we, if I could use that terminology.

Your, your argument, because you said that it's not just one thing.

I mean, we all want kind of simple answers, but it's actually a we.

It's a web of different causal factors that have created a certain hostile and I'm going to say a cultural environment where Christianity has a hard time finding the oxygen to breathe.

If I could use that type of illustration to kind of bring that out.

What are some of these causal factors that you have noticed and been able to identify that is simply kind of washed over?

I look at it almost like a cultural tsunami that has kind of cleared the ground.

And while there are still, still things that are standing after the water recedes, they're pretty beaten and broken.

So what are some of these cultural causal factors that are, have been at work that have brought this obsolescence to the surface?

Yeah, so the main sort of the story of my book is that these changes, many of them are long term, they've been happening over decades.

Some of them have deep roots.

So it's a very long term historical change.

Most of the, most of the causal forces have, don't have to do with religion.

They have to do with technological changes, economic changes, political changes, even wars.

And it's sort of building up over time that led to a shift.

Also what's really crucial, and this is preliminary to answering your question here, just to lay the groundwork, what's really crucial is to understand this generationally.

If you want to understand the data properly, you have to separate it it out by generation.

So boomers are one thing.

Old boomers are one thing, younger boomers are another thing.

Gen X, I argue, was the sort of the hinge of history here.

They changed things and you can see this literally in the graphs, how the religious behaviors in these generations and millennials just sort of took off in a whole different direction that they like the Gen X opened the door, millennials ran with it, and Gen Z's is carrying it on and cleaning it up.

So this goes, I mean, there are lots of a host of different kind of factors.

There are multiple chapters talking about this.

One of them is simply the long term changes in family formation.

What's called the institutionalization of the family.

Younger people are waiting longer to get married or not getting married, cohabiting, delaying having children or never having children.

Of course, divorce has been around for a while and the composition of the traditional family form is two biological parents with children makes a huge difference in who's going to be interested in attending religious congregation.

Well, can I add something there, a question you cite in your book, the Great Detouring and Ryan Burge, I know, supplied the statistics for that.

Michael Graham and Jim Davis wrote the book.

One of the things that they talk about in the book was the success track in that churches had developed.

They even said success long term is that they stayed in the success track.

And many of the ministries had been aimed at that.

But a lot of churches with the disintegration of the family have still been operating as if it's the ideal and not the ideal.

Is that a correct assessment?

Yeah, that's right.

So I mean, and again, I think it's helpful for pastors to realize not every outcome they face is a result of their actions.

There's a lot of contextual situations.

Do you live in, is your congregation in the core city or the out or the outer city or the suburbs or the country?

That matters hugely in terms of the demographics that are available to you, the kind of people that will gravitate to your program.

But the larger point is as emerging adulthood has influenced, you know, people in their 20s and they're not getting.

Most young Americans think religion is something you do as a grown up when you have kids.

Well, if it takes a lot longer for people to grow, grow up and settle down, if they maybe never get married or if they have kids, not until they're 35, that completely changes the way that a religious congregational involvement can or cannot form them in there from age 18 onward.

So that's just one factor.

It's a deep long term demographic change.

People aren't doing this to avoid church, but it has consequences for how they do engage religion.

Lots of other long term changes.

Americans have been developing over many decades a growing distrust of institutions, of almost every institution maybe except the military, including religious institutions.

So you're facing a population, if you're a pastor of people that think if it's an institution, it's, I'm suspicious of it.

Then there's other, other factors.

Like in the 80s those are, can remember this in the 80s, the rise of televangelism and a lot of which had turned a lot of people off.

You know, like they just want money.

They're just, it's a show, they just want money.

And so some of these things that religion did in public turned certain sets of people off.

And then some of them had scandals, you know, a baker and swaggered and all.

And that just turned off more people.

And then as the Christians mobilized politically in the late 70s and into the 80s and 9 and throughout, that really, it attracted some people, but it really created a backlash where a Large number of Americans said, I don't believe in this.

I don't believe Jesus is all about the Republican Party.

I'm not, I don't even think religion and politics should be in bed together.

So they just said, if this is religion, I don't want any part of it.

And so that is the effort to save America for God ended up pushing a lot of people away from the, the church, other influences.

Well, for the longest time, American national identity was defined as we are the God fearing Western nation who believes in freedom, fighting in a global struggle against Marxist atheist communists, you know, that persecute Christians.

