What's Really Behind America's Religious Decline?

If you're watching church attendance declining at your congregation and wondering what you're doing wrong, this conversation will transform how you understand the challenges facing American religion. Dr. Christian Smith, sociologist at the University of Notre Dame and author of "Why Religion Went Obsolete," reveals that the struggles you're experiencing aren't primarily about your leadership, programs, or preaching. Instead, we're dealing with "perfect storm" conditions—massive cultural, technological, and social forces that have been building for decades, creating what Smith calls a "cultural mismatch" between traditional religion and today's zeitgeist.

Smith's research identifies specific factors since 1991 that have reshaped the religious landscape, from the deinstitutionalization of the American family to the rise of anti-institutional sentiment and popular postmodernism. Rather than trying to fix church attendance declining through traditional methods, church leaders need to understand these macro-level forces and redirect their energy toward discerning where God is already at work. This liberating perspective helps leaders move beyond self-blame to focus on faithful response to genuinely unprecedented cultural conditions. Join hosts Dwight Zscheile and Terri Elton as they explore why traditional religion has become "obsolete" in American culture and what this means for the future of faith communities.

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

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What this book is trying to do is to say, wait a minute, step back out to the macro level, look at the big picture and it's not just you or it's not hardly you. ⁓ Maybe you've made mistakes, maybe you do great things, but that's not primarily what's going on in the world. There are plate tectonic, titanic forces at work, ⁓ technologically, in geopolitics, in economics that are driving this stuff.

And people on the ground in congregation, religious workers, are trying to make sense of it. But as you say, oftentimes it's invisible. It requires sort of whole, going to a whole other elevation of perspective to see it. And so my own view as a sociologist is that's my contribution to the world is helping people see contexts, bigger pictures that are normally, if you don't spend years trying to figure it out, are normally very hard to see.

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 are thrilled to welcome Dr. Christian Smith, the William R. Keenan Jr. Professor of Sociology and the Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Smith is one of the most astute observers of American religion and culture. And he's just published a compelling new book titled Why Religion Went Obsolete.

the demise of traditional faith in America.

This conversation couldn't be more relevant for our listeners who are navigating ministry in today's rapidly changing landscape. Many church leaders are struggling with declining attendance and engagement, wondering if they just need to fix their programs or find the right strategies to bring people back. But Dr. Smith's research suggests something much deeper is happening, not just a decline in religious participation, but a fundamental shift in how religion functions in American culture.

We think this conversation is so important that we're going to take two episodes to explore these themes with him. So, Chris, welcome to the Pivot Podcast.

Thanks for having me on. Look forward to our conversation.

So in your new book, you use the term obsolete rather than just declining, which is often what we hear used to describe traditional religion in America. Could you just start by explaining the difference and why that distinction actually matters?

Yeah, so the word decline, which is a common way of talking about this, usually that focuses on either organizational metrics, like how many members does our denomination have, or it focuses on individual metrics, like how many Americans believe in God, or how often do you pray? All that's important and valuable, and decline is a starting point of this book. But what I wanted to get to in this book, ⁓

operated more at the cultural level, at the macro-cultural level, something that's going on in the spirit of the age, especially among post-boomers, among younger generations. And decline doesn't quite capture that. I think when I was working on this, the language of obsolescence is what struck me, is what's really going on. I think that captures better the cultural feel. The word I use is zeitgeist, actually. The spirit of the era.

the vibe of how religion doesn't fit into sort of what's going on in the mainstream culture. And so, yeah, in order to capture that sense, that feel, and to refocus away from organizations and individual ⁓ features on what's going on in the culture around religion, not just to and within religion.

So say more about that word obsolescence or what does it mean for something to be obsolete in this sense?

