The Sean McDowell Show - The Death of Religion? The Alarming Shift Since 1991 (ft. Christian Smith)

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

Why has traditional religion declined so sharply in America since the early 1990s? Today, I have renowned sociologist Dr. Christian Smith to unpack the cultural, technological and generational forces behind the apparent obsolescence of religion in the West. Religion didn’t just decline, it was quietly replaced. READ: Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith inby Christian Smith (https://a.co/d/4osqans)*Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf)*USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM)*See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK)FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://x.com/Sean_McDowellTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sean_mcdowell?lang=enInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

There's been a lot of discussion and analysis about the demise of traditional religion in America since the 1990s. But as far as I'm aware, there's not been a systematic sociological analysis of the various factors that contribute to its demise until now. Dr. Christian Smith, who's been on the program before, has just published a very important, timely, and insightful book called Why Religion Went Obsolete. Dr. Smith, I'm such a fan of your work going way back to soul searching and even earlier, grateful for what you do. Thanks for writing a great book, and thanks for taking the time to come on and talk with me about this. Sure, you're welcome. Thanks for having me.

So let's just start with your interest in the question of religion and its seeming demise. I didn't seeming demise. It's apparent demise in America. Yeah, so I'm a sociologist. I'm not a theologian, ethicist, philosopher, or anything like that. My job is to figure out what's going on in the world, to describe it accurately, and to try to explain it as best as I can. Studying religion, that means I'm not, as a sociologist, my job isn't to figure out, you know, what's the true doctrine or what the Bible really teaches, but just how does it work its way out in people's lives and in society. As a sociologist, I've always been against secularization theory, the idea that modernity inevitably secularizes.

I think that's grossly simplistic. I've always been an opponent of that. But it's clear that empirically, in the last decades, traditional religion in America has been on the decline. And we know that very well now. But we haven't known really very clearly why or what's caused that. So that's what this book is trying to help sort out. And really, I offer it as a service to interested people to just better see things from a big picture point of view. So to encourage discussion and reflection out there about, you know, what it might mean, what possibly to do about it.

I think that's exactly right. I consider this book a service to the church and beyond. and you write very fairly, very objectively from my estimation as an academic should from the angle that you're taking, kind of telling this 30,000 foot view story about how religion has become obsolete. So people have focused on, say, church scandals or people have focused on changing technology, but you're kind of piecing all these together, so to speak, trying to give us a big picture. So I told you at the beginning, there might be a point or two that I would differ on, but we're not interested in that here. We want to tell you.

tell the big picture for people. But let's start with, in your title, it's why religion went obsolete. Tell us what you mean by obsolete, if you will. Yeah, so a lot of, most discussions in social science and beyond talk about the word, they use the word decline, religion is declined. That's fine. It really refers to organizational metrics like number of members in a denomination or number people that say they believe in God. What I'm trying to point to with the idea of obsolescence

is something more cultural, at a cultural level, to macrocultural level. It's a matter of traditional religion, from the majority point of view, having been superseded, replaced by other interests or quote unquote, you know, products or activities that are believed to serve better. So that's what obsolete means usually obsolete applies to products right so um you know i i give the example of uh of a of the electric typewriter which is how i learned how to type uh it being made obsolete by computers and laptops obsolete doesn't mean something is gone extinct it doesn't mean nobody's using it it doesn't mean the new thing is even better for example if you think about a music vinyl record People who are really into music will say vinyl records have much better fidelity of music that it conveys than at streaming music, right?

So the things that replace obsolete products are not necessarily even better. And there are still people who can use obsolete products and do use obsolete products. I have in my house, you know, CDs and so on that now are not the way to do things, but they're obsolete. So, again, it's not saying religion is dead, religion is extinct, religion is bad, anything like that. It's just saying at the cultural level, and also I'm talking about post boomers here, that is especially millennials in Gen Z, some Gen Xers. Religion is just at the cultural levels just come to be considered like old hat, old fashion, passe, not even really think about it, pay much attention to it. not expected to serve much purpose the example you gave that most resonated with me was western films yeah i read that i was like oh i've seen some they're interesting but they're not

relevant to my life they're outdated they're of a time that's passed and your claim is that religion in some ways is like a western film so that that's a helpful lens to look at it now i don't think you get a lot of pushback on this but the claim that religion is declining in america ryan burge has argued that since about 2019, those who identify as nuns, N-O-N-E-S, has kind of plateaued. And since the 90s, it was increasing. And there was some mild celebration of that, but I remember thinking, wait a minute, even if it's not increasing anymore, we've still got generational change. So you fast forward, you're going to see an increased secularism or at least demise of traditional religion.

So that seems to be the case that you're making. but maybe tell us how you gauge religious decline. Is it church closings? Is it lack of attendance, identification? How do you, what metric do you use to gauge that? Yeah, so the first chapter of the book lays all this out. There's a belief in God. There's affiliating strongly with religion.

It's church closings, net church closings as a result, you know, compared to church openings. It's public confidence in clergy, ethics, and standards. It's a whole range of typical social science metrics that show very clearly. Again, I used to resist this until the numbers, enough numbers came in, and I thought, well, this is just the way it is. And what's most interesting is, if you group all the, all Americans together as a single population, there's not that much change. But if you, what I do is I separate it amount by generations. So all the way back from silent generation, my father's era, to Gen Ziers, you know, young people now, you separate out by generation.