That was actually true.

Right.

So but it gave us, because we had the atheist enemy of the Soviet Union that gave us the national identity of not everyone's a Christian or believes in God, but we as a nation, we believe in religious freedom and God, God fearing God and so on.

And presidents would always, you know, say God bless America and so on.

When the Cold War was over, that was no longer a cultural structure that identified who we were.

And so I think ever since then we've partly been in a crisis of like, what is our role in the world?

What does it mean to be an American?

What holds us together anymore?

Like, obviously we have a lot of political polarization and I think it's partly because we don't have a clear mission that we did for so many decades in the 20th century.

These are just some of the, there's so many more factors.

The influence of postmodernism that comes over from Europe into the United States and is taught in universities in the 90s which basically communicates to young people as far as they can absorb it.

Like everything is relative.

There's no truth.

Anyone making anyone making a claim to truth is probably trying to control you every, you know, don't believe in any meta narrative.

You don't know what any authorial intent is anymore.

If you absorb any of that.

In fact, the, the less you think about it, if you just absorb it and not think critically about it, that completely corrodes the basis upon which Christianity would be built.

Like, well, there's scripture and there's truth and there's reality and we need to live in light of it.

Well, postmodernism dissolves all that.

So it, and that had a very large, immense, diffuse influence on the culture, especially younger people.

So all the point is all these things come together.

I use, I use the image of converging perfect storms.

So yeah, a Perfect storm is above.

You know, two or three storms coming together at the same time.

A converging perfect storm is like four or five perfect storms hitting at the same time.

And if you're sitting in a boat out in the ocean with converging perfect storms, you're in trouble.

So the perfect storms are cultural changes that affect ordinary people's dispositions, assumptions, presuppositions, what they feel comfortable with, what the vibe is.

And it all went against traditional religion making sense.

Well, even as you already, you wrote this in the book, that in some respect, Christianity is the agent of its own demise, like its own success has generated that.

And I remember I did a series I was writing for Substack, and it was on modernity.

You actually mentioned how evangelicalism has always been married to modernity and had a populous voice.

And one of the things that I noted was how Christianity was reduced over time as modernity became the industrial revolution.

You have the Enlightenment, you have all these different things.

Well, Christianity becomes very reduced to this kind of justification.

Only salvation, where we pray the prayer and then the services were really orchestrated to help aid in that.

So there wasn't an understanding of the.

The entirety of one's life within a culture.

Because when you just reduce it to that salvation event, let's say, and not understand it as an event and process, then your theology actually begins to become distorted.

Because we're trying to cater to the modernity aspect, we're also adopting a market theology where we're trying to give people what they want.

So we want to keep them in the door, we want to bring them in.

But in respect, what we're doing is we're just kind of catering to many of the idolatries of the age in which people find themselves.

And we're not challenging the idolatry because we're afraid of obsolescence.

So then, as Christianity has gone on and as we're interacting, you mentioned the perfect storm, post modernity, the Cold War.

I mean, one of the things that I thought was very interesting is even the digital revolution that's come up, I.

Would say that's the biggest.

If I had one factor of every.

Like, I wanted to try to order these in order of importance, but that's impossible.

But if you twisted my arm and said, what is the most important factor?

I would say the digital revolution, the invention of the Internet, social media, YouTube, we can stream everything.

That has had a huge effect.

And in the book, I sort of lay out 10 causal mechanisms by which that worked.

And I love that, actually, I Want to try to do a series on that myself.

Just because it was based.

I think many of us have failed to understand it.

So many of us have adopted the media aspect and failed to understand the dehumanizing elements that are within it.

But you actually go to great pains to even go through Mormonism and how some people are leaving Mormonism because now they have access to be able to research this stuff themselves.

Well, and you didn't even write about AI, which is a whole nother thing.

Another thing coming.

That's the next tsunami.

Yeah, well, well, I think that I remember talking to.

He'd been a NASA physicist and he is in.

He's in Semi Valley, California.

We had a long conversation on AI right when it first came out because he was very nervous of generative AI And I was asking him the implications of generative AI and he goes, bas said.

He goes, you're not going to be able to trust anything because you don't know.

You don't know where it's coming from.

It's going to be hyperlocal.

Go ahead.

Yeah.

Already you can't trust.

I mean, I.

Look, we shouldn't get off into AI, but already I don't.

