Christianity is Not Dead Yet

On religion's demise and surprising rebirth

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Is traditional religion obsolete, or is there a surprising rebirth of belief in God among the post-Boomers? Depending on what you’re reading/listening to at the moment, the answer is “Yes.”

My friend and fellow analyst Justin Brierley has been doing lots of work on the latter thesis, in book and longform podcast form. The second season of the podcast is rolling out now and has a somewhat more political flavor than the first. I admit I was a bit apprehensive about this and hoped Brierley had assembled some voices who could address these dynamics without attempting the sort of fruitless “third-way-ism” which boils down to never punching left. Happily, he did, including people I wasn’t familiar with before but am glad to have discovered. If podcasts are your tea, this continues to be a good listen. Later in this post, I’m going to pick out one particularly encouraging featured story from a new episode on the rise of religion among young men.

But a new book by sociologist Christian Smith offers a more pessimistic take, with particular focus on Smith’s own American context. Entitled Why Religion Went Obsolete, it identifies the many and varied factors that created a perfect storm for the decline (or as the subtitle more dramatically puts it, the “demise”) of America’s major faith traditions. Smith defines these at the outset as long-established religions with authoritative texts that wouldn’t be considered novel or fringe by the American populace. So white and black Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, and so on. (He also throws in the Mormons, which I suppose I can understand culturally, though it feels like they’ve cheated their way in here. No offense to any nice Mormons who might be reading this. I just say in all love, you’ve been had.) He excludes Islam, interestingly and I think correctly. Whole books could be written on why Judaism fits within a study of American religious sociology and Islam doesn’t. There’s a sleazy conspiracist tone of voice in which one could say it’s impossible to imagine America without the Jews, but I’ve said it with complete sincerity.

I might review Smith’s book later, though book reviews are time-consuming, so we’ll see. This was actually my first focused exposure to his work, even though I’ve used his popular coinage “moralistic therapeutic deism” any number of times. There’s much in this new book that I found interesting, along with some analysis that felt shallow and tipped Smith’s own political hand more than felt appropriate for a work aspiring to academic objectivity. For now, I just want to put some of it in conversation with some of Brierley’s work, along with some of my own observations as an analyst with a foot in each of their spaces.

Speaking of that work, pause for a quick plug: In my ARC report, I mentioned that Justin and I had recorded a couple things together. You can now watch our short chat with writer/speaker/professional troll James Lindsay here. We’ve gotten blowback from people for engaging with James at all, given his provocative track record and given that he does seem to wander into the interpretive weeds with some frequency around Christian doctrine. This is driven by James’ commitment to liberalism, coupled with an intense aversion to Christian authoritarianism. James has even been accused of pretending to be interested in Christianity as part of a longform troll. We’re not inclined to think that’s the case, but we obviously also don’t agree with everything he puts out there. However, we didn’t believe that was a prerequisite for having a conversation and sharing the gospel with him. So if this sort of thing interests you, enjoy!

Back to Justin and Christian Smith: As apologist and sociologist, respectively, they have different roles in the discourse, not to mention they’re assessing the situation from literally opposite sides of an ocean. They might share the same hopes for people’s salvation, but they’re not exactly working towards the same purpose or within the same context. So if I say there’s a sense in which they seem to be working in each other’s blind spots, I don’t mean to just accuse Smith of over-pessimistic ignorance, and likewise I don’t mean to accuse Brierley of naive over-optimism. But I think each distinctly puts a finger on something worth drawing out.

I also want to pull in another relevant forthcoming book that I just reviewed for First Things (coming soon in their summer print issue) called Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever, by a hotly-tipped young British writer named Lamorna Ash. Hers is also a sociological work in its way, but pitched as a personal travelogue, chronicling her encounters with fellow millennials and Gen Zers who have fallen in and out of various iterations of Christianity. Ash is on something of a quest herself, one that doesn’t lead her to any clear answers, which for her is rather the point. Among other running themes, her active and unapologetic bisexuality is a persistent sharp point of tension with little “o” orthodox Christian denominations.