Has Religion Become Obsolete in American Culture?

In this second part of our conversation with sociologist Dr. Christian Smith, we explore his groundbreaking research on why traditional religion has lost its cultural relevance for post-Boomer generations. Dr. Smith unpacks what he calls the "Millennial Zeitgeist" - a complex cultural worldview shaped by digital technology, individualism, and anti-institutional sentiment that has fundamentally changed how younger Americans approach faith, truth, and spiritual meaning.

Rather than offering quick fixes for declining church attendance, Dr. Smith challenges religious leaders to understand the deeper cultural forces at play and engage in profound soul-searching about authentic Christian identity. He reveals how the re-enchantment movement is drawing people to mysticism and alternative spiritualities - resources that churches once provided but abandoned in pursuit of secular respectability. This conversation offers essential insights for church leaders wrestling with whether religion has become obsolete and how faith communities can respond faithfully to massive cultural transformation.

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"Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America" by Dr. Christian Smith

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And the world is changing so much more rapidly. Technology, political events, globalization, that it's hard to keep up with. And again, I keep, I have to qualify. It's not like, let's chase the world. You know, just we'll run faster. But it's hard to keep up forms and styles that even match at all what's going on. So yeah, I agree with this idea. Step back, reflect, have the patience and the trust to really think deeply and have.

profound conversations and not try to patch it all up immediately.

Hello everyone, welcome to the Pivot Podcast, where we explore how the Church can faithfully navigate a changing world. I'm Dwight Zscheile

And I'm Terri Elton. And today we're continuing the conversation that we began in the last episode with Dr. Christian Smith, a leading sociologist at the University of Notre Dame and the author of a compelling new book titled, Why Religion Went Obsolete, The Demise of Traditional Faith in America. In the last episode, we unpacked the obsolescence of traditional religion among post-Boomer generations.

And in this episode, we're gonna dig deeper into the underlying cultural conditions around this and how churches can respond. Welcome, Dr.

Well, thanks for having me again.

So one of the most helpful things in the book is your research, this fresh research you've done on this predominant culture, particularly among younger generations in America, Gen X and younger, what you call the Millennial Zeitgeist. So what do you mean by the Millennial Zeitgeist and how did it develop?

Yeah, so zeitgeist is a word social scientists don't like and historians don't like. It comes with some bad intellectual baggage. A few of us are trying to rehabilitate it because as we know, different eras of history have different, like phenomenologically, we've lived through them. We know there are different feels and sensibilities and ideas and personalities that dominate. ⁓ The millennial zeitgeist is the product.

of all the historical forces I lay out in the book, especially the digital revolution, the internet, social media. ⁓ And I try to, it's impossible to directly measure the millennials, I guess, but I try in one long chapter to sort of convey sort of the cultural model involved, the kind of spirit it conveys. There's a section where I have a list of adjectives basically that kind of convey what I think's

summarizes it's not a simple summary. It's not even an internally coherent zeitgeist. Some of the pieces don't fit together. That's part of the zeitgeist. It's not internally coherent. But yeah, so it's focused on the imminent. The zeitgeist is focused on this world, what's happening now. It's not focused on the past. It's very presentist. It's not where do I come from? What is my tradition? It's captive to the present, I would say.

It's individualistic as we talked about in the last episode. It's anti-institutional as we talked about in the last episode. It's relativistic as we talked about. That's related to postmodernism and other forces. There's a kind of a distrustfulness suspicion of institutions and other people. We interviewed millennials, I would say. I don't trust anybody. In other words, it's not...

It's not like, people are good. You give them the benefit of the doubt unless they prove unworthy. It's like, don't trust people until you find a few who maybe you can. It's subjectivistic. the, the underlying epistemology is, you know, what's true. You know, what's real, depending on if it vibes with you or not, how it makes you feel like sort of how resonance is a, is an epistemology that's different from historic other historic epistemologies. So, ⁓ there's a lot of fluidity.

