Christianity isn't just in decline — it's become obsolete, says sociologist

Christian Smith says that traditional religion hasn’t merely lost adherents — it’s become culturally obsolete. That’s the claim at the heart of his 2025 book, Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America. Smith spoke with me over Zoom from St. Petersburg, Fla., after recently retiring as the University of Notre Dame’s William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology. “Religion hasn’t just declined in organizational or numerical terms,” he tells me. “It has undergone something deeper — something at a cultural level.”

When we talk about religion’s fate, Smith observes, we almost always reach for the language of decline. It directs attention to measurable outcomes: attendance numbers, membership rolls, survey results. Those measures matter, he says — in fact, his case is built on data analysis and hundreds of interviews — but they capture only a sliver of the story.

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He urges us to shift our gaze from church stats to the cultural currents shaping everyday life. “In the current zeitgeist, traditional religion just doesn’t make sense,” he says. By “traditional religion,” Smith means the institutional faiths that have long shaped American life, like Catholicism, mainline Protestantism, white evangelicalism, Black Protestantism and Mormonism. And the problem isn’t simply about belief, or lack thereof. “It doesn’t fit ordinary life — not in a cognitive or theological way, but in a cultural vibe way.”

In the United States, the cultural shifts Smith identifies began in the early 1990s and accelerated through the 2000s. Their effects are generational: each cohort — from baby boomers to gen X, millennials and now gen Z — has been progressively less religious than the one before. Millennials, he notes, are the “pivot generation,” coming of age in a world where traditional religion no longer resonated as it once had. (The Canadian case suggests a parallel dynamic unspooling on an earlier timeline.)

To illustrate his point, Smith turns to metaphor. Take vinyl records, he says. Vinyl didn’t fail, and it wasn’t inferior. In terms of sound quality, he notes, it may even be better. But it was overtaken by new formats that fit better with changing habits. Streaming music, for all its compression and loss, is easier to fold into everyday routines.

So when Smith calls traditional religion “obsolete,” he’s careful to strip the word of judgment. “I’m not saying it’s bad, wrong, stupid, useless,” he says. Religious people remain. However, “at a cultural level, something has shifted.”

Smith points to 1991 as an epoch-altering year. Politically, the Cold War ended, and the Reagan-Bush era was waning. Economically, globalization ramped up, reshaping markets, consumption and daily life. Culturally, Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit and Seinfeld’s “show about nothing” signalled a broader reorientation of values and sensibilities. Religiously, surveys recorded what would become a lasting shift as the share of Americans identifying as non-religious began to climb.

“It was the end of one moral and symbolic order,” he says, “and the beginning of something quite different.” By the early 2000s, the conditions for religion’s cultural eclipse had already been established. Then came the shock of 9/11, enabling New Atheists like Richard Dawkins to gain traction and to cast religion as a public problem rather than a resource.

Along with globalization and mass consumer capitalism, the digital revolution reshaped the cultural milieu in which faith had once made sense. The internet, in particular, made inherited beliefs easier to question, loosened the grip of institutional gatekeepers and expanded the range of imaginable forms of belonging well beyond churches and denominations. It also brought long-suppressed denominational scandals into public view, further eroding trust in religious institutions.

Smith resists accounts framing all this as the work of enemies or ideology. “Religious conservatives often look for direct antagonists — the media, universities, atheists, secular elites — but those are minor factors,” he says.

Religion’s retreat stems less from hostility than from cultural mismatch. This includes a gap between what people have come to expect from traditional faith and what it actually offers. “Most Americans think if religion has any value, it’s because it helps people make good decisions, be moral, cope psychologically and find community,” Smith says. “Very few really care about doctrine, theology, liturgy, except in so far as it suits their style — not to mention death, heaven, afterlife, salvation, eternity.” Religious leaders are expected to be “good, moral people of integrity,” and religion is supposed to help people live well in this world.

“It doesn’t fit ordinary life — not in a cognitive or theological way, but in a cultural vibe way.”