If something's on YouTube or a piece of news, it could be completely fabricated and you can't really tell anymore that it's not that person saying that.

But yeah.

So getting back to your earlier point, I got us off track a little bit.

But the main story of my book is religion's obsolescence mostly has caused unintentionally by social, economic, political, technological changes over the long term, not by religious forces.

That said, however, religion does take some responsibility for this in various ways.

The one you were mentioning is over the long run, and I don't.

I haven't done this history.

I don't know how it happened.

But over the long run, traditional religion, especially Christianity, Americans came to understand it in very narrow, therapeutic, moralistic terms.

All religion is really, is be a good person.

And of course, this is the opposite of the historic traditional gospel.

Right.

It's not about just be a good person.

But set that aside.

Theologically, most Americans came to understand religion is.

It helps you make good choices, it helps you be kind, it helps you forgive people, be a nice person, don't screw up your life.

Basically have a nice community that you're part of.

Some friends support some psychological coping mechanisms that helps you get through hard times.

And none of that's false.

It's just not the truth.

You know, the full.

It's not the Full story.

Yeah.

So.

Well, religious people aren't necessarily good.

Look at how many scandals there are in the news.

Or I are.

You don't need to, you don't need to God to be good.

You can be good without God.

Or you know, I have my friends online.

I don't need to get dressed up and go to a building at a specific time.

All these sort of things that what Americans thought religion made.

Americans thought made religion good start to become irrelevant or violated.

And so that was part of its obsolescence also.

So there was a sort of a.

Maybe the culture did that to religion.

I think there was a sort of a cooperation, like, okay, this is what people want from us, so this is what we'll supply.

As you were saying, a consumerist mentality.

I would say the biggest thing was religious scandals.

For whatever reason, they were just the media became more comfortable reporting them.

It started off again with sort of evangelical televangelists.

And it just, it seemed like every month there was a new scandal and it sometimes it was very high profile people leaders in the church.

It's not clear that it's even stopped, but at least there was a long phase.

And it wasn't just Christianity in Judaism, Mormonism, the black church.

Every religious tradition pretty much had scandals coming out.

Of course the Catholic priest abuse scandal was the, like the pinnacle of all this.

And it wasn't just that there are some bad priests.

You know, there's always some bad people.

But it appeared that the, the institution was covering this up and, and trying to keep their, their reputation mattered more than taking care of children.

Right.

So yeah, the religion definitely did some very bad things or set itself up in some ways that people reacted strongly against it.

Another one of these in evangelicalism was purity culture.

Sort of like super hyper emphasis on virginity and, and, and father daughter balls and pledge rings and all this stuff.

Well, a lot of those young evangelicals who did that grew up and said this really messed me up.

Like this messed up my head.

Now I'm screwed up in about my body and marriage and sexuality and, and it created a huge backlash.

It wasn't just like, oh, I don't believe this anymore.

There's a huge literature of young women, young ex evangelical women criticizing evangelicalism for messing them up.

In that way, that's just one story.

So the point is, one takeaway is, you know, people who start programs or movements to try to do something good, and I'm sure they have good intentions, they need to consider what could be the unintended negative consequences of this.

What.

How could this actually hurt things more than help things, and not just be so confident, like, oh, this will be great.

Right?

Because there are.

There are, as you've already mentioned, there have been so many different consequences, and I think of the different scandals.

Having been in pastoral ministry and being the recipient of what we call them, that we named it after the church.

We called them refugees that came to the church after a scandal because they had put all their hope in that one leader.

And we saw that time and time and time again.

And it seems like we just continue on.

But that leads me back to the question, and one of the observations that I found very telling is you talk about neoliberal capitalism and its effect on the church because so many different churches have unknowingly.

I would say some have definitely, knowingly, but so many don't even think about it because it's just being caught up in the cultural current.

This is what you need to stay relevant.

This is what you need to do.

Describe how neoliberal capitalism, I would even call it market theology.

For our audience, there is a similar way.

How has that affected the understanding of how to see and operate as a church?

Yeah, so this is a good question.

This is a huge and complicated topic, but I'll try to keep it focused here.

So neoliberalism is a movement that.

Well, let's see.

Neoliberalism is a movement that really became successful after incubating for many generations among intellectuals with the Reagan revolution.

And the basic idea was, there's too much government, there's too much regulation, there's too much trying to manage the economy.

