Why "Why Religion Went Obsolete" Hit Me So Hard
Part one of my examination of Christian Smith's book
TL;DR: Christian Smith’s Why Religion Went Obsolete is basically a sociological autopsy of American religion. His argument: cultural shifts + self-inflicted wounds from both Mainline Protestantism and Evangelicalism made traditional religion obsolete. The takeaway? The church needs honest soul-searching about what actually makes it the church—and must form children in a compelling, identity-shaping faith.
I want to write a fuller post on Christian Smith’s dense and rigorous book Why Religion Went Obsolete, but it’s the Monday of Thanksgiving week, I’m home with kids, and I’m fighting off a cold I caught from my son. So these thoughts will be brief, underdeveloped, and maybe a bit foggy.
Smith’s book reads like a long, drawn-out autopsy—almost a much more academic version of Thom Rainer’s Autopsy of a Deceased Church. What Smith does is lay out both (a) the massive cultural shifts in American society since the height of American religiosity in the 1950s, and (b) the many tactical, structural, and theological errors that traditional religion—especially American Christianity—committed along the way.
Here are a few quick takeaways as I finished the book last night:
Every attempt to make Christianity more “relevant” backfired spectacularly.
Mainline Protestantism, in particular, reframed Christianity as something like a moral civics project. Smith quotes Jay Demerath:
“Over time, liberal Protestantism’s core values—individualism, pluralism, emancipation, tolerance, free critical inquiry, and the authority of human experience—so permeated broader American culture that its own churches… had difficulty surviving.” (102)
In other words, Mainline churches succeeded in shaping culture so thoroughly that their distinctive voice was no longer needed.
Smith adds:
“Nobody seemed to notice that religious control is an inherent risk… of Americans’ shared expectation that religion exists to make people be good.” (272)
In short, some element of control is essential to “make” people good. It becomes about behavior management, not transformation, which hardly jives with our American individualism and certainly isn’t very fun.
Evangelicalism has its own version of this problem.
The evangelical move to emphasize a “personal relationship with God” unintentionally helped shape the culture’s broader embrace of individualized spirituality. Smith writes:
“This ironic migration of ‘personal relationship with God’ from evangelicalism to individualistic spirituality… contributed to traditional religion’s obsolescence—namely, the valorization of individual subjectivity as the seat of authenticity and authority.” (257)
And ironically, evangelicalism itself is deeply modern:
“Evangelicalism’s roots… sink no deeper than the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries… it is bound by—even captive to—modernity.” (258)
It also made me think of The Church Must Grow or Perish (Martí & Mulder), which basically shows how Schuller’s relevance-driven innovations worked in his moment but ended up creating some pretty serious unintended consequences later on.
Smith is absolutely not a fan of theological liberalism. At all.
He writes:
“One of the theological sources [of religion’s decline] is a certain stream of nineteenth-century Protestant theological liberalism.” (108)
And:
“The moralizing of religion and its sidelining of transcendent themes are analogous to a disease sapping religion’s strength as a species.” (116)
And, maybe the clearest summary:
“When religion becomes a ‘concept’… rather than one’s identity, life, and salvation, it generates less commitment and investment.” (116)
And finally, lest there be any doubt:
“‘liberalizing’ traditional religion does not have an impressive track record. “ (373)
Postmodernism didn’t help anything.
Smith writes:
“Postmodernism turns out to have been a strange mixture of some valid, important critiques… and an intoxicating brew of intellectual hyperbole, discursive silliness, and moral irresponsibility.” (151)
He also notes that thinkers like Foucault and Rorty had a significant influence on thinking about religion. As I read this, I couldn’t help thinking about how much of this postmodern shift infiltrated Mainline theological education. Even when people weren’t reading Foucault directly, the broader vibe—suspicion of authority, elevation of personal experience, moral ambiguity—was in the air, and it shaped how a generation of clergy learned to think.
Religion didn’t lose because secularism won. It lost because other things did “religion” better.
Smith writes:
“Religion did not become obsolete because secularity won the day. Religion lost out because alternatives that are actually more like religion than secularism emerged as cultural options that proved attractive to many post-Boomers.” (335)
And:
“When religion accommodated pluralism, it became milquetoast. When it proclaimed a distinctive message, it was narrow-minded.” (367)
It was a no-win landscape.
And in that vacuum, things like sports, identity politics, wellness culture, therapy, and lifestyle branding moved in to offer moral meaning, ritual, community, identity, and purpose.
He also notes that people are finding transcendence in concerts and art.
Smith ends by calling for honest soul-searching.
He writes:
“What, finally, are they trying to do and why?
What are essential to their traditions’ core identities and missions… versus cultural positions that may seem nonnegotiable but are actually liabilities?” (372)
And he reminds readers of one of the strongest sociological correlations in the entire field:
“The strongest statistical association with being religious as an adult is having been raised religiously as a child.” (371)
Meaning: if the church wants a future, it must form children in deep, identity-shaping, imaginative faith—not moralism, politics, or generic spirituality.
Final (Thanksgiving-week, cold-medicine) thought:
The book is not cheerful. It’s not inspirational. It’s not even particularly pastoral. But it is clarifying. And it forces the question:
What is the church actually for—and what would it mean to rebuild ourselves around that answer?
Finishing Smith’s book made me wonder whether decline is inevitable—or whether the church might be closer to a turning point than we realize. Gladwell talks about “tipping points,” those surprising moments when slow, hidden change suddenly becomes visible. In Part 2, I want to explore what a tipping point for the church could look like, and whether there are signs we might already be approaching one.