Notre Dame sociology professor Christian Smith knows that statistics about plummeting church attendance and rising numbers of "nones"—people who claim no religious identity—aren't new. Now, in the latest of his 20 books, Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America (Oxford Univ., Apr.), he digs into how that actually came to be, looking at the asteroid impact of the millennials' and gen-Xers' mass shift toward free-floating spirituality and away from traditional, organized, institutional, doctrinal religion.
Smith is not quite predicting that old time religion will go out like the dinosaurs. After all, surveys say younger generations still believe in God or a higher power, and religion publishers say sales of Bibles and devotionals continue to do well. But, Smith writes in the book, "large numbers of post-Boomers no longer believe that anyone needs a social institution to be a spiritual or moral person, and religion is seen not as a force for good in the world but instead as a source of harm, discrimination, manipulation, exclusion, and control."
PW spoke with Christian Smith about "the spirit of the zeitgeist"—the cultural climate of an era—and where we're headed.
You set a specific period—1991 to 2009—when traditional religion lost its cultural clout in mainstream society. What happened?
By the end of that time, people had lived through the end of the Cold War, 9/11, the invention of the internet, the Great Recession, and so on. We may not be aware at the time but these years, in multiple ways, affected the assumptions, beliefs, values, norms, expectations, and aesthetics that shaped young people’s life experiences, interests, identities, and commitments. Those transformations created a new cultural zeitgeist inhospitable to traditional religion.
Why haven't secularists and atheists like Richard Dawkins seen their numbers swell?
Secularism won't fill the bill for many Americans. It feels too reductionistic, rationalistic, simplistic, materialistic. It doesn't have a spirit they feel, and it doesn't have a moral orientation and motivation. If we're just here by accident or evolution, that just feels too shallow. It doesn't resonate. There's no vibe.
Still, we're seeing push-back, aren't we? Even President Donald Trump is selling a Bible.
A crucial part of Trump's coalition includes Christian nationalists and traditionally religious people. They feel embattled, like they're losing ground and they're desperate for someone to protect them. What's interesting to me is that in the '80s, the Religious Right used to say is we need moral good, moral, righteous people in politics. That's been abandoned now, and we just need anyone, however corrupt you know they are, to protect us, to defend us.
I fear there could also be a more sectarian, fundamentalist backlash. Whether anybody can come up with anything more constructive, I don't know. As a sociologist, I'm not in the business of predicting. There are a whole lot of changes coming down the line. Technology. Economic shifts. Maybe wars. We don't know.
But there's no coming back from obsolescence, is there?
I don't see things turning around anytime soon. We may like hard numbers and facts, but I really think the need to consider the zeitgeist is important. My book is really a cultural analysis. The old dichotomy of religion versus secular, which has long been the structuring way we look at change, has been destabilized by a third major force I call a culture of enchantment.
Please explain.
There's still a ton of interest in things spiritual, divine, supernatural, magical, or paranormal. I would call the direction "religion-ish" — occult, neopagans, very personal spirituality, Eastern religions. "Enchantment" is a very broad umbrella term for this, but I think there's a coherence to it, in that enchantment provides people with an alternative to traditional religion or secularism. I'm working on a book on this now. It's the vibe of our era.