Yeah. So obsolete conveys the sense of ⁓ something that was once used, something that was once significant or relevant, and then superseded or ⁓ passed by by other developments. ⁓ Sometimes, ⁓ usually obsolescence refers to products or technologies. ⁓ And one of the reasons I chose this idea of obsolescence is I specifically wanted to capture these dimensions that

When something goes obsolete, doesn't mean it's extinct. It doesn't mean nobody uses it or nobody does it. Things that are obsolete may actually be superior to the things that superseded them. So for example, people that really love fidelity in music will say that a vinyl record is much better than streaming or even a CD in ⁓ conveying the quality of the music.

Nevertheless, vinyl records are obsolete except for the aficionados. So ⁓ there are still lots of Americans practicing religion, even if traditional religion has gone obsolete. this term recognizes that. It doesn't make a judgment that traditional religion is worse than or inferior to what's supplanted it. ⁓ Obsolescence also pays attention to the idea that

Things can be obsolete by developments that have nothing to do with the product or technology itself. It could be an industry decides, you know, we want something different or we want to make more profit or whatever it may be. but again, using the term zeitgeist, I really want this idea of obsolescence to convey a feel. And again, it's very hard, especially in sociology, we like to be able to measure things, you know.

with numbers at a quantifier, but it's very hard to do that when we're talking about the feel of an era, the sensibility, the vibes. But I think that's really an important dimension of all this. So I'm just insisting that we try to do our best to get at that.

So as I read through your book, the phrase that came to my mind was perfect scorn to describe the many factors that together have undercut traditional religion. It's not just one thing. You have quite a catalog and chapter after chapter explaining all these. Can you walk us through some of those factors and how they fit together?

Yeah. So the bulk of my book is just an historical cultural, ⁓ sociology of what happened, ⁓ in the late 20th century and then turn of the century, trying to explain the various forces and developments that led to what I say is absolute obsolescence. ⁓ and the main story is it's complex. It's not simple. It's multi multifactorial. It's combinational.

that the obsolescence was unplanned. We know that manufacturers can produce planned obsolescence because they want to sell more stuff in a shorter time. Almost all the factors that had to do with traditional religions obsolescence, nobody was intending for it to have that consequence. So it focuses on unintended consequences and to some degree ironies. So here, we go back to get into a few specifics. I can't cover them all, but...

We go back to there's a long-term weakening within the religious sphere itself, mainline Protestant decline, which is a very old story, transformations in American Catholicism. The rise of evangelicalism is sort of the main, ironically, the mainstream religion, but whole series of factors, one of which, just for example, is long-term transformations in the demographics of marriage and family. ⁓

This is what sociologists call the ⁓ deinstitutionalization of the family. So we're talking about long-term changes in delay of first marriage, a delay of childbirth, voluntary childlessness, divorce, rise of cohabitation, ⁓ rise of people, especially young people living in households that are not related by marriage or blood as roommates.

American religion is very closely tied to the traditional nuclear family, to heterosexual parents with children and maybe grandparents hanging around. ⁓ As that changes, as there are fewer and fewer Americans living in that way of life, just that factor alone, we would expect to have huge consequences for ⁓ if congregations in their cultures don't somehow adjust to different family forms.

We should expect that to have huge negative consequences for religion's sort of relevance or feel of appeal. And again, that has nothing to do with doctrine. It has nothing to do with ideology. It's just, if you're divorced, if you're cohabiting, you walk in theory, you walk into a church, it's just not gonna vibe with you the same way it would vibe with, you know, two parents with toddlers. So that's just one factor. Women entering the workforce in the seventies, especially,

Um, the decline in participation in face-to-face memberships. It's not just religion. Americans have been less and less for a very long, many decades, less likely to get involved in any face-to-face membership organization. COVID only accelerated that. So you've carried all these things through the rise of emerging adulthood, which I've written about in other books. That is instead of just going from, you know, high school, a sweetheart, getting a job and settling down and then getting involved in a local church.

That's when the number of Americans who said they're non-religious started to increase. That's when the end of the Cold War, which was another one of these big unintended factors. So yeah, again, that's just a little bit of the sort of my historical story of what brought obsolescence about.

