Religion's Own Worst Enemy

Christian Smith. Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America. Oxford University Press, 2025. $34.99. 440 pp.

Though the signs, in retrospect, were all around, no one can pinpoint the exact day the Roman empire fell. 

The story of religion in America is similar. Religion in America once enjoyed widespread dominance. Its decline, like the fall of Rome, began slowly, invisible at first. Once religion had fallen out of favor, the fall seemed to some to have occurred suddenly, without warning. In truth, religion’s cultural prominence had been receding slowly, like a tide, until all at once it was gone.

There has been a cottage industry of dime-store prophets, attributing Christianity’s decline to any number of factors—politics, extremism, social media, and even the Protestant Reformation. Now that the decline is evident, it turns out that many can predict it. 

Christian Smith, fortunately, is neither a prognosticator nor a dime store prophet. Throughout 350 pages of meticulous research, Smith does not entertain emotional reasoning or nostalgia. What he does is carefully demonstrate how religion arrived at its current status–obsolete. In Why Religion Went Obsolete, Smith assembles extensive empirical data to track how American religion fell out of favor. He relies on 209 personal interviews and four focus groups, comprised of individuals who were asked to discuss their changing religious involvement. Smith also conducted extensive searches across the repositories of American culture, including book titles, scholarly publications, television news coverage, and newspapers. He analyzed the resulting data to examine the decline of religion’s cultural presence. Smith also conducted a national survey on religious questions, surveying over two thousand US adults, and conducted many interviews with adults of various religious persuasions.

All told, Smith is not interested in predictions or strategy. He has instead compiled an extensive study not merely of the numerical decline of religion, but its cultural decline as well. As he notes, that religion has declined is all but apparent. His interest lies in the why. 

He calls this decline religion’s obsolescence, and he tracks it through the “zeitgeist”, the cultural environment “during which American religion declined.” Focusing on obsolescence and the “zeitgeist” allows Smith to give an “alternative narrative to the ‘secularization’ thesis, suggesting that something more complicated and interesting has transpired that requires a more creative conceptual description [than] traditional secularization theory offers.” 

“Religious losses,” in Smith’s words, “do not automatically translate into secular gains.”

Additionally, “obsolete does not mean “useless” or “failed. It just means having been superseded by alternatives that most users deem preferable” (emphasis mine). What makes Smith’s account of religion’s decline uniquely useful is organizing his narrative around this concept of obsolescence. As he notes, there are individuals who still use electronic typewriters or cassette tapes. This habit, however, is rare and “quirky”—and likely an indicator of other varieties of quirkiness that such a person might exhibit. Under such an account, religion is for weirdos. But it is not gone. It is now simply the domain of the quirky, the insignificant, and the outdated. 

Obsolescence also answers questions that Smith might not even have anticipated. For instance, one challenge with obsolete technologies is that they become difficult to use because replacement parts or technicians who know how to fix them cannot be easily found. There are now many denominations that cannot find qualified pastors to staff their obsolete churches. Meanwhile, schools of counseling are glutted with practitioners aspiring to this new, more desirable trade—one that is surpassing religion in its popularity. Everyone, it seems, goes to counseling. Far fewer go to church when their souls feel restless or distressed.

For Smith, obsolescence has as much to do with function as with fashion. This may be the most innovative aspect of Smith’s book. In considering the cultural zeitgeist that contributed to religion’s decline, Smith points to one particular decade that assured it: the 1990s. 

Many factors that facilitated religion’s decline were well in place by the 1990s. They include “long-term social trends” like “higher education for the masses” and “women entering the paid workforce”, as well as “the deinstitutionalization of marriage and family.” They also include the decline of mainline Protestants and Catholic organizations and the spread of the religious right.

But perhaps most important is the role of the “moralizing of religion, [and] downplaying [of] transcendence” in religion’s own decline. In Smith’s words, “Religion, in this view, is not primarily about divine worship, timeless truths, sacred historical traditions, eternal salvation, theological doctrines, or the like- except as they might inspire morality.” Smith’s earlier work on spirituality among American youth led him to coin the term “moralistic therapeutic deism”—the view that religion is good insofar as it makes you better. The particular trappings of religion, from ritual to liturgy to historical practice, matter only insofar as they contribute to this moralistic goal.

A primarily moralistic view of religion did not immediately portend religion’s decline, because the broader culture of the mid-century reinforced religion’s mores and demands. But once the culture came to undermine religion’s demands, its fate was sealed. This happened, by Smith’s read, in the 1990s.

It was, on the face, a bright and optimistic decade. America was enjoying a season of economic prosperity and international stability, bolstered by the endorsement of American values that the end of the Cold War provided. 

Additionally, widespread cable TV and internet brought initial boons in connection and entertainment that seemed to encourage creativity and artistic expression. These were the years of dial-up internet and AOL messenger, of a “world wide web” that seemed focused on the weird, wild possibilities of connection and lowered barriers to entry.

But alongside the optimistic conditions that young people enjoyed was a darker shadow for religion.

For post-Boomers, religion had primarily become about morality. “Moralistic therapeutic deism” was the paradigm in which people thought about religion’s benefits. But for the first time, in the 1990s being good was no longer cool. The Zeitgeist of the 1990s prevailed against religion because the culture valued the edgy, transgressive, or anti-moral. Smith’s examples of this include: The Simpsons, Sex and the City, Seinfeld (“the show about “nothing”), and MTV. Though none of these shows had religious (or for that matter, anti-religious) messaging, together they accord with the “You do you,” “Do what feels right,” and “Do it your way,” zeitgeist—vibes against commitment to traditional religion. 

