Lake County Ohio Weal

Decline of Christianity in the US has slowed, may have leveled off.   The June Commonweal Magazine issue contains a symposium centered around Christian Smith's recent book, specifically the question of whether or not Christianity has become "obsolete" in the small fashion that technology becomes obsolete.  This review addresses the issue of whether the decline of Christianity in the US might be evidence of obsolescence.   Executive Summary At present: 62% of U.S. adults describe themselves as Christians: 40% are Protestant, 19% are Catholic, and 3% are other Christians. 29% are religiously unaffiliated: 5% are atheist, 6% are agnostic, and 19% identify religiously as “nothing in particular.” 7% belong to religions other than Christianity: 2% are Jewish, and 1% each are Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu (all figures are rounded) The 2023-24 RLS finds that: 44% of U.S. adults say they pray at least once a day. Though down significantly since 2007, this measure has held between...

  On the Persistence of Faith Amid Religious Decline Susan Bigelow Reynolds May 27, 2025 A sign at the counter of a vintage shop that I frequent reads: My grandmother owned it, my mother sold it, I just bought it back! Traditional religious faith, argues Christian Smith, has gone the way of something your grandparents owned, like, for example, a record player: a nostalgic artifact well-suited to the needs of another age but obsolete in our own. “When people can ask Alexa to play any song,” he explains by way of analogy, “they rarely think about vinyl records. And so obsolete items become decreasingly familiar to most people and, in time, associated with bygone eras.” Twenty years ago, Smith was right, at least about record players. I didn’t know anyone who still used one. My Millennial friends and I were content to download Death Cab for Cutie’s latest releases off iTunes for ninety-nine cents apiece and listen to them on our iPods. Today, however, a record player sits next to the ...

  Retreat & Resurgence Gerardo Martí May 27, 2025 There was a time when holding a BlackBerry felt like holding the future. Surgically precise thumb-typing, emails firing off at the speed of thought, the blinking red light—a heartbeat of connectivity—appealed to eager adopters of cutting-edge technology. Its reach exceeded 20 million users by around 2010. And then it was gone. The BlackBerry didn’t disappear because it was inferior. It disappeared because what we wanted from technology changed. As societal structures evolve, so do our tools, reflecting new desires and demands. German sociologist Hartmut Rosa describes obsolescence as a byproduct of social acceleration. I n a world ruled by speed, novelty, and optimization, institutions—even worldviews—lose their resonance not because they stop working, but because they no longer compete. What becomes obsolete is not what is old, but what no longer speaks to present experience. The importance of relevance was strikingly evident i...

  Christian Smith Suggests the American Religious Decline May be Irreversible Peter Steinfels May 27, 2025 Any all-star team of scholars of American religion would have to include Christian Smith. Smith’s extensive use of surveys and interviews in two books on young Americans and religion, Soul Searching (2005), with Melinda Lundquist Denton, and Souls in Transition (2009), with Patricia Snell, showed him a master of empirical research. At the same time, What Is a Person? (2010) placed him among the few sociologists ready and able to explore the philosophical underpinnings and ethical implications of their social-science methods. His twenty books over thirty-five years also tangle with topics like evangelical Biblicism, religious parenting, Church disaffiliation by young Catholics, and the New Atheism. He is a stalwart though subtle critic of “secularization theory”—that religious faith is inevitably destined to be dissolved, in Walter Lippmann’s phrase, by the “acids of modernity...

  Ask Better Questions Kaya Oakes June 2, 2025 My 2015 book The Nones Are Alright explored Americans’ shift away from organized religion. For a few years I did the circuit of conferences and church talks where people kept asking the same question: What can we do to bring people back? I never had an answer that made anyone happy, because I had no idea how to bring people back . The ship had already sailed, but people were still standing on the shoreline waiting for it to turn around.  A decade later, there have been more than a few books written on the same topic, from Tara Isabella Burton’s pop-culture history Strange Rites: New Religion for a Godless World to sociologist Ryan P. Burge’s charts-and-graphs-crammed The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going. They ask similar questions about the future of religious affiliation, and they come to similar conclusions. Religion is fading away, but faith and belief, somehow, are not. The problem is that ho...

Why We Need Graveyards  I have always enjoyed walking in cemeteries. They can be places of serenity where it is possible to escape the noise of everyday life. But when I strolled through Montparnasse Cemetery in 2019, it was not as refuge from the hectic pace of a trip to Paris. My visit was, instead, a kind of pilgrimage to the final resting place of many important writers, including Samuel Beckett, Charles Baudelaire, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre. In the year since my wife died, I had not written a word and was hoping that being in the “presence” of such important literary figures might inspire me to sit down at my desk again. Walking down the narrow lanes of the cemetery, I stumbled upon the grave of Susan Sontag. Had I realized that Sontag was buried there, I certainly would have been looking for her grave, because I knew her work well. I had taught Illness as Metaphor and Regarding the Pain of Others, and had re-read her critique of conceptualizing cancer metaphori...

  Pope Leo, OSA Terence Sweeney is an assistant teaching professor in the honors program and the humanities department at Villanova University Move aside Gregor Mendel and Martin Luther—there’s a new Augustinian on the world stage, Pope Leo XIV. As we all reach for different insights into this new pope, we would do well to consider the religious order he has belonged to since he was undergraduate at Villanova. The Order of St. Augustine does not have a standard founding, or a single founder like St. Dominic or St. Ignatius. Instead, several hermits living in Tuscany were instructed to form a single community by Pope Innocent IV in 1244. This was called the Little Union and was followed by yet another papal call to unity in the Grand Union of 1256. Having two foundings, both featuring a bunch of hermits told to live in community by two different popes, does not make for a tidy narrative. This might be why the Augustinians have long been overshadowed by orders with more famous founde...

  Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice Foundation   Dear brothers and sisters, welcome! I thank the President and members of the Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice Foundation, and I greet all of you who are taking part in this annual International Conference and General Assembly. The theme of this year’s Conference – “Overcoming Polarizations and Rebuilding Global Governance: The Ethical Foundations” – speaks to us of the deepest purpose of the Church’s social doctrine as a contribution to peace and dialogue in the service of building bridges of universal fraternity. Especially in this Easter season, we realize that the Risen Lord always goes before us, even at times when injustice and death seem to prevail. Let us help one another, as I said on the evening of my election, “to build bridges through dialogue and encounter, joining together as one people, always at peace.” This is not something that happens by chance but is rather an active and continuous interplay of grace and freedom, o...