Let the market take over, let there be competition, and that.

That will lead to material prosperity and we'll have a better world.

It wasn't Republican or Democrat.

I mean, one of the biggest advocates of this was Bill Clinton, and he promoted neoliberalism and globalization.

Nafta, the North American Free Trade Agreement, was part of this.

So get rid of barriers, get rid of tariffs.

Trump, by the way, is a pushback on neoliberalism as an aside.

But get rid of barriers, get rid of tariffs, free market, that'll solve our social problems, get the government out of everything.

Well, that created a world.

It did create a lot of material prosperity, but that also created A world that was much more kind of cutthroat, competitive, fluid.

And so millennials grew up in a career environment that's totally different than boomers.

Millennials grew up in an environment where you were competing against your peers, very strongly competing.

You had to constantly be upgrading your skills.

Course technology was changing, so it's like constantly investing in learning the new programs or whatever skills, skill set.

There was much more mobility.

Your company may move you around the company into different teams or in different branches in the city or in different states, or maybe even across the world, as the world is becoming globalized.

And so millennials are not stupid.

They grew up learning.

If I'm not going to get left behind, I need to be somebody who's always ready to move, who's focused on keeping my skill set upgraded, maybe getting more education, working harder.

You know, a whole set of professional people found themselves working at nights and over weekends not to be left behind.

And so compare that to the traditional American sort of mentality of church involvement.

That mentality was, I got a job, I married my high school sweetheart, we settled down, we bought a house with a 30 year mortgage, we had a family, we got involved in our neighborhood, our community, we joined a church, we were good members, we'll be there a long time, maybe I'll become an elder, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And traditional religion, which is to say was associated with stability, roots, commitment, membership, involvement, raising a family, well, millennials, that didn't work for their lives at all.

They had, they were, they were transient, they were mobile.

They had to be ready to, even if they had good intentions, they might literally say to themselves, I can't get too involved here.

I can't sign up for responsibilities because I may have to move or I may not be able to fulfill these.

So millennials were also like, we know objectively the most mobile generation.

They moved a lot.

They moved to, tended to move to cities, I show in the book, that were less religious cities, so that literally the destinations they were going to had fewer sort of supply of churches.

And simply the fact of moving makes the likelihood of one getting involved in a church reduced.

You would think that people, when they move, they would say, well, I'm a Methodist, I'm going to find the New Methodist Church in my neighborhood.

And some people do that.

But in general, moving is disruptive of people's lives.

And then especially if they have a new job and they're trying to build new friendships, they get less involved again in the context of all these other changes going on.

So neoliberalism was not out to undermine traditional religion.

Neoliberalism was out to create.

Its original idea was to create freedom, prosperity and it really believed it would bring peace to the world and stability.

But it had these unintended knock on consequences for, for especially for particular generations of people that had the unintended consequence of making people less able or interested in traditional religious practice.

Well, even your research seems to work in ball and glove with the great detourching where they mentioned that a lot of people just simply stopped going to church because they were moving.

It's just the reality of our society.

And again that neoliberalism.

But those, even those performance kind of metrics that you mentioned, that competitive performance idea has crept into many of the churches where churches then are being evaluated on their performance metrics.

But those are all externals, buildings, bodies, budgets, that kind of thing.

Rather than necessarily the slow work of soul or spiritual formation.

Yeah, it's more modeled more on.

So the boomer megachurches were modeled on the shopping malls, right?

Yeah, it's huge.

You can find your boutique store that works for you, for your small group or whatever.

But then as neoliberalism comes along, the business corporation can become the model for, for a congregation.

And I guess you and I would agree that's kind of problematic.

But the other thing neoliberalism did in its era, and it's hard, these changes are rapid enough that we can get a sense of them, but they're slow enough that they don't shock us into.

Like what?

Like they're gradual enough that we accommodate ourselves to them.

But we have to remember, I mean it just wasn't always like this.

But what neoliberalism did in especially insofar as it created a more materially prosperous world, it didn't just make people more competitive, it was more materialistic, it was more shopping therapy.

And as other technologies come along, you can buy things online with two clicks.

It reformed the cultural notion of what it means to be human.

This is a deep cultural matter.

What it means to be human is not to get left behind, to be successful, to have a good career, to be prosperous, to be.

To not to not be materially uncomfortable, to succeed, to get promoted, all of that consumerist.