The conditions for religion continued to get darker. Once religion was judged to be about morality, evidence of immoral religionists served as solid evidence against religion. Smith notes several examples of religious scandals that gave fuel to the fire of religion’s decline; on the Roman Catholic side, the clergy sex abuse scandals was a species-ending event that destroyed faith in the institution of the Catholic church and the authority of the priesthood. On the Protestant side, the scandals began with the financial hucksters like Peter Popoff and the Jims (Bakker and Swaggart). It continued with Ted Haggard in 2006 and Mark Driscoll in 2014. The capstone of them all was Ravi Zacharias, whose worldwide apologetics ministry was felled in 2017 by the discovery of his years-long sexual affairs.

Zacharias, in the end, provided the most thorough apologetic imaginable against Christianity. If religion is reduced to simple morality, the best apologetic against religion is an immoral religious leader–especially an immoral apologist. 

In Smith’s words, “In the first phase of the zeitgeist [of the 1990s], things seemed so good that people found themselves wondering why anyone would need religion. In the second, reality seemed so bleak that religion’s proffered hope and comfort seemed superficial and unrealistic.”

For Christian writers and thinkers, the implications here are startling.

Reduced to primarily a way of being good, religion can be evaluated alongside other possible ways of being good. For this reason, culture—even “vibes”—actually do have a lot to do with who remains Christian, and who never bothers to try it out. Once the vibes prevail against organized religion, it becomes increasingly difficult to persuade anyone to be religious. We see the effects of this theory in the misbegotten evangelistic and church growth movements of the 1990s that paired the nihilism of the 1990s with church planting, yielding an admittedly head-scratching generation of church planters who dressed like Kurt Cobain and brought along worship leaders who sounded like him. It should not be surprising that such an odd pairing of nihilistic vibes with traditional religion didn’t work. It should have been obvious that pairing the message of Christianity with the vibes of a nihilistic culture would fail. But it wasn’t, and we still haven’t learned.  

Just like Kurt Cobain’s vibes turned out to be bad for organized religion (shocker!), pointing our fingers so persistently at the weaknesses of traditional religion does nothing, in the end, to strengthen it. You only need to give a cursory glance to popular Christian writing and podcasting in 2025 to notice that there is an appetite for grievance. The same themes repeat: church trauma, spiritual abuse, abuse of power, and sexual misconduct. By the look of it, you would think that the abuse of power and mishandling of harassment claims are endemic to Christianity and are present in every church and parachurch situation. Curriculum offering training on how to be a “safe church” and on “narcissistic pastors” presumes that church is otherwise unsafe, and that narcissistic leaders abound. Christianity Today, Protestant evangelicalism’s premier publication, is now on its second podcast detailing the sordid failures of the evangelical movement. The appetite for such productions remains immense. 

Today the worlds of media and publishing are swarmed with memoirs, tell-alls, and post-facto evaluations of religious institutions that have gone bad, written by exiles from these movements. My concern is not that the sins so revealed are not lamentable and evil. My concern, rather, is that our appetite to pick apart and denigrate our own religious failures is feeding the very same forces that seek to hasten religion’s demise. 

If the orchard is diseased, we should indeed cut it down. But if it is not, and we’ve been sounding the alarm regardless, it is likely that we have been doing so to gain cultural cache. We want to make ourselves look better by publicly ruminating on how bad religion has gotten. It makes us look sophisticated and cultured. When the vibes of the moment tip away from anything that smells of organized religion, with its outdated rules for life and social mores, the best way to gain an audience and some cultural clout is to agree with your listeners. Since the vibes are off, we must renovate religion to make it abuse-proof and anti-hierarchical. We must make it uninterested in imposing itself on those who don’t want anything to do with it. The perverse incentives here are obvious.

The problem with this way of thinking is that Christian intellectuals come to reinforce the anti-religious sentiments that are already prevalent, adding fuel to the fire. By endlessly bemoaning harassment, sexism, patriarchy, hierarchy, and abuses of power, we are preaching to the cultural choir. Yet it is a pointless effort: Our secular audience was already convinced of the depravity of religion. We are doing nothing to improve the public’s perception of religion or even to “raise awareness.” We’ve just made ourselves fools for the vibes.

The robust market for retelling stories of Christians’ depravity is surprising. We might imagine readers would prefer edifying content. But what is novel, and I think evidence of religion’s obsolescence, is that we are entertained by hearing stories of how depraved religion actually is. We find these stories appealing and seek them out, reading about Christianity’s hierarchical past or scandalous pastors. This hunger goes beyond mere curiosity and being “informed”; if information was all we sought, one telling would do. Instead, presses are acquiring dozens of books about how patriarchal Christianity is, in 2025, when women can be pastors at many denominations. Our appetite, it seems, is to feel bad about religion.

Once the vibes have shifted so far, it is hard to imagine much can change. Religion is already obsolete. But it is worth considering how our thought leaders and intellectuals might have served as amplifiers, granting voice to religion’s decline and hastening it in the process. On its last dying breath, Christianity’s intellectuals and creatives have kicked a dying horse. We have committed our best energy and waking hours to proving something our audience already believes instead of undertaking the harder, deeper work of construction. But the tide of religion is already out, its empire has fallen, and we can bring ourselves only to laud its demise. We have been, I’m afraid, religion’s own worst enemy.