Each generation is less and less and less religious on all these metrics. So, yeah, there's a strong generational dynamic. It's generally not a matter of individuals changing their mind, although there is some of that, too. We're changing their commitments or faith. It's more new generations come along that are less and less religious. and then, over time, as you alluded to, they grow up, they'll have children. We know that parents are the most strong influence on people's faith, so that when you have less and less religious younger people that grow up and have children,

they're going to raise their children on average not to be so religious. So this will have long-term ramifications. As far as the plateauing of the non-religious, that may or may not be the case. I think the jury's still out on that. Pew Pew Research Center just came out with a lot. report recently that said something similar. But in a way that's distracting because no trend can continue forever. I mean, at some point, it has to level off. You run out of people to stop being religious. But we also don't have, I don't think we have enough data in yet to really know if

it's a plateau or if it's just a blip. But even if it's a plateau, okay, fine. Still, the number of non-religious Americans has jumped from 6%, which is what it always was before the 90s into the 30s or whatever percent now, that's the real story is the huge jump over the last decades, whether or not it's plateaued is a secondary question, I think. Talk to you about how you view some of these, what can just be dubbed, anti-religious forces, whether it's like the new atheists, often the media, universities, wokeism. How significant do these play, according to your data, in the demise of, religion. Yeah. So the general story of my book is that what matters to really understand this

properly, we need a long-term perspective. These things go back. The forces that have caused obsolescence are long-term. They're complex. Most of them do not have to do with religion. They have to do with other spheres of life, technology, economics, politics. And some of them are ideologically anti-religious, like the new atheist, but most of them are indifferent to religion. They're not trying, or at least on the face of it, they're not trying to hurt religion. So, you know, I talk in the book about the Internet, the effect of the Internet on people's sense of knowledge, epistemology, authority, individualism, community, all these things have influences on religion. The people that invented the Internet were not trying to hurt religion.

that wasn't their main purpose but nevertheless i argue in the book it has that effect another is uh which connects to religion indirectly is demographic changes in marriage and family just over time you have a more uh what we call deinstitutionalization of the family in marriage not just more divorce but delayed age of first marriage voluntary childlessness delayed age of first child uh cohabitation etc those are demographics changes that people do for various reasons, but they have consequences for traditional religion because traditional religion is very much oriented toward the quote-unquote traditional family to heterosexual bio parents with children. So the fewer of those that are around, the more

consequences that will have for the kind of the kind of people churches and synagogues are best at serving. Those are just two examples. Yeah, that makes sense. We're going to come back to some of the factors culturally that you think have positively led to the kind of demise of religion, so to speak. But it sounds like in your book, when I've heard you say, things like the new atheists that are the anti-religious forces are not insignificant, but not as significant as many times people think that they are. Is that a fair summary? Yeah. That's a great summary. I think a lot of times for religious people, it's easy to say, you know, the bad guys are out to get us, and that's not false, but it just misses a lot of other

forces that are at work. The other thing I would say is take the new atheists. I mean, atheism has been around for centuries, if not forever, right? So what gave the new atheist energy was not the force of their arguments. It was the fact of September 11 and the association of religion with violence. So the original version of my books had, if September 11 hadn't happened, the new atheist books would have been on sale for 10 cents at the library books you know book table but they took off because of the emotional impact of september 11 so it's really combinations of things that go together yeah um i do think that you know there are forces out there you know wokeism whatever liberals in the higher education they contribute but the other argument i make is that

religion did, I think in my estimation, religion did more to damage itself in various ways, which we could discuss than the anti-religious people did, you know, in the form of scandals and a whole host of other things. So religion itself should sort of own up to what it's done to harm itself. Well, we're skipping ahead a little bit to the end, but at the very end, you're like, religion needs to do some soul searching. And we're going to circle back to that because I think that's exactly right. But my experience, research, this book and beyond, would say it's much more internal than it is external. And I think you're right about that.

You cite the year 1991, which is so interesting to me because that was my freshman to sophomore year in high school. So I feel like I was living this out, so many of the things that you're describing. What was it about that year that you think was just pivotal? towards the demise of religion. Yeah, so there's, if you go back and look, there's a whole host of things that happened. I don't wanna put too much weight on that, but I do think that that was a turning point.

That was the year, for example, when the very first rise in the number of Americans who said they were not religious. So again, forever, as long as we've been doing surveys, it was about six or seven percent, very stable number of Americans that said there. All of, that's when the curve just started going way, high. But in addition to that, a number of other very consequential things happened, the end of

the Cold War, for example. So I have an argument in the book about how fighting the Cold War for decades against the godless, atheist, Marxist, Leninist, communists, we were able as a nation to understand ourselves as a God-fearing, this is sort of Eisenhower era, all the way through Reagan era. We were, even if not all Americans were Christians, say we were still God-fearing, religious liberty, God honoring nation. It was part of our national identity that we were not atheists. We were religious, held us together as a people. Well, at the end of the Cold War, that evaporated pretty quickly and then opened up this question, well, what is America now? What is our place in the world stage? And I think the 90s was a little bit intoxicated on globalization and prosperity,

you know, the Bill Clinton smoking cigars on the golf course era. But then September 11 hits. And instead of us being the religious nation against the godless communists, now the bad guys are religious people. They're kind of Muslim, not all Muslim and they're not Christian. But, yeah, then the new atheist gets to tar all of religion as associated in the public mind with violence, instability, etc. et cetera, et cetera. So within literally one decade, the tables are turned on religion. So other

things happened at a cultural level. I mean, this was, Seinfeld goes, you know, to one number one comedy. I put a lot of emphasis in the book. Maybe it's a little tongue and cheek, but on nirvana, Nirvana smells like teen spirit. So that to me, that was a shift. It killed the big hair glam rock of the earlier era and introduced a whole new spirit of independent, indie rock um that i think was consequential so again in the book i have a i've a couple lists of of things that happened in 1991 that i just think turned a corner it's a turning of a corner really yeah the list is fascinating i'll read i'll read a few right here he said it's the like you mentioned earlier it's the uptick in americans identifying as religious nuns i didn't

realize this it was the launch of the worldwide web and the first web page goes live in 1991. That's pretty significant. The launch of AOL, second generation cell phones. Of course, the Seattle-based crunch band Nirvana releases that. And I remember that in high school, that song. It was kind of a mantra for my generation, so to speak. Hip-hop breaks into mainstream.