That's not really the.

What you find in the Gospels, let's say.

Right.

It's.

It creates a model that just doesn't fit.

There's a mismatch.

What does it mean to be human?

Mismatches what you know, orthodox Christianity would be teaching.

Well, this is where in our research we have what's called the Western humanist story catches people up if the gospel isn't framed right.

And again I go back to the reduction of what some have called a two chapter gospel, as opposed to a four chapter gospel where it's strictly the justification only salvation.

There's we have classic Christian teaching, creation, fall, redemption, restoration of all things.

So if many though they would give a tacit acknowledgment and defend creation, the understanding of the cultural mandate and how to be human or the humanization, the flourishing of society is not present within many different Christian explanations.

So they have fall, redemption, but they don't have restoration.

And if you don't frame it correctly, then the Western humanist story catches people up and then it just becomes moral tidbits.

The Bible.

That's the moral, therapeutic deism.

Moralism.

Yeah, yeah, complete moralism.

In that we're in agreement.

And even as we're talking about the neoliberal capitalist tendencies, that consumerist mindset that's really crept in, as you said, over time, there is another factor that I think has also helped kind of change things.

And you mentioned this in the book and I was delighted to see that you mentioned it was talking about multiculturalism.

Now one of the things that we see obviously with Christian nationalism today is the idea of an unum, which also James Davison Hunter talks about.

And he's saying that we don't have something that unites.

And some have said, oh, we never meant to be multicultural, we are to be unicultural, whatever the case may be.

And I would really push back on that idea is that we are multicultural.

And you're not going to.

The toothpaste is out of the tube in that regard.

And even then I would debate on how can you use the opaque definition of civil religion in order to bring about that unum in a society such as ours, I think is completely impossible.

Now people might disagree with me and that's fine.

And yet it has changed things and caused the American traditional religion to again, one of those pieces of the web, if you will, what has multiculturalism then done to help disturb or challenge, if you will, and I hate to even use that term because I actually think it's a benefit within pluralism.

But how has that affected American traditional Religion, bringing in multiculturalism and multicultural education.

Yeah, so this is complicated again too, but I could try to say this.

So I'm a pluralist.

Like, I. I think a good society has plurality and it's not just one thing.

And I would use the word plural.

I'm a pluralist more than multicultural, but I'm comfortable with multicultural.

I think there's a lot of values in multiculturalism that parallel Christianity, let's say, hospitality, love of the other, etc.

So the story I tell in my book is not that multiculturalism was against Christianity, but the way it was rolled out in schools, elementary, middle, high schools in the 90s, it was a big movement the way it was rolled out.

And by the time you get to a sophisticated theory of multiculturalism and the really good intentions of it, by the time you get that into a second grader or an eighth grader's head, I think what a lot of children learned, what they walked away with was, was a few basic ideas.

You can't criticize anybody else.

Everything is equally good as every other culture or belief.

Nothing is better than anything else.

Essentially, the, the background message is there's no such thing as truth.

Everything is culturally, historically relative, and you just have to accept everything.

Don't, don't question, you know, don't judge anybody.

Multi.

A good multiculturalism is much more sophisticated than that.

Right.

But by the time it gets worked down from the theorist to the teacher's college, to the principal, to the seminar that teaches teachers how to teach it, by the time they teach it and by the time a school child walks away with it, that's kind of what they get.

And so the cultural message of multiculturalism, even though it doesn't have to be at all, ends up being like, oh, well, what you believe is just totally relative, and anybody can believe anything else, and nobody has the truth.

So just keep your mouth quiet.

And probably.

And then of course, people take the next step, which is, well, if there's no truth, and why should I invest in what I've been told is the truth?

I should just go along with what's easiest or most profitable, as I understand it.

And so it really.

Not only does it undermine the idea that people can have convictions that what they believe is the truth, it undermines the capacity to carry on conversations across difference that don't turn into violence.

I think one of the deep things we've lost in our culture is the ability for people who have very different views to talk with each other.

I mean, like, this is not news, right?

So.

But I think all of these changes fed into that.

If people literally don't have the skills to know how to say to somebody who thinks very differently, like okay, we disagree, like why don't you explain to me your point of view and what are your.

Why.

What do you assume about that and why is that compelling to you?

And then let me tell you where I'm coming from.

And oh well, we share more than we thought we did but we really disagree about these things.