Let's just maybe go into a bit more of those factors. I think it might be helpful for our listeners and viewers, again, to see some of them. Because one of the things I was curious about reading your book was the deep sense of individualization in the culture, which also then connects with an anti-traditional stance or anti-tradition stance and a kind of criticism of institutions and disengagement from institutions. All those factors seem to have some

kind of shared set of relationships, but then they also, of course, play out with religious organizations in some dramatic ways.

Yeah, so running in the background or sort of hidden threads tying a lot of this together is what you just said, is a sort of growing individualism. Of course, individualism is as American as apple pie and it's been around a long time, but an intensification, like a real intensification of it, partly combined with a growing distrust of all institutions. again, this is very post-boomer, but institutions are associated with money and power and money and power is considered corrupting and bad. So...

any institution and during this era, there's always been corruption, but during this era, there were lots and lots of scandals and Bill Clinton and Enron and just countless that really knocked sort of trust in institutions and leaders out of people. So you put together a strong individualism, strong anti-institutionalism or suspicion of institutions. You throw in sort of the...

don't let people get, make moves to try to control you. This is what students walk away with the popular versions of this. ⁓ if you, if you end up thinking, well, smart people at universities are telling me. Tradition is bunk Institute, you know, all knowledge at any claim to knowledge is trying to is really just a masked power move. Yeah, that's it. Doesn't fit very well.

traditional religion of any sort, Abrahamic at least. ⁓ yeah, all of this comes together with, again, the image of ⁓ perfect storms sort of all hitting together at the same time. All this stuff hits together within a couple decades and young people just like, yeah, that doesn't vibe. Either I don't need that, it doesn't serve a function for me, or it's just something off about it, so I don't think I'm gonna do it.

So I want to jump in on two parts here. think one is for congregational leaders, all of this big stuff that you've been talking about often is just invisible. They're just doing their job, right? And so getting on the balcony, if you will, or getting a meta view of what's going on is really helpful. And I think one of the parts of that is it also helps people take a deep breath and go, this isn't all about you, right?

So we have to listen to it, but it helps explain. What do you want to say about that? And then I have a follow-up.

That's a really important point. So we all live our lives in our immediate worlds. And that's what we focus on. That's what we deal with. ⁓ And we also can attend to what causal influence do we have in our lives. So for clergy people say, they live in their congregations. They live in their cities. They do their best in their worlds. What this book is trying to do is to say, wait a minute, step back out to the macro level. Look at the big picture. And it's not just you.

Or it's not hardly you. ⁓ Maybe you've made mistakes, maybe you do great things, but that's not primarily what's going on in the world. There are plate tectonic, titanic forces at work, ⁓ technologically, in geopolitics, in economics, that are driving this stuff. people on the ground in congregation, religious workers,

are trying to make sense of it. But as you say, oftentimes it's invisible. requires sort of a whole going to a whole nother elevation of perspective to see it. And so I'm my own view as a sociologist is that's my contribution to the world is helping people see contexts, bigger pictures that are normally if you don't spend years trying to figure it out are normally very hard to see. yeah, I mean, early on I gave a I gave a like a

proto version of this, of my thinking and at Emory Candler School of Theology and a couple of just retired pastors came and they came up to me afterwards and said, thank you. Thank you so much. Like I always did nothing. I just blamed myself. I thought, what was I doing? How was I failing? I said, on the one hand, you know, you should be relieved. It's not all your fault. It's hardly your fault. Maybe zero your fault. On the other hand, it's a little disconcerting that

We have, as individuals, have such little influence over the macro forces of the world. But I really think at the very least, it's important for people to grasp them. Even if we can't change the internet and the war on terror or whatever, to understand how our lives are embedded in contexts that shape us so powerfully and to figure out what can we be responsible for, should we, and what is just well beyond our capacities.

