Ten Theology Books to Watch For – April 2025

Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America

Christian Smith

(Oxford UP)

Is traditional American religion doomed?

Traditional religion in the United States has suffered huge losses in recent decades. The number of Americans identifying as “not religious” has increased remarkably. Religious affiliation, service attendance, and belief in God have declined. More and more people claim to be “spiritual but not religious.” Religious organizations have been reeling from revelations of sexual and financial scandals and cover-ups. Public trust in “organized religion” has declined significantly. Crucially, these religious losses are concentrated among younger generations. This means that, barring unlikely religious revivals among youth, the losses will continue and accelerate in time, as less-religious younger Americans replace older more-religious ones and increasingly fewer American children are raised by religious parents.

All this is clear. But what is less clear is exactly why this is happening. We know a lot more about the fact that traditional American religion has declined than we do about why this is so.

Why Religion Went Obsolete aims to change that. Drawing on survey data and hundreds of interviews, Christian Smith offers a sweeping, multifaceted account of why many Americans have lost faith in traditional religion. An array of large-scale social forces-everything from the end of the Cold War to the rise of the internet to shifting ideas about gender and sexuality-came together to render traditional religion culturally obsolete. For growing numbers of Americans, traditional religion no longer seems useful or relevant. Using quantitative empirical measures of big-picture changes over time as well as exploring the larger cultural environment–the cultural “zeitgeist”–Smith explains why this is the case and what it means for the future. Crucially, he argues, it does not mean a strictly secular future. Rather, Americans’ spiritual impulses are being channelled in new and interesting directions.

Why Religion Went Obsolete is a tour de force from one of our leading chroniclers of religion in America.

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The Business of Incarceration: Theological and Ethical Reflections on the Prison-Industrial Complex

Justin Bronson Barringer, Sarah F. Farmer, James McCarty

(Cascade Books)

There has been perhaps no political issue in contemporary America able to garner as widespread agreement as the need to end our system of mass incarceration. Racial justice advocates, fiscal conservatives, prison abolitionists, and more believe that America incarcerates far too many of its people. This book provides tools for Christians seeking to understand this massive social injustice, its theological and historical origins, and faithful ways of resisting and ending this system.

The Business of Incarceration places the political-economic system that is the prison-industrial complex at the center of the story it tells, the analysis it provides, and the engagement it recommends. The second volume in The Business of Modern Life series, this book extends the groundbreaking theo-ethical analysis in The Business of War: Theological and Ethical Reflections on the Military-Industrial Complex to another social sphere that is supposedly oriented to the common good but is now dominated by logics of market and profit-making.

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