It's multicultural, it's minimalist. Get rid of stuff you don't need. get rid of things that are unnecessary. ⁓ It's transgressive. Like, break boundaries. Challenge ⁓ all norms. At least some people should be doing that. It's pornographic. Like, I talk in the book about a third sexual revolution in this era that just opens up whole new versions of sort of previously

embarrassing or shameful sexual practices or representations. Again, this gets back to digital technology basically, but pornography, ⁓ it's jaded. There's a certain sense of unhappiness in the whole thing. It's sort of, the world will disappoint you. There's a certain dark side of all this. It's also at the same time, consumerist. It's oriented toward entertainment. And ⁓ another key feature of this for very many

younger people is it's re-enchanted or there's movements toward re-enchantment which we can discuss but that is a dissatisfaction with sort of rational, metaphysical naturalism, secularism, atheism, that story. It doesn't want traditional religion but it doesn't want secularism. It's not the winner in all this. There's much more interest in mysticism, ⁓ the paranormal.

secret knowledge, so everything from tarot cards to manifesting to paganism to vampires. It's this whole world of re-enchantment that is where people, think that's the growth industry, not secularism winning from the demise of American religion.

So I'm going to go there. And I want to talk about how this re-enchantment culture actually is satisfying spiritual needs that maybe once, at least for some of us, were met through traditional religion. But it's in a very different way now.

Yeah, I mean, think that this is a certain degree of sort of chase of traditional religion chasing modernity and trying to make itself respectable in terms of the standards of secular modernity. So this has been going on for a long time. Liberal Protestantism is at the forefront of it. But yeah, I mean, if people are just in enchantment and mystery and transcendence and the sacred and the dark side of all that, traditional religion should be where they go for that.

I mean, we have millennia of resources and experience and practices that engage all of that. But I think in modernity, American traditional religions, especially Protestantism, but eventually also Catholicism, sort of found that embarrassing, found that... ⁓

Like that wouldn't be acceptable. I mean, this would be like some kind of version of Schleiermachian, you know, like let's have an apology for a reworked version of Christianity that a modern secular person could at least respect if not believe. And so a lot of that, think I put sort of put in mothballs in the basement of churches and other things got emphasized like moralism, which we discussed in the last segment. ⁓

be a good person, like its ethical implications, apologetics, how rational and reasonable this could be, various things. things like, ⁓ and I'm not, yeah, things like exorcism, which a lot of people now really don't want to go into a church, but they're very fascinated with demons and energies and powers. The church is doesn't, that's all been put away. And so, ⁓

for very understandable reasons, the afterlife, hell, the judgment, all these sort of things have been sort of ⁓ sidelined in traditional religion. so young people are not finding it there. But they do find it online. They find it in books. They find it in esoteric shops. They find it with psychics. They find it in retreats. They find it in women's circles. They find it all over in the culture in other ways.

which are not traditional religion, which go back to ancient religions like pre-Christendom paganisms, that more modern versions of folk religions like vampires and monsters, ⁓ and very modern invented versions of quasi religions like Wicca or laws of attraction. ⁓

And even some of it has very strong ties to what's considered to be science. You know, the, energy frequencies of crystals or the metaphysical implications of quantum mechanics and physics. there's this whole realm out there that I think a lot of people in traditional religion sort of just dismiss as trivial or marginal or silly, or just entertainment, you know.

all the shows on Netflix that have spirits and possession and supernatural and vampires and everything else, that's just entertainment. One thing I'm saying is that's not just entertainment. The culture's being reshaped where that's where people are going to find mystery, transcendence, the mystical, the scary, ⁓ the hidden knowledge. And so in a way that the church has itself been...

sidelined itself and has been sidelined by ⁓ narratives and what modernity would have considered crazy stuff. Like we thought the Enlightenment got rid of that. Well, it's making a big comeback. And I think that really presents challenges to the church to think, well, we're not just going to start doing exorcisms, right? Like in order to get the youth back, but ⁓ like, what about that? What to do about that? But the back...

I know I'm going along, one of the background lessons or questions here is if you let secular modernity sort of set the agenda for what's acceptable, that might work for a while for some generations. But eventually you're letting someone else set the terms of who you are, who's not a friend to you. And so again, this gets back to, I think communities of faith really need to step back and think about who are we? What are we committed to? What is in our DNA?

