Understanding our Culture’s Fundamental Shifts
A Feature Review of
Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America
Christian Smith
Hardcover: Oxford University Press, 2025
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Reviewed by Leonard J. Vander Zee
I am a cradle-to-grave Christian, and a congregational pastor for over fifty years. The Church is a huge part of my life and identity. I really believe deep down the essential truths of the Christian faith, not without doubts and struggles of course, and have sought to practice the way of Christ throughout my life. For someone like me, it would be hard to find a book title more provocative and more scary than this one. In fact, when I first learned about it, I assumed that the title was deliberately provocative to increase sales potential. But the more I read, the more I realized that Smith was describing something very real that is happening right now in our culture. And as Smith puts it in the book, “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
To begin, it’s important to define some of the basic terms the book employs. By “traditional religion” Smith has in mind “religious groups that have existed for multiple generations, that have established practices, doctrines, organizational structures, and cultures.” This obviously goes beyond Christian churches to include Mormons, Muslims, and Hindus.
But the really shocking claim is that these traditional religions have become obsolete. At first I stumbled over that term. Has religion declined? Of course. But can one claim it obsolete when millions of believers gather in churches, mosques, and other houses of worship every week? For Smith, obsolescence happens when “most people feel that something is no longer useful or needed because it has been superseded in function, efficiency, value, or interest.” Of course, he is not claiming that religion has disappeared, but that for an increasing number of especially younger generations, it just doesn’t work.
Perhaps it’s because of my own deep immersion in traditional religion, but I found myself hesitant to accept obsolescence. He uses the analogy of the electric typewriter. They may still be around, but they’re not useful, and hence, we store them in the closet. I don’t see religion in quite that state of obsolescence, but it certainly may be well on the way.
This decline of religion in our culture is not news to anyone who has been half-awake. We have read about the startling increase of the so-called “nones” over the last few decades. And if you are like me, you have seen it in our increasingly gray-headed congregations, and in your own families, as children and grandchildren leave the church behind. What Smith does in this remarkably thorough book is to describe what he called the “perfect storm” toward religious obsolescence that we have experienced in the past fifty years.
Every chapter is filled with massively detailed survey results along with vivid descriptions of the religious and cultural realities of our lives. Alongside these hard facts, there are revealing quotations from various individuals reflecting on their attitudes toward religion and religious institutions.
The descriptive heart of the book has two main sections. The first is called “Perfect Storms Converging.” In this, the longest section of the book, Smith offers detailed descriptions of the various religious trends and historical events that have shaped this growing obsolescence.
First, he discusses the social trends that have impacted religious institutions over the last fifty years. These include:
- Growth of mass higher education which has largely neglected traditional religion, or deemed it irrational
- Deinstitutionalization of marriage and family
- Declining participation in face-to-face membership associations
- Mass consumerism
- Expressive individualism
- Emerging Adulthood
Again, these trends and their effect on religion and religious institutions are all described in comprehensive and compelling detail.
Second, Smith focuses specifically on the religious environment of the past fifty years. He describes such religious trends as:
- The decline and weakening of both Mainline and Roman Catholic institutions
- The “ersatz warfare of science and religion”
- The downplay of transcendence and the rise of moralism
- The rise of televangelism and the religious right
- The general decline of confidence in organized religion
Then Smith moves into specific decades and the events that deeply affected religious institutions. First, the 90’s, with the end of the cold war that dominated the previous decades. This also included the advent of the internet and social media, deep changes in sexual mores and practices, the rise of “pop post-modernism,” and intensive parenting. Secondly, the 2000’s with 9/11 and its association of violence with religion, religious pluralism, increasing religious fundamentalism, the new atheism, “spiritual but not religious,” and the rise of the “nones.” And, on top of all that, the increase of “religious self-destruction,” with clergy abuse, evangelical “me and God” spirituality, biblicism, and politicization.
This perfect storm of cultural and religious change leads to what Smith calls the current “Millennial Zeitgeist.” In the closing third of the book he describes the cultural atmospheres, moods of an era, and feelings in the air of the current era. Here we see the defining events, public figures, artistic expressions, styles and slogans that surround us today.
In analyzing these “spirits in the air,” Smith argues that while there is a decreasing interest and participation in traditional religion, there is also an increased interest in and openness to all kinds of different sources of spirituality. Whether it’s found in mushrooms or Reiki, in alternative religions or grunge rock, the search is on for experiences that reach beyond purely natural life.
Having passed through a period of profound disenchantment exemplified in the naturalism of the Enlightenment, many people who find themselves in a spiritual wasteland now search for some kind of re-enchantment. However, it is typically not found in traditional religious institutions, but in other, often esoteric sources. There is a deep longing for the beyond, however that may be described or experienced, but typically not in the language of traditional religion.
Smith closes with the lament that “the story…is a dismal one for traditional religion. The long-term macro transformations, the Millennial zeitgeist, and religious obsolescence have led to throngs of post-Boomers exiting traditional religion.” Having said that, he asks, what then can we learn? There is the solid reality that strong participation in traditional religious institutions early in life tends to continue on through. But with each successive recent generation the level of participation has waned, leading to the inevitable conclusion that there are “no sociological reasons to believe traditional religion will somehow bounce back from obsolescence to a new vigor….Still, to borrow from the biblical parable, perhaps a season has come for traditional religion’s remaining seeds to fall to the ground and appear to die so that some much more fruitful life can be born.”
For myself, I wonder whether one area of rebirth might come from what theologian Richard Beck argues in several of his books and recent Substack articles as a new alignment with the deeply mystical traditions of an earlier era. Figures like Pseudo-Dionysius envisioned ways in which the liturgy of the church, and especially the Eucharist, can be experienced as profound avenues by which we experience deeper unity with God in what the Church Fathers called “deification.”
As Beck writes, “for the most part I don’t think we know what worship is ‘for.’ Worship mainly seems to be a moralistic and therapeutic exercise. We worship God because we are told to do so, we’re following the rules, and we also hope to get something out of it by way of insight, inspiration, or social connection. Liturgy as theurgy, however, brings in a spookier, more mystical, more ontological element. Liturgy, as the theurgic work of God, lifts us into the divine presence where we, ourselves, become more godlike in divinization and deification. This is a view of worship ancient Christians would have readily understood which we, by contrast, find pretty weird.
While the church has, over the last few decades, strived hard to achieve relevance and acceptance, perhaps the route of the next few decades is to live into the weirdness that is at the heart of our faith, that we are meant finally for union with God.
This is a very important book, and one that every Christian leader needs to study in order to understand the fundamental shifts in religion that are taking place in our culture. Then it may help us to prayerfully anticipate what the Spirit might be calling us toward in the future.
Leonard Vander Zee
Leonard Vander Zee is a retired pastor in the Christian Reformed Church, married to Jeanne Logan, and father of four and grandfather of 12. Besides serving as occasional Interim Pastor he loves playing tennis, pickleball, and golf, and reading the theology of the church fathers. He is author of Christ, Baptism, and the Lord's Supper (IVP, 2004).
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