That was a huge shift, culturally speaking. And you list some other things here as well. so that that you also mentioned magic johnson announcing he had HIV i remember where i sat and that moment especially as someone who loved and still loves basketball that was like a pivotal moment sitting in my room hearing it on the radio being stunned by that and what that meant for me in my generation so you really do a good job kind of pulling these threads together let's take a step back and talk about how millennials tend to view religion in america So one of the reasons, and partly what you do so well in this book, is you talk about these factors that have been in play, sometimes for centuries and decades leading into 1991 where you see these changes take place.

And a part of that is just a perspective that people have. They're probably not aware of it of kind of a lens through which they even approach religion and think about it. So what is that lens? Yeah, so part of what's going on here that I argue is kind of a functionalist argument, and that is Americans, from my research, I just know this from interviewing hundreds of people, but most Americans make certain assumptions about religion, what they expect of it. So the second chapter is called religion is good when. And basically I say, for most Americans, religion is actually a good thing.

Whether or not they're religious, they think religion is good if it helps people be moral and make good decisions. This came out in my earlier stuff on teenagers, right? Moralistic therapeutic deism. If it gives people community, if it helps to create peace in the world, if it creates national solidarity, if clergy and religious leaders are good role models. So Americans will say, you know, if religion does it, that's good. It's good to have a realm. Set aside for one second whether or not that's what religion is or should be, but that's what Americans think, right? So what happened in the 1990s is a whole series of things shifted that sort of took away those functions of religion. People either decided, oh, clergy are not good. Look at all these

priests abuse scandal problem. Or I can now have my community on the internet, right? I don't need to have it at a face-to-face organization, like a religious congregation. or all of those functions sort of had the legs cut out from under them or another phrase I use in the book were crowded out by other things it's not that religion was actively rejected it was crowded out pushed aside by other things that many people thought this is all I need or this will serve us better or so so yeah I think if from a religious point of view if you go back to that chapter and say wait a minute why do people think that religion is just about being a nice person or giving community and being able to participate in the choir. Like, I think that that chapter itself should raise questions about why is this what Americans think? Is this what's being taught? If it's not being taught, why are people hearing this or translating in their minds? This is what it is. So I think implicit in this are a lot of hard questions about why have Americans come to understand religion

something different than, I think, objectively, is different than what religions understand themselves is bringing to the table to people's lives. I agree. That's a good way, good way to put it. Would you, would you, as far as I remember, it was in 2005, I think in soul searching that you first had the term moralistic therapeutic deism? Is that where it first showed up? It is?

Okay. Would you amend that? Would you still use it? Has that gotten greater in America, stayed the same? Yeah, so I think, I think moralistic therapeutic deism is running in the background here. I use that to describe the functional de facto religion of American teenagers. Now, at the time, they've grown up. Now they're the millennials that I'm talking about in this book, right?

So I think what happened is still the general outlines of MTD are what's running in people's minds, most Americans. When you, MTD is pretty simplistic. When you grow up, when you have some hard knocks in life, when things don't work out the way that MTD says it should, people, you know, teenagers grow up, they become young adults. They realize it's more complicated. Some of them maybe fall off the wagon. They say, I don't believe any of that anymore. But in general, the spirit of, you know, there's a God out there maybe, and there must be

something out there. And he's here to help when I'm in trouble. and it makes me feel better. Yeah, that's a simplified version of what I'm talking about in that chapter. You know, religion is here to help me in this world, in this life. It's not about anything particularly transcendent or eternal. It's not ultimately about truth, even. It's about, you know, coping with life.

That's the common thread between 2005 and this book, yeah. And that raises questions we'll come to at the end, is that there's so many people saying, okay, if this, if a religion is in demise and become an obsolete and truth is viewed this way, do we accept the cultural view of truth and buttress religion into that? Do we challenge the view of truth? All those questions get really important. You're not trying to answer those here. That's what religious groups and others need to take the book and process and discuss and say what it looks like to accomplish their mission in this cultural moment. That's what I think you do well. But let's, let's just make

maybe piece together. You hinted in a couple of these before, and there's some we can't even talk about. But like the changing state of the family and how this contributes to the demise of religion, obviously, this goes back arguably centuries, you know, from the industrial revolution to the pill and all these kind of factors. But what role do you see that playing in the demise of religion? I mean, one of the stories of this book is that everything can't be divided easily and to cause and effect. So I think that the changing demography of family and marriage is partly the effect of changes in religion

or a decline of religion. But then that becomes its own cause. So it's a complicated thing here. So I do think that transformations in the of young people's approach to marriage and family has a big impact on religion. It both reflects their view of religion. And it affects their availability, so to speak, for religion. So, you know, if you wanted to start a new church that has the greatest success of attracting new members, go to suburbia where there are young couples with children, right?

