An Alternative Narrative?

 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”—and yet, a believer himself, he has never hesitated to deliver the bad news about religion’s plight in the United States. 

Perhaps it is Smith’s bad luck to publish a book claiming that traditional religion, at least in the United States, has gone “obsolete” at a moment when millions of people were zealously following the last rites for a beloved pope and the very traditional procedures that, against all assumptions, chose an American successor—and when the Pew Religious Landscape Study has found that 83 percent of Americans believe in God or a universal spirit, 70 percent in an afterlife, and even higher numbers in a soul and in spiritual reality. In sum, it concludes that the decline of Christianity in America has leveled off, that non-Christian faiths are growing, and the percentages of Americans praying daily and attending religious services at least monthly are holding steady. 

It would be a serious error to dismiss Smith’s argument on those grounds. Note what the Pew survey itself documents: “Despite these signs of recent stabilization and abiding spirituality,” each generation has shown itself far less religious than the previous one. It is precisely this story of generational change that is central to Smith’s argument: “For the majority of Millennials”—Americans born between 1981 and 1996, now aged twenty-nine to forty-four—“religion has simply become obsolete.” Smith is ready even to date the transition precisely: “By the start of the 1990s, American traditional religion was sociologically vulnerable. Over the next fifteen years, it would be battered into defeat.” Obsolescence didn’t mean extinction, of course; it did mean growing indifference, irrelevance, rejection, and marginalization. 

As someone trained as a historian in the heyday of the longue durée, I find such dating of a monumental change within two recent decades rather jarring. Smith even directs me to Nirvana’s 1991 grunge hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as the “pivotal song” that launched the Millennial zeitgeist that in turn rendered religion obsolete! (No doubt the sociologist Smith might find a historian’s tracing of religion’s downfall to fourteenth-century treatises by William of Ockham similarly fanciful.) In fact, Smith’s focus on Millennials is not surprising. Soul Searching studied, in exquisite detail, a swath of Millennials in their midteens; Souls in Transition studied the same age group as eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old “emerging adults.” 

Where those earlier studies focused on the religious backgrounds, beliefs, and experiences of Smith’s adolescent and young-adult subjects, Why Religion Went Obsolete gives much more attention to surrounding nonreligious factors: the end of the Cold War against atheistic communism; the economic pressures and anxieties of neoliberal capitalism; changing patterns of marriage, gender, parenting, and sexual mores; multiculturalism; “pop postmodernism”; the climate crisis; religious violence and terrorism; political polarization; and, especially, the digital revolution. Smith does devote a painful chapter to religion’s own exercises in self-destruction, from sex-abuse scandals to culture-war partisanship and unsustainable fundamentalist epistemology. Nonetheless, he writes, “most of the social forces that rendered traditional religion obsolete arose outside of and appeared to have nothing to do with religion.” This conclusion distinguishes Smith’s book from the internal focus of many others about religion. Religious leaders can take it with a sigh of relief—it’s not our fault—or a groan of despair—there’s little we can do about it. 

True, some nonreligious factors and much else in Smith’s earlier studies foreshadowed the dire conclusions of Why Religion Went Obsolete. Still, the earlier books have a much more hopeful tone about religion’s prospects, and nothing in them really signals, while plenty contradicts, the idea that, in the very decades and among the very generation under examination, religion was going obsolete. How did Smith and his coauthors miss it?

There may be good answers to that question, and probably to many more that this provocative book brings to mind. What about international comparisons to secularized Europe or religious hotspots in Africa and Asia? What weights should be given to the various nonreligious factors Smith indicts as contributors to religion’s obsolescence? Does neoliberal capitalism or “pop postmodernism” weigh more or less than the digital revolution or the latest frontiers in acceptable sexual expression? 

Among these questions, two loom large—and are related. The first: What exactly does it mean to say that traditional religion has gone “obsolete”? Obviously, it is the word “obsolete” that gives Smith’s book its firepower. He is not just signaling ongoing or possibly cyclical decline. He is announcing a qualitative, not quantitative, change, and probably an irreversible one. He unfurls all the familiar phrases: a tipping point, a perfect storm, a tide that has turned. Overstated? Alarmist? As someone who, a quarter-century ago, opened A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America with the warning that American Catholicism faced “irreversible decline,” who am I to complain? 