Yeah, I found I did a lot of work with congregations when the National Study of Youth and Religion came out. And there was a similar sense in those working in faith formations with young people and families of this get into the bigger view of what's going on. But then comes the second question, which is where the second part for me is, ⁓ and so now what? Because there is a sense it's not your fault, but.

I would like you to talk how have religious organizations often contributed to this, right? You've said a little bit about the way we're wired, our DNA, so they don't align. But say more about the congregational practices or religious organizations that we need to be aware of in our own DNA or in our own practices.

Yeah. So that's a huge question with a lot of dimensions of the answers. And I hope that this book sort of stimulates tons of conversation and reflection around this, which this is just a piece, but a few thoughts. mean, ⁓

Well, first of all, there is whole chapter that's talking about how religion contributed to its own self-destruction. A lot of that I pin on American evangelicalism, although not all of it. But yeah, mean, there were tons of scandals, the Catholic Church. Pretty much every tradition had its own versions of scandals. And it seemed like every time you opened the news, there was another religious scandal. That really, really damaged things. So yeah.

Point number one, stop having scandals. But again, to return to the earlier point, I don't think it's that scandalous behavior has dramatically increased. The internet has made it so that reporting on it anonymously and virally spreading it within a day or a week, again, it's the context, the environment of technology that's changed the effect of scandals. All right, so to turn to your question.

I also, one of the threats of the argument in my book is that ⁓ traditional religion is kind of stuck with or refuses to let go or doesn't know it needs to figure out. It's kind of stuck with cultural forms that may be totally legitimate and in an era they were fabulous, right? But in the, in the new zeitgeist, they just don't fit. There's a mismatch. This is one of the concepts I use in this book is that

The world has changed. And so there's a mismatch between what traditional religion has to offer in many ways, but let's just say cultural forms and what the world is doing. So it's not that there's something wrong with the cultural form. It's just mismatched. so that actually comes from a sociology of education. When you get first generation college students, they go to college where there's elites and people that who... ⁓

They're good, they're smart, they can do the work, but there's a cultural mismatch. takes a lot of effort to sort of get into the world of university. And I think that there's a cultural mismatch now between much of traditional religion and the zeitgeist. So I don't think the answer is like, let's go imitate the world. Like, let's get even better at advertising and high tech than the world. That's dead. That's never going to happen and never going to work.

I don't think it's a matter of like, let's just jump on the bandwagon. But I do think that there needs to be some reflection about who really are we? This is what I get to at the end of the book. And I don't have answers and solutions. I'm not a church consultant. But I do think all this situation requires some really deep collective reflection about who are we? What is essential to our tradition? And what really could we let go of? Where do we need to?

I don't even like the word innovate. sounds so, you know, Silicon Valley or whatever, how, how do we deal with this new environment in a way that sustains what we believe is a faithful and essential and shed some stuff that's just hurting us that's unnecessary.

I'd

love to follow up on that a little bit more on a couple levels. One is, you know, I was struck reading the first part of your book when you talked about how people understood the basic shared understanding of what religion is good for in America. I'd love to have you just share a bit about that because already, I think, that already sort of is so shaped by cultural developments that are so detached from what historical

Christianity or other religions actually believe. So yeah, so say more about that.

Yeah, so there's actually a functionalist argument here, which is the majority of Americans have these background assumptions about why religion would be good, what it's good for. Or religion is good when it does these things. And they're very functionalist. They're very sort of imminent this worldly. Religion is good if and when it helps people be moral. It helps people make good choices. That's why raising children in the church is good, even if the parents aren't sure about the whole package.