I mean, it's just a simple, I don't mean to be reductionistic. Yeah, yeah. But it's a simple demographic. Don't start up in a downtown, you know, city where there are. So it has a big effect. And we could think causally about why, people that are cohabiting, maybe they grew up religious, now they're living with somebody. They know that their church isn't really going to be okay with that. So it sort of steers them away.

Or people that are divorced often feel, whether it's in their heads or in reality, they feel judged or inadequate or they failed or something. And so they, I mean, this is just a fact. We know this for sure, that there are differences in marital types. and the household situations in how interested they are in religion. Even more interesting to me is the rise of emerging adulthood and just not getting married. So now we have a much longer period of time before people settled down, young people settled down, and become real adults. Well, if you become a real adult when you're 22,

to that and you associate traditional religion with, you know, settling down, which is how most young people associate it, that means you're going to possibly start going to a religious congregation throughout your 20s, especially if you're married and have children. If you don't become a real adult or settle down until you're 30, say, you've lived your whole 20s forming your identity, your priorities, your commitments, your, where you're stuck in life, everything, without any influence, without any input from a religious tradition. You may even go back to church when you're 32, and now you have children, your first child. You're a very different person than you were 10 years ago, you know.

So it really matters when people marry, and I'm not saying everyone get married at 18 or anything, obviously, but it just sociologically matters. At what age people get married, if they get married, when they have their first, first child and how thoughtful they are about how they want to raise their children. So all these things really affect the likelihood that people will become people of faith a lot. Yeah, that makes sense. One of the other pieces I think is interesting is you talk about consumerism and it kind of has a view of what it means to be human. How does consumerism contribute to this trend? Yeah, I think it's very easy for us to sort of lose perspective on how,

materialistic and consumeristic our culture has become because we get used to it. But, and I don't mean that in a judgy way. I just mean that's sort of an objective, you know, economics way. And what I argue in the book is, you know, going shopping doesn't weaken somebody's faith per se, but the increased emphasis on consumerism and competition and careers and so on, again, it's not just a matter of how much stuff people own, embedded in that larger, cultural package is a vision of what it means to be human, what a human being is, what we're here on earth for, what a good life looks like. So a simple way to say it is, a good life is

the goods life, you know, like having more stuff. And a lot of people say, oh, I'm not materialistic, it doesn't affect me. But it shapes our notion of what a human being is here for. And the idea that we are, say, creatures created by a certain kind of God who, in relationship with that God, who are living morally significant lives and who our beliefs and commitments and practices matter a lot, not just for ourselves, but for something bigger than ourselves like the kingdom of God or the history or however you want to put it, that all gets sidelined by, you know, career, development. human capital investment, buying the next cool thing, or increasingly not material thing,

but experiences, experiences of becoming more and more sort of the consumer product. That just steers people away. It doesn't even steer people away. It just makes, say, the Christian narrative odd or just doesn't fit that, in other word I use in this book is mismatch. It's not that people are actively rejecting something. It just doesn't match up culturally. with what feels normal, with what vibes, so to speak.

That's a really helpful way to put it, because I don't think most people are thinking through these different factors and how it shapes religion. It's just kind of the cultural air that we breathe in expectations that we have. And what you're doing in this book is trying to pull out some of these threads again to make it very clear, hey, this might be contributing in ways that we're not aware of. I think that's what's so helpful. Talk a little bit about expressive individualism,

because this seems to be at the heart of kind of the millennial zeitgeist, so to speak. Yeah. And so Americans are very individualistic and have been for a very long time, even when the culture was quite religious. But expressive individualism is a particular version of individualism that comes out of romanticism. It comes out of even, I was just reading John Stuart Mill on Liberty the last couple of days. It's evident there, but there's a long tradition. And basically it says, you know, each.

person is their own unique individual self. And what's most important about them is their distinctiveness from everyone else. Therefore, everyone has sort of a moral obligation to figure out who they are, to discover their unique individual selves, and to express that in the world. And what threatens that is any external authority or conformity or system or institution or relationships that might get in the way of that. So it tends to view sort of the individual as absolutely unique as needing to express its uniqueness, no matter what cost. You have to be yourself.

You do you. And it tends to structure the external world, the institutional world, and everything outside of the self as a potential threat, as a potential obstruction. And so institutions become distrusted, authorities, even parents eventually become like they're trying to keep you from being your real self. This can be extended in so many different ways, you know, like wanting to travel the world or my artist, whatever the individual self is, it has to be expressed. We have a sort of a very classic sort of genius artist need to express. themselves, however strange or whatever that may be, among, I don't really want to get into this

because it's a mind field, but I'll mention it, you know, among Gen Zers, especially sort of one's gender identity is even like, you have to figure out what you are in the world has probably conform to some alternative thing that's not the true you. And no matter what price you have to pay, you have to express that. Well, okay, there's some, it's not absolutely false there's some truth in this right i mean everyone is their own person etc etc but um it doesn't match very well with traditional religion that says there's a most of which say there's a real truth out there it's objectively the way things are uh you you know you you need to fit your life in as part of that there are truths there is an authority there are ways of living that are good

in bed. So it just doesn't, again, vibe would be the word here. It just doesn't resonate with traditional religion so well if one has already bought into the deep presuppositions of expressive individualism. Let me sum up. This is a concept in the book that's really important. Sorry, this idea of deep culture. So there's culture on the surface, but what the book is trying to point to is there are deep cultural structures that are formed over centuries. or at least decades that have deep roots. And they're so obvious, so to speak, they're so deeply embedded in what's taken for granted

that you can hardly even argue with them or people often don't even recognize that they're committed to them. Once those deep cultures get set in place, of which expressive individualism would be one example, that's a lot of what drives people's lives. Again, they're not rational, philosophical reflection on things. They're going with deep culture and how that resonates with what makes sense.

