Overlooked Treasure

 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 television in my living room, and nearly all my friends own one, too. This past Christmas, Santa Claus—the foremost authority on the material desires of the planet’s young people—brought my ten-year-old daughter a Taylor Swift album on vinyl.

As every good vintage connoisseur knows, “obsolescence” is not “demise.” The obsolete thing merely recedes and, in receding, becomes retrievable. There is a difference between putting something in a museum and putting it in the basement. The museum freezes the object in time: it is finished. We can visit it but never use it. Embalmed and set behind glass, like the incorruptible face of a saint, it has truly died. But the obsolete thing—the record player, say—merely gets put away. It waits, dormant but not dead, for the day the twenty-something grandson comes across it while searching for something else and finds himself strangely enchanted. It’s hard to say why it captures his imagination: perhaps it’s the object’s materiality in a digital world, or its mechanical complexity and elegance of form, or the sense of rootedness and connection conjured up by using something that someone he loved once used. So he dusts it off and takes it home and six months later, vinyl culture has become his entire personality. When he spies you listening to Spotify, he will remind you (again) that listening to music on vinyl is an entirely different experience from listening to an MP3—richer, truer, multidimensional. He is a convert. And the record player is back, only different from before. 

Why Religion Went Obsolete is a book about decline. Researchers have offered no shortage of explanations for Americans’ steady abandonment of religious institutions and practices. Smith uses survey and interview data to illuminate the contours of the downward slope. He offers us a portrait of the “Millennial zeitgeist,” a convenient if not inaccurate descriptor for the amalgam of historical events, political conditions, cultural movements, and vibes that have conspired to produce an age in which Americans of every generation find themselves increasingly indifferent—and sometimes hostile—toward traditional religion. So stark is the picture that, by the book’s midpoint, its conclusions already feel inevitable, and it’s the inverse question that begins to nag at the reader’s mind: Why does anyone still practice their faith? Who’s still doing this?

I can confirm that we’re out there. I was born and baptized Roman Catholic in 1987. Despite having fed from the same banquet of post-9/11 political cynicism, clergy sex-abuse scandals, purity-culture backlash, institutional disillusionment, internet-fueled attention deficits, and Green Day lyrics as my generational peers, I managed to keep the faith and grew up, somehow, to become a Catholic theologian with three baptized kids. My admittedly anomalous social and professional worlds are similarly populated with what I now suspect, statistically, is every single practicing Gen X and Millennial Catholic left in America.

Any satisfying explanation about religious decline should also be able to tell us something about its inverse—that is, about religion’s persistence. Why do some people—especially people in the generations ostensibly responsible for religion’s demise—still practice their faith? Why Religion Went Obsolete offers few clues into this other, frankly more puzzling question. It isn’t the question the book sets out to answer, of course. But it’s one that, I suspect, holds some untapped explanatory keys to the whole picture. Smith acknowledges that there are hangers-on, but gives us little sense as to why he thinks that might be: “At this very moment, some people are no doubt happily listening to music on cassette tapes or watching DVDs, just as many Americans are still practicing traditional religion.”

If someone were to ask me why I’m still Catholic (and they do, all the time, on airplanes and at doctor’s appointments and on the sidelines of my daughter’s soccer game), my response would not give them the impression that things have just been humming nicely along all these years. Nor would I describe my relationship with reality as insulated from, or unaffected by, the generational zeitgeist in which I came of age. There is something more complicated happening on the other side of religious decline than blithe acceptance of the status quo.

For what it’s worth, I’m not sure that there are people “still” listening to music on cassette tapes. The only people I know who are listening to cassettes are my friends’ teenagers, who never knew a world where their only access to recorded music was through a capricious, four-inch cartridge of plastic that threatened to melt in the car or vomit up magnetic tape at the slightest provocation. It’s the sixteen-year-olds who are suddenly buying back all the Peter Gabriel tapes their parents long ago donated to Goodwill and scrambling around in the attic for something to play them on.

 

If I seem overly fixated on generational music-consumption habits, it’s because the metaphor Smith offers us is actually far more interesting than he gives it credit for. Obsolescence may be the source of Millennial religious rejection, as he argues. But, I contend, it is also the key to understanding Millennial religious embrace. For us, religion has always been countercultural. One of the major legacies of Pope John Paul II was the creation and mobilization of Catholic youth culture on an unprecedented global scale. John Paul II saw that, in the postconciliar, pluralistic, secularizing West, the ambient religiosity that formed generations past was gone. Catholicism needed to become an identity with enough countercultural cachet to make young people desire it. The iconic refrain of his papacy, “Be not afraid!,” took on a particular urgency when directed toward youth, whom he urged to embrace lives of bold faith. “Do not be satisfied with mediocrity,” he entreated European young people in an address on the eve of the new millennium. “Do not be afraid to be holy!” His “Theology of the Body” offered a credible apologia for the dream of traditional family life and gender relations. For young women, it provided a complementarian grammar of dissent against mainstream feminism; for young men, a self-referentially Catholic model of heroic masculinity; for both, a theologically tinged fantasy of holy sex.