Smith’s explanation of “obsolescence” relies heavily on technological examples like the horse and buggy, electric typewriter, or cassette tape. These did not cease to function; they were simply superseded by something that accomplished the same task better. Which raises the question: What tasks do Americans want religion to accomplish, and what might accomplish them better?

Smith’s research has convinced him that for Americans, the goals of religion are essentially instrumental and self-regarding. Religion should inculcate basic morality, foster social harmony and moderation, provide psychological comfort, produce inspiring role models, and strengthen national solidarity. There is no disguising Smith’s conviction that this view falls far short of what ancient faiths have proclaimed. In Soul Searching, he suggested that the real religion of American youth was “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,” belief in a creator God who wants everyone to be “nice” and “get along” and “feel good about themselves” but is undemanding and personally involved only when needed—“something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist.” Similarly, Souls in Transition reported many young adults comfortably affirming religious beliefs “that appeared to have no connection whatsoever to the living of their lives.”

But religion’s obsolescence is only partially explained by post-Boomers’ discovery that they can achieve the same ends by other more efficient (or at least less burdensome) means. Smith found that a majority of Millennials, preceded by a Gen X avant-garde and confirmed by Gen Z followers, considered religion not merely superseded—to allay anxiety, for example, less prayer and more Prozac—but positively discredited or even repugnant. The “Millennial zeitgeist,” it seems, prescribed a new set of ends, above all the personal pursuit of a subjectively fulfilling authentic selfhood, free from the constraints of institutional authorities. It was no longer a question of finding better means to reach the old religious goalposts. Now the goalposts themselves had been moved, and in a nonreligious direction. The historian in me says this change was in the works for a much longer time span than Smith’s two decades. 

When it comes to large-scale, historically and institutionally entrenched systems of belief and practice, obsolescence is a complicated matter. The list of things that I recall being declared obsolete in my lifetime is long: capitalism (also socialism and communism), marriage, war, the nation-state, and liberal democracy, to name just a few. A plausible case could be made for some of them. What is the meaning (or sometimes the rhetorical use) of “obsolete” in regard to such complex social realities? It surely goes well beyond the progressive waves of technological devices. Smith’s one example, the decline in popularity of the Western as a cinematic genre compared to action, thriller, or sci-fi films, is hardly sufficient. 

More reflection on that question might also respond to the second one. If the book says a great deal about why religion went obsolete, it says very little about the consequences. As one midtwenties “emerging adult” with a checkered relationship to traditional religion said when confronted with Smith’s argument: “So what?” 

Smith does not, after all, dismiss religion’s truth claims nor, unlike Enlightenment enthusiasts for secularization, anticipate a brighter world once religion has been debunked or privatized. To the contrary, he foresees greater social isolation and loneliness, a decline in human capital and trust, the loss of resources for emotional coping and purposeful living, and more mental-health problems and destructive behavior among the young. 

Isn’t this merely a grimmer version of secularization theory, not the “alternative narrative” to it Smith promises in his introduction? No, he insists. The obsolescence of traditional religion does not mean “the disappearance of the sacred, spiritual, magical, enchanted, supernatural, occult, ecstatic, or divine. They remain alive and well.” They have “migrated to new locations” and reconstituted themselves in “new forms.” Perhaps. I look forward to another empirical study by Smith to tell us if that’s really so, and what it means. 

After acknowledging that his book’s story “is a dismal one for traditional religion,” Smith cannot quite let its adherents (like me) go. His only suggestion is that they undertake a “self-critical soul searching” about “their traditions’ core identities and missions.” My guess is that he is thinking of religion’s failure to challenge Americans’ complacent view of what their faith is about and to respond to many of the nonreligious factors creating the Millennial zeitgeist. 

Such a “deep soul-searching” would have to be “brutally honest,” he says, and any consequent transformation would be risky, especially in the short run. He closes on a phrase from James Baldwin—“nothing can be changed until it is faced”—and an image from Scripture: the grain that must fall to the ground and die before it can be reborn and produce abundant fruit. 

Smells like traditional Spirit to me, but I couldn’t agree more. 

This article was published as part of a symposium titled “The Future of American Religion.” The other contributions can be found here:

Gerardo Martí, “Retreat & Resurgence”

Susan Bigelow Reynolds, “Overlooked Treasure”

Kaya Oakes, “Ask Better Questions”

This symposium was made possible with the support of the Lilly Endowment.

Peter Steinfels, a former editor of Commonweal and religion writer for the New York Times, is a University Professor Emeritus at Fordham University and author of A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America.

Also by this author