So like people do not anymore know how to disagree.

How do you have a pluralistic society without those skills?

And we've really reduced power to politics.

If we don't have the cultural shared understanding, it gets down to power.

And so it's no wonder that we, it's no wonder that we have the political polarization and it's get.

And, and even like the original founders.

I don't want to get into political theory here, but the idea of like balance and different even the system itself, if you, if politics is downstream from culture, if the culture has become a problem, then our political system is showing itself to be less and less functional.

And then it just gets down to power and force.

You just make people and you do whatever you want, even if it requires massive amount of lying and deception to do that and distraction.

So you know, things aren't that good.

I don't want to blame all that on multiculturalism by any stretch or post modernism or anything.

It's very complicated by.

But these things feed into if you lose.

Another way to put this is in my view, a commitment to accountability to truth.

Even if you don't know what the truth is, just accountability, everyone's accountable to discussions.

A commitment to the accountability of truth is a precondition of human civilization or a decent society.

Once that's gone, you know, you're in huge trouble.

Well, this is where I think it goes back to as we talked about before and again, I'm not trying to get in political theory or AI, but does lead you to the question of hyperlocality where I can't begin to believe what I'm seeing at a national level.

I mean even when I look at the news now and I've talked to so many different people have said the same thing.

They're like, I don't even know what news source to trust anymore because everything has become so polarized and it's in some respect even when you bring in the Christian nationalism, which I think is the gospel in enemy mode is what it is.

It's a zero sum game and it's more of a, in some respect, it's like a status competition on a loss of cultural standing and that I'm trying to recapture that through political means of what I can't do by listening, by taking the time.

Because again, the neoliberal capitalism is keeping us and pushing us on, plus the digital revolution.

So now we're moving as fast as we can, we're too busy and even the younger generation lacks the skills necessary to be able to even have a conversation on these issues now.

Now there are so many things that we can talk about as we walk through this.

I mean, we already have and as you said, these are very complex issues.

And again, I go back to the web illustration.

All of them are all connected with one another.

But as we're looking through this and pastors I know that are listening to this right now are saying, okay, I got it.

It's complicated, it's complicated.

What do I do now?

What do I do now?

And I've mentioned before how we, we have some steps that we've taken to help try to, to, to change the paradigm a little bit, a different perspective.

It's not an end all solution, it's an approach.

Because we, as you said before and you wrote in your book, some of the simplistic decisions that if I have the right program, if I do this, if I copy what church, you know, successful megachurch does down by the way, it'll work.

But it's a formula because you don't understand the charism, the personality, the location, the leadership, all the contextualization aspects of it that we have to be faithful to where we're at at the end.

God's not calling us to have big platforms and followings and things like that, but to be obedient where he has us to be.

So I don't want to say that there is, that there is no hope here.

There's massive challenges is what I'm going to say.

Now you might feel free to disagree because you're talking about these at and this is where you and I would be in agreement.

These are deep cultural issues.

These aren't surface cultural changes that can be made just by any one person.

There's a series of cultural issues that are at work that are currents that are carrying us along whether we like it or not.

What then is, what then do we need to do?

How can we help?

Take concrete small steps.

I'm not asking for world Earth, but small steps of disobedience where we are to help accomplish the purpose that God has for us.

Where we are.

Yeah.

So good question.

And let me start off with two general setting a context.

First, I'm a sociologist.

I'm not a pastor, I'm not a ministry consultant.

I'm not a, anything like that.

My job is mainly to help people understand the situations they find themselves in.

And that's what this book is about.

So I would say the first step is to really come to grips with the enormity of the challenges.

I find there's a lot of wishful thinking out there.

There's a lot of hoping, like, oh, somebody heard a headline that young men are going to church more.

Maybe we're going to turn around and have a big revival or something.

I, I don't predict the future.

I have no idea what's going to happen.

Maybe there will be a revival, but sociologically, I wouldn't count on it.

So the first thing is like really, really come to grips with the huge changes that have happened in the last couple decades.

I think people have felt them, they've experienced the consequences, but really better understanding them.

That's a complicated way of saying, read my book.

But, but yeah, so come to grips with the big picture situation.

I think that, I think it's helpful to zoom out to get some historical sense of hope from this.

And I would say you.

Christianity is not a faith and practice that's designed for just one society or one way of life.