In principle, Smith argues, traditional faith is meant to grapple with life’s darker realities. It should have had the internal resources to meet the deeper struggles of millennials — their despondency, anger and search for meaning — drawing on centuries of reflection on suffering, brokenness and redemption. Instead, by the late 20th century, traditional religion had largely redefined itself to meet prevailing cultural expectations. Many churches came to emphasize goodness, niceness and happiness, responding primarily to cultural demands for positivity.

This cultural accommodation, Smith argues, ultimately hollowed out religion’s relevance for younger generations. “Millennials — facing wars, environmental crises and economic hardship — didn’t see religion as relevant,” he observes. “Religion, packaged as ‘nice,’ didn’t resonate.”

The upshot is visible across denominations. Early 20th-century mainline Protestantism emphasized reason, science and morality, diffusing those values into the broader culture. “It worked its way out of relevance or connection when a new generation came along that was like, ‘We don’t care about secular enlightenment. We live in a dark world, and our lives are hard in various ways.’” With the possible exception of Catholicism, Smith says, religious institutions have largely abandoned ritual resources for grappling with suffering, instead reinforcing social morals and emphasizing being “nice” or uplifting. Yet helping people wrestle with difficulty is exactly what younger generations need in a world that feels chaotic and threatening.

Smith is careful not to frame this shift as simple loss. (His follow-up book, Occulture: The New Face of American Spirituality, co-authored with Matthew Coetzee and Bridget Ritz, is due out this fall.) Young people continue to seek meaning through personal spiritual practices — mystical, expressive and often consumeristic, but better aligned with the zeitgeist. Think neo-paganism, tarot, reiki, vampire hunting, manifesting, the laws of attraction and other individualized rituals. Films and TV shows such as Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and Buffy the Vampire Slayer have shaped these interests, he says, engaging with magic and morality, darkness and struggle.

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These patterns aren’t uniquely American. Looking back on my own ’90s Canadian coming-of-age, the cultural shift was palpable. Movements like grunge, together with the rise of 24-hour news cycles broadcasting the Gulf War and economic recession, contributed to a shared North American youth culture steeped in alienation, cynicism and anti-authoritarian energy. But I also recall inimitably Canadian examples of mismatch: alternative music like Our Lady Peace and Holly McNarland; comedy troupes such as Kids in the Hall; novels and media, like Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, that were defined by irony, pluralism and a growing skepticism toward authority. Churches, by contrast, faded into the background of cultural life, increasingly perceived as disconnected from young people’s outlooks and realities. By the early 2000s, the public revelations of residential school survivors made that gap impossible to ignore. In Smith’s terms, religion in Canada was losing cultural credibility.

And the gap has only widened. My millennial friends rarely step inside churches, seeking meaning instead through podcasts, retreats, psychedelics and hikes.

What, then, are religious leaders to do? Smith offers caution rather than prescription. “If deep cultural currents are driving these trends, short-term solutions won’t help,” he says. Clergy must grapple with fundamental questions: what in their traditions is essential, and how might faith speak to despair, evil and suffering today? And they must spend time outside church walls, learning how people actually live and listening to younger generations.

Smith is also clear-eyed about the limits of revival narratives. Reports of renewed interest among gen Z may reflect local phenomena — a single congregation or catchment area — but won’t reverse the larger trajectory.

Toward the end of our conversation, I ask about his own faith. He’s reflective but restrained. “Like many religious people, I have mixed experiences with faith and church,” says Smith, who’s Catholic. “That inevitably informs my perspective. But my aim is sociological: to pursue truth as best I can. Religion at its best can offer profound benefits. It’s a loss when the wisdom of grappling with life’s darker dimensions is neglected.”

Smith frames this cultural moment as an inflection point. The challenge for institutions isn’t survival but engagement: wrestling with the world as it is and finding ways to speak to those seeking more than a place to be merely “good and happy.”

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Julie McGonegal is a journalist in Elora, Ont.