What are we willing to not be acceptable for for a while without becoming weird and sectarian and you know crazy of which there's plenty of that too up there now.

Well, so one of the threads in the millennial zeitgeist that's so strong is this sense that the individual self is the ultimate authority and arbiter of truth. And often that is, it's through kind of an emotional response that people have that feels, you as you say, subjective, it feels right, it feels true to me. And we've talked about, you know, Charles Taylor's language of the age of authenticity or ethics of authenticity quite a bit on this podcast over the

the months and years as a way to think about this cultural shift. But I'm curious then, so if churches have, that have embraced secular modernity as a way to stay relevant and you can think of the, the kind of liberal version of that or the, even the kind of conservative evangelical version, was use whatever instrumental means we can to get people to come to a worship service where they feel something, right?

individually that then feeds into the same kind of cultural framework. So there's a deep dilemma there. If traditional religion has as a basic kind of predicate or foundation belonging and community, how do you think about the tension there with the way this culture doesn't see both people are very lonely and disconnected and feel the pain of that and are anxious and depressed and

don't really know how to belong or how to dwell deeply anywhere.

Yeah. I mean, these are the very kind of questions that need to be wrestled with. I don't really have answers. I think before getting to any answers or intelligent reflection, it requires sort of understanding the parameters of the problem. So again, I back up and say, I'm just a sociologist. I'm just trying to help people understand the context. ⁓ however, so with that caveat in mind, yeah, part of the, ⁓ part of the,

Difficulty in all this is the millennial zeitgeist, is not internally coherent. People are not sort of always or often sort of rational, instrumental sort of wayers of the situation. as an example, people may feel immense isolation, loneliness, wishing, longing for community, et cetera, but not know how or not necessarily feeling ready to try to engage a real community of real people.

We've been trained so much by so many institutions to just stick around people who are your age like within one year of your age To to delete people who are are anything other you know annoying or don't vibe with you just Find your little niche of people who are just like you well We all know or those of us who know no that's not community. You community is more complex than that and ⁓

it requires face-to-face relationships, which are messy. yeah, which is to say, just because we say, there's a lot of people that are longing for community, that doesn't mean they're gonna be ready to do it or under certain conditions. again, it's a matter of realizing the complexity of this. the conclusion, I have a whole section where I talked about, traditional religion is damned if it doesn't, damned if it doesn't. Like whatever it tries, it's not gonna vibe.

And I don't mean that as sort of like throw in the towel, give it up, anything like that. But just like once you've gone obsolete at a cultural level until something big changes, there aren't a lot of doors have been locked and it's hard to know what to do. So that may feel like just so much pessimism. do think there've got to be creative ways to respond to this, but it's got to be different than like, let's be more entertaining or let's, let's just. ⁓

stick with who we've always been for the last five centuries and hopefully some people will come. Or let's just move to the neighborhood where there's the biggest growth of families with toddlers, church growth or whatever like that. again, I don't think there are any simple solutions. I really think what needs to happen, as I say in the conclusion of this book, is a lot of soul searching, a lot of sort of reflection on don't accept simple.

answers. Don't say, if we just get our exegesis of Ezekiel right, that'll really improve things. Or if we just get a youth group leader who's the hippest, coolest thing that ever. These are not the solutions. What's at issue here is deep culture, deep cultural constructs. ⁓ It may not be that in the short term there are any solutions, but that in the long run, there are ways to think about. ⁓

identity and formation and commitment and that is alternative to what's problematic in the culture, but that can with faithfulness sort of vibe with what's good in the culture. Yeah, so I'm just kind of talking in circles here, which is to say, I don't have answers. It's, it's the, the problems are not superficial. They're profound and they involve culture, not just programming and getting the ideas right.