It's good for national solidarity if it holds us together as a people. It's good when religious leaders are sort of moral public exemplars to society. Even if I don't believe what they do, like it's good for us to have them out there sort of doing their good clergy thing. It's good for providing people community. Community is another huge thing. ⁓ So ⁓ there's nothing wrong with any of these, of course, but... ⁓

What happened is, in my argument, what happened is the world changed in a lot of ways that either absented those goods or in people's minds violated those goods. If clergy are not being good, another movement in all this was ⁓ against the idea that religion makes people extra moral. Like you can be good without God. ⁓ The new atheists fed into this. so what America, what broadly Americans expect religion is good for,

it's in their minds, it stopped doing and even it violated what they thought it was good for. And so it's essentially disqualified itself as having legitimacy and anything to offer. Now, what's interesting is if you take that chapter and step back and say, why do Americans think that religion is essentially about, you know, helping people make good choices? I mean, this goes back to the teenage stuff I did on moralistic, therapeutic deism and others like,

How did they get to think that? It's not just like a general Americanism. These are peoples in pews. So it raises the question, how is it that whatever gets taught and preached, by the time it gets in people's brains and in their spirits, they end up thinking that's what religion is good for. And if it doesn't do that, we don't have any need for it. I think that raises a lot of questions about religious education, faith formation, catechesis, whatever.

and I'm not pointing any fingers at anything other than it's not the case that ⁓ most Americans have real clear ideas of what their traditions in an orthodox, faithful, historical sense would want them to believe in value. There's a big gap. Or another way to put that is, most Americans are coming to churches

I think there's a big mismatch with why most denominations and leaders and clergy, what they think they're doing.

Yeah, well, so I found that so interesting. And I think two sides, one is the sort of mainline liberal Protestant side, which really did the theological work going back, you know, generations and centuries to set up this kind of highly moralistic, ⁓ imminent understanding of faith. You know, what Nancy Ammerman talks about as sort of ethical spirituality or golden rule Christianity.

And so that certainly, so the mainland kind of played into this in the broader culture. But then the other side to that is evangelical stress on a personal relationship with God, which very much plays into individualism. And I'm going to kind of, I'm the only source of authority. I'm going to make it up myself as I go, those kinds of things.

Yeah, one of the ironies in this book that I'm not sure really evangelicals are going to get it, but evangelicals love to think of themselves as the embattled outsiders. When in fact, I think at a certain point they became, maybe the eighties became functionally, essentially mainstream American religion, like the representative of. So if you're a more nuanced mainline Protestant, it's too bad. the evangelicals are defining the agenda. So.

Yeah, so the very specific thing you refer to, evangelicals have this language of, you need to have a personal relationship with God. It's not just enough to go to church, it's not just enough to believe in God. You need to have a vibrant personal relationship. Okay, and that was a way to try to evangelize people, to try to encourage a deeper discipleship, et cetera. Well, what's happened totally unintentionally is that that discourse succeeded so well that it's very common in the culture

except people remove it from the way it's embedded in evangelical thought and deploy it to justify, well, I don't have to go to church. I don't have to be a member of any church. I can do this on my own. I have a personal relationship with God. Why do I need to be part of a congregation where I got to dress up and go somewhere? So, ⁓ yeah, it's an example of how religious sort of frameworks can be, ⁓ re or transposed, or you might even say hijacked for purposes that are

the opposite of what they were intended to do and then they get out of your control. can't and then it's very hard to tell people. You have a personal relationship with God, but you still need to believe in the God of the Bible and not ever whatever you make up and you need to be part of a congregation. That's hard to once the cat's out of the bag, it's hard to get it back in so to speak. Yeah.

Well, on the mainline side of that, you've talked about Jay Demeres' cultural victory and organizational defeat, which is sort of if the values that mainline and liberal churches have promoted for so long around pluralism and relativism and all of that, if they prevail in the broader culture, why do you need a congregation?

Yeah, yeah, this is an argument I pick up from a sociologist from the University of Massachusetts, Jay Demerath. ⁓ he basically argued that ⁓ mainline Protestantism lost at the organizational level because it won at the cultural level. its emphasis on openness and inclusivity and reason and humanism and

Like that one, like everybody's a mainline Protestant in some way. And so if everyone becomes a mainline Protestant, why do we need the PC USA? know, why do we need these denominations singing hymns from the 19th and 18th century? It's just, it makes itself obsolete by winning. There's no more, at least from many Americans point of view, like what is the value added of...