And so what I think happened in the 90s and 2000s is the deep cultural structures all got kind of aligned in a way that made religion, traditional religion feel like obsolete. So one way to maybe look at this is that sin in traditional religion is breaking, so to speak, an objective moral code, so to speak, that exists outside of myself. Now it's almost sinful not to look within and be yourself, express yourself, be true to yourself. That's a radical shift in terms of what we think about what it means to be human. You add consumerism to that, which positions us as our happiness comes from having goods and getting more goods and collecting things as opposed to happiness coming from sacrificing and committing to a cause larger than yourself. You have traditional, you know, religion at home in kind of the family. You could see it arguably at the beginning of the scriptures, you know, a husband and a wife and kids. And yet the family is shifting.

So some people don't feel at home in it. These are some of things you're pointing out. And of course, we don't have time to go into this, but you have a section of how even the digital revolution like smartphones. There's a competition in time that we have that takes away from church. There's a competition in authority now. lots of voices can speak into this generation. So all these things are kind of, we use the metaphor I've used in others to have, kind of this perfect storm that bubbles up in 1991, the dam begins to break.

Now we can look back and piece some of these things together. As you see it, how significant do you think religious scandals have been in this? And really the big first one that, well, I guess I remember in the 80s as a kid, there was the Jim Baker and Falwell scannels. I remember hearing about that, but really it seems like the Catholic Church was the cultural breaking point in some sense. How significant is that in religion's demise? Yeah.

So basically what I say in the book is no one of the factors that I lay out would have produced obsolescence. It's this really, it's this perfect storm idea, multiple perfect storms coming together. I do believe that religious scandals over money, sex, and other things were super damaging to religion because, again, most Americans presuppose that what the main thing religion is good for is making people moral, and especially leaders should exemplify that. So when you have a couple decades of strings of seemingly every month, there's a new scandal, It starts in the, with some of the televangelists.

It starts in the public imagination with the televangelist, Jim Baker, and these people. It just continues on and on. And as you said, the Catholic Church scandal is worse because it's not just a matter of one person or a couple, you know, getting caught doing something bad. It's the institution, right? It looks like it's not just you got a bunch of bad priests, but the institution failed. It reassigned priests. It looked like it covered it up. More recently, we've had the Southern Baptist Convention have something similar come out.

So Americans are willing to forgive individuals or forget them at least. There are a few bad apples in the barrel. But when it looks like something institutional, that really triggers, that really presses some buttons for Americans that say, well, this is the whole thing is just corrupt. There's something about religion per se. So, yeah, that was really. really damaging. I mean, there's no question whatsoever. There's still lots of Americans who say, nevertheless, I'm still committed to, you know, my Catholic faith or my, you know, it's not that

everyone left churches, but at a cultural level, it was profoundly damaging. One of the words I use in here is polluting. Religion has gotten culturally polluted, and it's not just, it takes time to clean up, you know, toxic waste sites, which is whether or not, they're really polluted or really toxic or how toxic. That's a separate question from the public's perception and what gets embedded in culture. So that's a big problem. If people approach religion through the lens of truth, whether this is true or not, then scandals are probably going to affect one less because it's like, hey, there's such a thing as truth and they're failing to live it.

But if like you said earlier, religion has an instrumental role and it increasingly fails to carry out that instrumental role, then in people's minds, you're going to have less and less tolerance and patience and appreciation for and commitment to religion. So that's in a important way to see how people assess this. I think earlier I said Falwell with Jim Baker, I meant Swaggert, of course, in the 80s. Oh, Swaggart, yeah. But if we bring in the recent story, Falwell's son, you know, President of Liberty, that's another example of the scandals tied to him that just keeps this narrative going forward and this reality going forward, you know, it keeps it going forth.

Another big one was the, his name is escaping me, but the head of the National Association of Evangelicals at the time was caught with a, you know, in Colorado Springs is caught across the food and drugs. Haggard, yeah. There's an interesting HBO documentary on him. I mean, it's clear he's a good guy, you know, so, but you're right. If, if a church has a real strong doctrine of sin, it wouldn't be surprising that, here and there is something about being you know even strong religious leaders people of faith

are going to sin that shouldn't throw everything off but if you start off with the assumption religion is about it's moralistic it's fundamentally moralistic at its heart it's making people good and nice and make good choices then that then that's really crippling so there's so many other pieces we won't be able to get into but you talk about it's kind of like a subplot uh what's often called purity culture and in particular the site true love waits and i kiss dating goodbye and i'm wondering how how you see that playing into it because one of the things that i i struggle with is my dad also wrote a book in the 80s called why wait which was about a decade before true love weights it had some overlap with that but also some differences and we've had conversations about areas where i

differ with him and and see things differently and maybe now looking back would have done things differently. I read Joshua Harris's book, but I remember reading it going, yeah, I agree to them. I disagree with them here. Not this level of like trauma that people attribute to it and say I abandoned faith because of it. A lot of your data, as far as I can tell, correct me if I'm wrong, is asking people the question, how central was this? Why did you leave the faith? And people cite that. And yet sometimes I wonder, was that really the cause? Or is that just a symptom of something deeper going on. And it strikes to me that in many cases, it's more of a symptom than a cause. Would you agree with that? And how does your data flesh that out?