I hear an invitation in what you've shared and in this book for the church really to shift the conversation from how do we just do church a little better or differently in ways that can either attract people back who have just disengaged or re-engage them or how do we take on the culture in a adversarial way as if the church had the authority to be able to

to do that anymore. And what you've, think, hopefully are helping us see is that we really need to figure out who we are at a deeper level, not on the grounds of the culture, not to legitimize ourselves on the grounds of the culture. But really, there's a, you know, well, to use a title of one of your earlier books, there's some soul searching to do, right? Some deep soul searching.

around what does it mean to be a Christian community? I suppose the same thing would apply to Jewish community or Buddhist community or anything else in America, but in this culture that we live in. And that I think is work that church leaders traditionally have not in recent years been focused on, shaped or forms to really take up in many ways.

And so there's a huge challenge here and also I think a freedom to be able to get at a deeper level of engagement. I think for those of our listeners and viewers who may feel a sense of heaviness listening to this conversation or watching this or reading Dr. Smith's book, I also feel that it's an opportunity for us to turn to God's action and to ⁓

to really give up the kind of fixing posture that I think so many of us have been caught in and to be able to ask a much more profound set of questions. And I think biblically, spiritually, to not know in the wonderful traditions of Christian faith and spirituality when we're waiting on God to act. And so in your final chapter, you talk about kind of that metaphor, the parable of seeds going into the soil.

to be reborn and I wonder if it isn't such a moment as that.

It could be. I mean, I think that's a very good summary of sort of what I'm trying to imply in this book. I'm not, I really don't want to tell the traditional churches what to do, but I do believe there are bigger picture implications that I think you've just summarized very nicely. We in the United States love to think ⁓ there's a solution for everything. It should be able to be rolled out pretty short term. We were very pragmatic people. We don't, and we follow numbers and metrics. So it's

It may be hard for us, but again, if we step back and look at the big picture, history is a long-term project. ⁓ You and I, or nobody else alive today is in charge of history or where things are going or any of that. Usually the next statement is we just need to be faithful. But again, I think the question is, what does that look like? What does that mean in light of a larger context? The other thought I have,

I hadn't thought of this before, but the other thought I have in light of what you're just saying is, along the lines of long-term project, it may not be within our lifetimes to sort of get this sorted out, but in the history of Christianity, know, Augustine was wrestling with, gosh, what does it mean that Rome is falling apart? What does that mean for the church? Well, it took some centuries of...

you know, monasticism and other forms of ⁓ not cocooning. I mean, I don't want to use the language of sort of retreat and just stay a bunch of monks in the mountains for a long time, but realizing that these things may take time to sort out. And ⁓ it may be that what comes out on the other side after it's, I don't know what, again, metaphors are so dangerous, but

incubated or been in abeyance for some time ⁓ is much more authentic, there's a that word authentic, is much more ⁓ faithful or true to itself and good for the world and good for people than ⁓ what's been. And again, I will keep, want to go back to this theme that

It's not that what's been is so bad. It's that the world and the world is changing so much more rapidly. Technology, political events, globalization that it's hard to keep up with. And again, I keep have to qualify. It's not like, let's taste the world. You know, just we'll run faster, but it's hard to keep up forms and styles that even match at all what's going on. So yeah, I agree with this idea. Step back, reflect.

have the patience and the trust to really think deeply and have profound conversations and not try to patch it all up immediately.

I also hear an invitation to lay down some of those forms that are mismatched and this instrumental kind of moralistic and other functioning ways we view church, right? And being invited into the dwelling of what does it mean to be a spiritual community in this time? Because I think there's openings for different spiritual connections, but they're not gonna come quick. They're not gonna be linear.

in any of that. I just want to say thank you on behalf of ⁓ Dwight and I, but also all of our listeners for this enlightening conversation, two-part conversation about the research in this book. I think it will have critical insights for us to sit with as church leaders as we try and navigate these times and await history as it unfolds, as you've said.

Yeah, well, you're welcome. I'm glad to be on it. It's an interesting and important discussion. So thanks for having me.

And to our audience, thank you for joining us on this episode of Pivot. As always, we'd love for you to help spread the word about Pivot by liking and subscribing or sharing it with a friend.

And as you know, ⁓ the best way you can help us is to give us feedback. So if you can help spread the word by sharing it or leave us a review, that would be great. And so this is Terri Elton and Dwight Zscheile signing off from another episode of the Pivot Podcast.