Meanwhile, in the United States, decades of moral panics—and, after 1999, the myth that the Columbine High School shooters had targeted Christian classmates—gave rise to an Evangelical cultural machine that encouraged Christian teens to view themselves as persecuted defenders of their faith. High-schoolers hosted early-morning “Meet Me at the Pole” prayer gatherings around their public-school flagpoles and wore T-shirts proclaiming Jesus Christ “the real thing” in mock Coca-Cola typeface. Catholic youth-ministry organizations like Life Teen took cues from Evangelicalism, marrying pop-counterculturalism with a focus on liturgical worship and Eucharistic adoration. A zealously Catholic youth-group kid myself, I daydreamed of the moment that a classmate (or, even better, a teacher) would insult the faith and I would arise and become the Joan of Arc of Arapahoe High School. The opportunity never came. It turns out that when you go to school with a bunch of Protestants and Latter-day Saints, everyone is actually quite on board with God.

It is not difficult to see how tradition-as-identity-marker became easily taken up and transformed by some into an embrace of traditionalism, an aesthetic insistence on Catholicism in its most recognizable, most Western, most stereotypical forms. The more esoteric, the better. So-called trad Catholicism is the vintage record player brought up from the basement, the used cassette tape purchased from the back wall of the record store: a thing defined not primarily by its objective form and function but by the fact of its retrieval, measured against a culture that ostensibly has no use for it. The greater the distance, the greater the value. This is not to denigrate it, but, staying with Smith’s category of religious obsolescence, to acknowledge it as an act of cultural resistance. The Catholics most incensed by Pope Francis’s 2021 restrictions on the use of the Traditional Latin Mass were not seventy-five-year-olds “still” attending Mass in Latin all these many years after Vatican II. No one who grew up going to Mass in Latin in 1950 is still going to Mass in Latin. Francis’s detractors grew up in the burbs singing “City of God” with their Boomer parents, whose own fading memories of preconciliar liturgy consisted primarily of not being able to understand a thing. On social media, where resistance is already the dominant mode of communication, traditionalists were able to stake their claims to the Church in a darker, more aggressive key. Many of Catholicism’s most online far-right celebrity converts—J. D. Vance, Candace Owens, Rod Dreher (who has since left for Orthodoxy)—no doubt encountered in Catholic Twitter a particularly satisfying height from which to own the libs.

The Church in which Millennial Catholics came of age was a Church that saw itself locked in a heroic battle against a host of worldly powers and principalities. The last gasps of Soviet Communism. Secular humanism. The “culture of death.” Ironically, the crises that actually precipitated the Church’s steady undoing in the eyes of its faithful were much more concrete, closer to home, and largely of its own making. These were the crises Church leaders refused to face, because they would have to face them not as heroes, but as penitents. In any case, Millennials who were raised religiously were taught, explicitly or implicitly, that their ultimate task was apologetics: not merely to have faith but to defend the faith, not merely to belong to the Church but to fight for it.

This is an exhausting way of relating to an institution, and ultimately a dishonest one. We should not be surprised that it proved unsustainable. As time goes on, we are left with three options. We can walk away when the institution we were told to defend becomes indefensible. Takers of this option are well documented in Why Religion Became Obsolete. We can cling to obsolescence for the sake of obsolescence and wield it like a weapon. Or we can lay down our arms, cease imagining ourselves as the main characters in the St. Michael the Archangel prayer, and approach faith like we approach the things in life we actually desire. We can approach tradition with the same thrill of adventure and—dare I say, hope—that one gets walking into a vintage store: What treasure will I find here? What would happen if I made this my own? In his first address from the Loggia of St. Peter’s, the newly elected, Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV proclaimed the peace of the risen Christ. It is “a disarmed peace and a disarming peace,” he said. He was speaking to the world. But it is an invitation that American Christians need the most.

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

Peter Steinfels, “An Alternative Narrative?”

Gerardo Martí, “Retreat & Resurgence”

Kaya Oakes, “Ask Better Questions”

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

Susan Bigelow Reynolds is assistant professor of Catholic Studies at Candler School of Theology at Emory University.