It has survived and sometimes thrived and spread in the, a vast variety of situations and contexts, some of which have been extremely hard, people being murdered, some of which have been very open.

So it, just because things have become hard doesn't mean the game is over.

Right?

But to bring the, to, to, to engage, to bring old practices and old models that are not matched with what's.

With what, where things are today isn't going to work.

So I think there's going to be, again, I just mean this sociologically.

What's needed is a lot of first coming to grips with the situation, then, then being patient enough to take the time to think, where are we?

What does this mean?

What, how are we our own worst enemies?

What needs to change?

What does it need to change?

What would it look like to be faithful in the, in this context instead of 30 years ago?

And at the end of the book, I suggest, you know that.

But it's going to require some long, hard, difficult thinking, conversations, reimagining, and there's nothing guaranteeing that they're going to be work right away.

So that's that.

The other thing I would throw in which we have a long track record in the United States of trying live just liberalizing the gospel, make it easy, demythologize, you know, all the, the Bible, accept anything, tolerate everything, like just come on in, everything's great.

That doesn't work.

It's whatever you would think it might work.

But people don't want nothing.

People don't want anything goes.

So I'm not, I am.

To be clear, the implications of my book are not.

Figure out where the culture is and chase after it.

You know, that's not you.

The church cannot compete against Silicon Valley.

It can't compete against Hollywood and Madison Avenue and neoliberal capitalism.

It's got to figure out what it is, what it believes, what it's going to teach.

And so I think there's a tough line, however, in all of this between it's not even balancing, I don't even know what the word is, but between not just going liberal, but not becoming sectarian.

So one temptation in all this is hunker down, dig some trenches, become oppositional, become grumpy, become sectarian, become I.

A countercultural is fine, but it has to be intelligent, countercultural.

Agreed.

Like it has to be faithful to your tradition.

Countercultural, not just we're against, you know, the mainstream.

That's not going to work either.

So it's going to require a lot, I think, looking from, you know, as a sociologist, a lot of really smart, careful, collaborative people talking together, not just some entrepreneurial person running off and trying some other new thing, figuring out a longer term, well, even longer terms problem because the world changes faster and faster.

The minute you get it figured out, then there's a new technology that undermines it.

But I would say a patience and acknowledgement.

Things are a really difficult time now for traditional religion and taking the time, rather than to come up with some quick solution, to think it through and to figure out who are we, what are we really trying to do here?

What are our goals?

What would success look like if, if we actually succeeded and what might have a chance to get us there.

Well, that's, that's the, the, the thought.

Concluding thought for the day.

I wanted to thank you for coming on the show.

I do highly recommend the book for all pastors and ministry leaders.

Anybody that's doing ministry in this cultural context.

I think you do an excellent job of drawing out and drawing attention to these, these, these different issues that we face.

You give us new language to be able to categorize properly and hopefully be able to, to try to take the steps, as you just mentioned, to dialogue, to learn to think critically and carefully about these things, which is what we are, as an organization are trying to do.

Thanks for having me.

I enjoyed the conversation.

That wraps up my conversation with Dr. Christian Smith.

I hope it's given you fresh insight into the forces that are shaping Christianity today.

I know it did for me.

The book is fantastic.

Go get it.

You need this book and I hope it's inspired you to think more about how we can faithfully engage our communities.

And here's the cool thing.

This is where Missio holism comes in, because most ministry approaches don't take those into consideration.

But missioholism does, and it shows that God is bigger than all of that.

So be sure to learn more.

Go to our website, ApolloDriver.org learn more about Missioholism if you want to take the first steps of transforming that, or taking that from just mere theory to strategy, then join us for our next Blueprint Cohort that's starting up the first week of November.

It's a space for ministry leaders to grow, to get equipped and learn how to minister faithfully and fruitfully in the middle of this this world in which we find ourselves.

And Again, go to ApolloSWater.org that's your hub for resources, signups and tools to grow in cultural apologetics, missioholism and just practical ministry.

There you can explore, learn and get equipped to make a biblical impact in your world.

And be sure to come back next week because I am going to be speaking with Kyle Strobel as we are diving into the subject of prayer.

Because even in the midst of all this cultural turbulence, prayer aligns us with God's power and his purposes.

You will not want to miss that.

I hope to see you then.

Thanks for joining us on today.

Today's episode of the Ministry Deep Dive, a podcast of Apollo's Water 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.

It.