Yeah, I think you're on to something there. I mean, in the end, it's really hard to know. But so a couple of observations. When you interview people, all you can do is work with what they tell you. Sure. Sometimes it really is the account of what happened in their lives. Sometimes it's a post-talk rationalization for other things they don't want to talk about or they're not even aware about. But if from a sociological cultural point of view, if people all point to something or if many people point to something, even if it wasn't really the thing that made them leave church, that at a cultural level, that is still a significant sort of marker or publicly acceptable justification or discourse. for explaining what's wrong with religion or why they're not religious. So it still matters, even if it is essentially a rationalization that they pull out of a cultural grab bag.

But yeah, like the true love weight stuff, part of what's going on here that I explained in the book is multiple reactions against specific things in religion. So we're pretty confident that part of the original rise of the not religious people in the 90s, was a reaction against the rise of the Christian right. So the Christians getting more involved in right-wing politics or Republican politics. There was a certain set of people who just said, if that's what religion is, you know, I don't want to be religious, the Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson types. That's a reaction against something.

My analysis is simply observing, look at these reactions. I'm not trying to justify the reactions. I'm not saying what they reacting against was better. You take true love. I have no investment in, you know, this was good or bad or true or false or whatever. I'm just pointing out there was objectively a huge reaction against it within evangelical by young evangelicals who had gone with the True Love Waits program or I kissed dating goodbye program and later decided that was wrong.

Like that screwed me up and I'm really angry about that. And they wrote about it and they created blogs against it. So those sort of things had real consequences. Now, you could say in that era, it was because of that era, and it was because of a whole lot of other cultural changes that they reacted against it. Okay, that may be true. You know, true love weights in the 50s. I mean, I have had a very different outcome, but it wasn't the 50s. It was the 90s and 2000s.

So, yeah, again, another example of this that I talk about in the book is the sort of how the postmodern mindset of, understanding of truth reacted to evangelical's commitment to scripture as the final truth. I'm not saying scripture is or isn't the final truth. I'm saying postmodernism had a huge cultural influence. And when somebody views the world through a postmodern lens, the claim that the Bible is true, it's not even rejected. It's just considered not even like in the right ballpark you know it's it's another mismatch factor so it's not a rational argument against something right it's just not even connecting with that way of thinking about what are you talking about truth there is no truth it all depends on when you're placing that that's how a postmodernist would view it yeah

so there's a the overall the all of this illustrates the overall point which is the fate of what's happened to and inside the church, say, has been profoundly shaped by big picture things that have gone on way outside of the church, outside, above. So the context is, another way to put this, is the bigger picture context has had huge impact on traditional religion. And if people want to understand what's happening, what's happened to us, why is this going on? They need to understand the context. I think that's right. Even with some of purity culture, I've asked, you know, things like what lies behind this idea in the church that just says, you know, if you just read this book and follow this plan, you can resist some of the temptations of our culture. Well, that's a certain

idea of control. That's a certain idea of spiritual growth. Where does that come? That's what played into purity culture you also see consumerism in and i've heard you know somebody said in purity culture is this idea that sex sells everything including purity and christianity you think sex is good out there come in the church it's like wait a minute where do we get these ideas that we should play by that script those are some of the underlying ideas that i think we need to give a lot of reflection and thought to and how much you know i'm speaking for myself but as christian leaders do we imbibe certain ideas that might just come from the world in these changing trends you're talking about as opposed to just kind of the history of the church?

Yeah, so this is another like sub sub plot in my analysis, which is if traditional religion takes its standards of acceptable success, whatever, from traditions outside. of itself, it's just setting it itself up to fail in time. Amen. It needs to ground, I would say, without being sectarian and crazy, and it shouldn't have to be, but traditional religion will only succeed in the long run, or I'll say Christianity, let's say, if it is well grounded in itself as its own tradition and understands, here are the standards, here are the, I don't like the word metrics, here's, here are the orientations

by which we will understand, we are being faithful or not, we're being successful or not. And I think way too much has what's happened to explain religious obsolescence is tradition of religion, taking other traditions or groups' standards as how, what they're going to work with to decide if they're working or not. And then you end up with things like, you're good if you make people make good choices, or if you help them be psychologically balanced. or something. It doesn't work in the end. Yeah. So it requires sort of a re, this gets back to the whole soul searching point you've raised. It requires sort of really stepping back, I think,

and I'm not telling churches what to do, but sort of rethinking, whose standards are we even counting here? No, preach it. I'll tell you. As a sociologist preach it, I'm with you on that. I love it. One of the tensions that comes out in the data that I'm trying to make sense of, And it might just be an inconsistency that millennial post-boomers live with is that there's a sense of like judgmentalism is bad. We shouldn't judge, judge. But hypocrisy is terrible. Yeah. Live and let live be yourself.

But there's an outrage right now where you contrast this kind of moral relativism that you talk about that's imbibed within this millennial zeitgeist with no. problem of condemning, say, the Hamas in war, one side, the Hamas war, one side or the other, or condemning a politician, say Trump. No problem condemning that is wrong, but you shouldn't be judgmental. Is there, are people just speaking out of both sides of their mouths? How do you make sense of that tension? Yeah, that's a really good observation. Here's what I would say. First of all, most people are not philosophically consistent in their thinking and behavior. So there's There's a certain amount of just people not realizing they're doing the thing they say people shouldn't do. However, it's more than that.