I give grandma wants to go there, fine. if the people are good, if it helps the community, again, back to the functionalist argument, if the clergy are good people, fine, I'm not gonna knock it, but it's not essential. and the moral, I mean, again, this moralizing of religion, which I've written about elsewhere and it comes up against here, religion is essentially making people good and nice, not ultimate truth.

What is any metaphysical claims, eternal destiny, anything like that. It's to be a nice person. If that's what it gets boiled down to in the book I argued, you know, that has some of its lineage in a certain version of liberal ⁓ European, originally Protestantism, German Protestantism that just says,

So there are some indicators of a resurgent of engagement with traditional ⁓ faith among Gen Z, as well as some flattening out of the decline in some of the latest Pew surveys around ⁓ religious affiliation. How would you respond to someone that says, you know, you've pronounced this demise of religion in America prematurely.

Yeah, so on the one hand, so there's an on the one hand and on the other. On the one hand, I'm talking about history. I'm talking about an era. I'm talking about a zeitgeist. And as we know, every zeitgeist passes into something else. So I don't know what's going to happen in the future. I don't know. Okay. So that's on the one hand. On the other hand, I think that some of what you cite is a little premature to be.

I'm enthusiastic about the

As follows, the Pew study is interesting. I Pew data are great. I rely on them. I know people there. I trust what they find. ⁓ first, this idea of flattening that maybe the rise of not religious is ⁓ evening off. First, ⁓ we need more data. We just need more time to see if that's really true or if that's just a blip on the curve. Secondly, at some point it has to flatten. I mean, you can't have a

You can't have a curve go forever, it goes off the chart. Sometime we'll run out of people who will become, who are, to become not religious. yeah, it's not surprising. It's just a matter of when and who and how, the details of that. So maybe that's happening now. I would point back to however, what really matters in that big picture story, again, I'm always going back to the big picture is not maybe there's a recent flattening, but look at the curve, even if we're flattening now, look at,

And so I ⁓ think as far as Gen Zers, yeah, I mean, I've seen stories here and there about, Gen Z men maybe being more interested in religion than women and so on. I don't want to be a total cynic, but again, my general attitude is give it some time see how it plays out. I generally am skeptical, to be honest. And I think part of that kind of focus is driven by a...

It's driven by journalists and religious people both needing something. Journalists need something new to say. You can't report the same headline for so many decades and have anyone be interested. If there's the slightest bit of evidence that may be something interesting like men over women among Gen Z are religious, your journalists will just eat that up.

As far as religious leaders, think there's such a desperation for any good news. Like, is there any good news that if something comes out, however, minuscule that might be positive, it gets jumped on. And I'm not criticizing, I totally understand it. But what's needed is to maintain sort of a level headed wait and see is how big is this? Again, journalists will report, you know, I found a church where there's enthusiastic young men worshiping.

Okay, well, there are thousands of churches and there are millions of young men. Like it has to be put in context to see how significant it is. Anecdotes are not evidence. So that's my general response. If it turns out there's some big change underway, then my book will have documented an error, which I think is important. I'm skeptical that there will be some big turnaround. mean, history happens.

in ways you never know what's around the corner. I mean, that's clearly true. That's why I don't like to predict things. But all else being equal, the biggest influence on young people's religious identity and commitment is their parents. With every new generation, there are fewer and fewer parents, period. And there are fewer and fewer parents raising their kids religious because the parents are less religious. And so unless there's some new trend or event that drives something very different,

We should expect all this to concatenate into a general decline in obsolescence in traditional religion to a point of steady state minority status of the hardcore leaner and meaner, so to speak.

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 and 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.

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.

Pivot Podcast is a production of Luther Seminary.