Part of the millennial zeitgeist itself is an abandonment of the idea it all needs to hang together. It should be rationally coherent. That's baked into the zeitgeist itself. It's like, if you want everything to add up, you're probably totalitarian, you know, intellectually totalitarian. like the world is messy things are messy and so there's a plenty in the in the millennial zeitgeist that doesn't really make sense it doesn't come together there's internal contradictions and that's fine within the millennial zeitgeist so yeah you know i think we would both agree it's impossible to live a life as a total relativist i mean nobody does that whether they say that or not so if at the same

time, very many millennials, it's not that they're irrational. It's that they were taught by in school, actually, in various ways, as I elaborate in the book, don't judge people. You know, everything should be acceptable, be multicultural in certain ways. And I think postmodernism taught this too. The original movements, like the smart versions of this, would have been more sophisticated. But by the time it gets down to a fifth grader or a college sophomore, it becomes this popularized version that's overly simplified that they think, well, don't judge anybody. Everything is equally good as everything else.

But then again, you can't live that way. So people end up making moral and other kind of judgments. This is good. This is bad. So it ends up kind of messy. One of the points that you draw out is about what you suspect might happen to culture as religion declines. And it's interesting that there's been a shift from like the cultural conversation

with a new atheist debating God and science is religion bad. There's such a thing as truth. That was a very modern project, not a postmodern one, obviously. And yet now we're seeing a lot of people go back, even people like Dawkins being a quote, cultural Christian saying, wait a minute, there's a certain value to not religion in general but really Christianity in particular when you talk about religion declining and again we I probably should have said it's the beginning what you mean by traditional religion would be like Protestant faith Catholicism Mormonism is a traditional religion in America not some of the other

religions but what do you suspect might be some of the cultural repercussions if this trend continues that you're highlighting yeah so what we know from research over many decades is that in the United States, my story is very particularly American. I'm not talking about Europe. In the United States, religion has been a huge source of what we call social capital, trusting social relationships, people's sense of community. It also has been an important source of sort of mental, psychological stability, coping mechanisms. This is, I mean, This is a fact, and this is partly why Americans expect this from religion. But given that, if the less people, religious people are, the more we should expect, unless they come up with an alternative substitute, people to feel isolated, less psychologically stable.

And it's exactly what's going on. Like, it actually fits the exact, I mean, COVID was part of this, social media are part of this, but people, especially, young people in fact do feel more isolated and lonely and lacking community and wishing they had more relationships and more troubled and destabilized it's not all about religious obsolescence but I think sociologically it's it's explicable why people would be feeling this the interesting thing though is when we interviewed a lot of post boomers they would say things or they would imply things that were like I wish I have more community but they're not ready to go back and join a church in order to get that community or they or they don't you some young

people don't even know how to go about finding community again this this is related to so many other complex factors for example millennials were much more geographically mobile so when you move it's harder to start a new community to meet new people traditionally in the past if you were united methodist you move to a new town you're finding united methodist church it's like a plug-in community but that's not functioning that way as it is now So, yeah, sociologically, we don't have good reason to think that the decline of religion will be healthy for society. There may be some people who were abused in religion or suffered religious trauma, maybe they'll be better. But at a macro level, unless there's some substitute, which I don't, hasn't seen come up yet for what traditional religion used to do, it's not going to be.

good. And you draw out this is mental health. This is healthy communities. Yeah, this is, you know, these relational. This is not even talking about Christian truth. This is just talking about sociological metrics of, you know, functioning society. Yeah. Now, as an apologist, of course, I'm going to ask the question, why do we function best there? And does it suggest anything is true? But that goes way beyond this book. That's a separate conversation. It's a whole other conversation, yeah. Fair enough. So, of course, at the end, you know, someone like myself and others are saying, okay, what can religion do?

Now, of course, this is not your project, you're a sociologist. You're more trying to draw the story together of why religion has become obsolete. But, of course, you've studied this in depth. And as I was reading it, I was kind of pulling out a few threads that I thought in line with what you said earlier, that we can't shift the message and what it would mean, for example, to be a Christian, but how do we adapt, given our times? And just one small thing you said on page 367, I thought was great. It was a small line here it is.

You said, in my observation, many who care about a declining American religion, especially clergy, take their struggles to personally. You know, Christian, I gave this up a long time ago talking about changing culture and just talking about faithfulness to what I think God has called me to in my task. Just that shift, it sounds like some of your data would serve people well. But what other things? I mean, I could pull some threads of stuff that I saw. But if you were, say, you know, say an evangelical church brought you in and said, okay, I understand your critique here. How do you think maybe we could or should pivot, still being faithful to the message of, say, the Bible and Jesus as we see it,

what things might you suggest? Yeah, so I want to repeat what you said here, which is, I'm a sociologist, I'm not a church. Totally fair. I really, oftentimes when I was working on this book, I thought, I do not know what any answer would be. Like, I'm glad it's not my job. I do think that there are possible implications, but again, in my view, there are too many sociologists who think they know how the world should be and are trying to tell everyone else that's totally that's not my vision my vision is you know different communities need to wrestle

with this stuff i'm just giving them material to wrestle with um the you know the first thing is to realize this is my sense is to realize um there aren't any easy answers this is not going to be turned around next year it's like that it's like this is a bigger longer term if you buy the story of my book that these are long-term cultural trends, then the solutions, then the answers are going to require sort of a long-term cultural trend mentality. I think one thing that could be done, well, there's so many levels of this. At a more intellectual level, there are a lot of false narratives out there in the deep culture, one of which I talk about in the book, is that religion and science are inevitable conflict against each other, and religion always loses. Like, secular

historians of science and religion know that's false but somehow the populace has still accepted this idea so sort of more effectively addressing the relationship of religious knowledge and scientific knowledge is one thing um at a totally different level i think part of part of the story in my book is that what's mismatched in traditional religion with the zeitgeist um are cultural forms that may not be cultural expressions of church that may not be necessarily biblical or essential, right? So sort of stepping back and really thinking hard about, do we really need 45-minute sermons, for example? That's just picking on sermons right there. How might we do life together in a way that maybe even be more faithful?

I don't know. I have certain ideas about that, but... Sure. Yeah, this is a whole other conversation. I guess everything I think has another yes but side to it. I mean, one of them is not, one of them is certainly, don't just keep chasing the culture around by the tail. Like just because everything's meeting online, doesn't mean meeting online is the answer.

Sometimes it's going against the mainstream is what's needed most of all. But in an intelligent way, you know, not in a, we're going to just be different and sectarian. So I realize I'm really not answering your question. That's okay. I guess what I want to say is what I put out in this book is intended to help people grapple with stuff. I really want people and communities out there to take a good, long, hard time to consider what have these forces been? What do they mean? what needs to change.

So I'm just restating your question in the term here. That's fine. But in a way, there's a part of me that thinks I have no idea what the answer is. There may not be any answer in the short term. I have a section in the conclusion where I say, you know, damned if you do, damned if you don't. Once you're obsolete, like you can, anything you try is going to be dismissed. But in the longer term, in the longer term,

I, you know, history's unpredictable. Things change. It could be the millennial zeitgeist is shifting around right now, something new will emerge. So I guess another way to put all this would be, this is my personal view, a lot of American Christianity seems very invested in the American part of that. And so trying to think,

what are our deeper roots? What are the historical roots of Christianity? How have other cultures and times in history done this? And how can we be less sort of captive to immediate, trendy forces at work now and be more authentically ourselves? The Christian church has been around a lot longer than the West even, or American, not to mention America, not to mention our current culture wars. So I think sort of stepping back, reconsidering and returning to roots in some ways and being more thoughtful, maybe less reactionary, something like that is at least the general way to think about moving forward.

I really appreciate and respect your reluctance to say, here's how you fix this when you're a sociologist on the outside. I was not trying to push you into any box, but just curious your take. And I think your points are well taken. I mean, if I was a pastor of a church or had a staff, I would have him read this book and say, what stands out to you? What applies specifically to our context? How can we shift if he's right about this in line with what scripture says? I think that's huge.

So a few things jumped out to me. You talk a lot about how the world's just kind of a mess. place. And starting in the 90s, Christianity kind of had this evangelical Christianity, this formulaic, like, if you just read the Bible and go to church, things will be rosy and fine. And it's like people didn't sense that this fit their despair and their questions in the changing world. But we have a history of that in the church. So let's not make things so simplistic. You talk about the value and role and importance of community and a deep need for relationship. You also point towards your other writings just when it comes to faith transmission, which concerns my community, just the powerful role that parents play more than, I almost said MTV, because that was my case in the 90s, more than like social media, more than these other metrics, more than YouTube.

And then finally at the end, you just say, I love this section. It's just kind of like, let's do a deep soul searching within the church. where have we fallen short? What do we need to learn? And of course, you don't use this word, but it's really a kind of repentance within the church. And I think if the church ever wants to see any kind of revival, it's got to start within with the deep dive and repentance. That's my message, not yours, but I think it lines up with it. Last question. One thing that was not in the book is really how post-boomers view Jesus. Any sense of that?

Yeah, like as a religious figure, because clearly all the traditional religions in America are tied to the figure of Jesus in some fashion for another. Yeah, that's a really good question. So I think I have two answers to that, and they're sort of on the one hand and on the other. On the one hand, Jesus feels too particular to really touch. Many post boomers are happy.

I observed this among the teenagers two decades ago. Many post boomers are happy to talk about God, but the J word is too particular. Like, that's, like, that could offend somebody. So there's almost an avoidance of Jesus. That's on the one hand. On the other hand, I think that there is a strong sense of admiration for this guy. What he taught was really good. and he was a great teacher sort of, it almost, to me, it almost has a dismissiveness to it,

but he was a great teacher. And the problem is, though, that nobody follows him or the church is so far hypocritical of they follow Jesus, but they don't really follow Jesus. So that there's a, on the one hand, Jesus is a little too particular. On the other hand, Jesus was a good guy. Like, if only the Christians would follow him, then everything would be okay. yeah so again nothing is straightforward and clear there's uh it's it's kind of messy well thoroughly enjoyed your book thanks for your work on i can only imagine how much time and research it took it was the

kind of book that most of it i'm like yeah that makes sense that's articulated what i've sensed as a whole and there's a few pieces we didn't even get into like neoliberal capitalism that role i was like whoa i did not see that coming but people are going to have to pick up a book and read it to assess that for themselves but i appreciate your work really appreciate you coming on folks pick up a copy of why religion went obsolete and agree or disagree it's going to make you think about where we're at in religion in in america right now and while you're at it make sure you hit subscribe we've got some other conversations like this coming up as well and if you study want to study apologetics this is one piece of the larger conversation that's taken place we would love to have you at

top of school theology biola university information below come study with me dr smith thanks for your time thanks for having me on i enjoyed the conversation