Why Religion Went Obsolete: Not by Secularization Alone
The story of my recent book, Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America, presents an empirical challenge to traditional secularization theory, which holds that, as societies become more modern and developed, they will become more secular. While traditional religion has declined in the United States, it has not been replaced by sheer secularism. Religious obsolescence in the United States has not meant the disappearance of the sacred, spiritual, magical, enchanted, supernatural, occult, ecstatic, or divine. They remain alive and well.
The sacred and ecstatic have migrated to new locations. The spiritual is reconstituted in new forms. Old divinities are replaced with new and sometimes even older ones. One has to crawl under a rock to escape popular interest in spirituality, magic, and occulture. But to see that, one needs to discard certain theoretical blinders. The cultural field of play today is not a binary one on which two teams face off and battle for supremacy. The field is occupied by many competitors playing different games, some clusters of which do not even look like teams. Far from religion’s growing obsolescence entailing the triumph of secularity, then, the American experience demonstrates instead the relocating and morphing of religionish things to nontraditional sites and expressions.
While some of the causes of religious obsolescence were secularizing forces, many others were pressures from competing alternative religions and quasi-religions and spiritualities. American society has indeed become more secular in some ways. But it has also become re-enchanted by spirituality and occulture in other ways that belie any inexorable march to secularity. Max Weber would smile wryly about American religion helping to dig its own grave. But he would be confounded by the reversal of disenchantment in contemporary American culture. And while these other forms of enchantment compete with religion, they outright reject a secularist cosmology. The American case thus disappoints skeptical Enlightenment hopes for the arrival of a rational, scientific, secular social order—and its academic counterpart, secularization theory.
Secularization theory is not flat wrong, which helps explain its longevity. But it is part blind and untenably overachieving. An adequate sociology of religion requires more complex, nuanced, and context-dependent theoretical accounts. Traditional secularization theory, far from being “beyond doubt,” needs to be revised as not a master narrative of modernity but instead as one set of causal mechanisms that sometimes but not always or in the same ways tend to move some societies in secular directions. Secularization happens. But so do a lot of other processes, including ones that perpetuate and strengthen the sacred, spiritual, enchanted, magical, supernatural, occult, ecstatic, and divine in modern life—even if outside the structures of traditional religion.
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I was, while working on this project, often asked whether religions do not simply run through cycles of strength and decline. Might we expect a religious revival sometime in the future? The answer is: such foreseeable cycles do not exist, neo-positivist wishful thinking notwithstanding. History and social life are too particular and volatile for such things. More generally, we should take seriously the droll saying, “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” Some may hope that a post–Gen Z generation will in time revive traditional religion. But, at present, nothing on the sociological horizon indicates this as likely. Quite the opposite. Nothing in the 2010s or early 2020s fundamentally reversed any of the big forces of change let loose in the 1990s and 2000s. If anything, they have intensified. American traditional religion is, for post-Boomers, now culturally polluted, and that contamination cannot be quickly and easily cleaned up. At some point, the decline of religion will have to plateau, if for no other reason than that fewer religious people will be left to leave. But leveling off is not revival. History suggests that colossal socioeconomic disruptions—like a major global economic depression or societal breakdown due to global overheating and climate change—would likely incite popular (if short-lived) enthusiasm for different religions. But precedent also says to expect them to be apocalyptic, sectarian, and cultish, not traditional.
Beyond that, I can only offer a final bit of empirical evidence from my Millennial Zeitgeist Survey. The data do not yield a reliable forecast but do provide glimpses of generational differences that can inform thinking about the near term. First, our survey asked respondents to choose which of the following best describes their upbringing:
• I was raised in a strongly religious household.
• I was raised in a moderately religious household.
• I was raised in a weakly religious household.
• I was not raised in a religious household, but one that was open to spiritual things.
• I was not raised in a religious nor spiritual household.
• Don’t know.
Their answers show that each successive generation from Boomers to Millennials was raised in a slightly less strongly religious household. 23% of Boomers, 21% of Gen Xers, and 20% of Millennials said they were raised in a strongly religious household. Similar modest declines are evident for those raised in moderately religious households. Trends moved in opposite directions for those raised in not-religious households open to spiritual things (5% Boomers, 5% Gen Xers, 10% Millennials) and in households that were neither religious nor spiritual (8% Boomers, 10% Gen Xers, 14% Millennials). Millennials and Gen Xers were also sixteen times more likely than Boomers to say “Don’t know,” which tells us about religious apathy and illiteracy.
We know that the strongest statistical association with being religious as an adult is having been raised religiously as a child. Parents are usually the most important influence shaping the religious lives of American youth. The kinds of religious families in which our survey respondents were raised is also strongly associated with their current frequency of religious service attendance. This means that—in the absence of some unexpected event or force that overrides these powerful dynamics—the decline in younger generations being raised in strongly religious households offers no sociological reason to believe that traditional religion will somehow bounce back from obsolescence to a new vigor.
We also directly asked respondents in our survey whether they thought that, in the next five years, they would become more religious, less religious, or stay about the same religiously. Most said they expected to stay the same: 65% of Boomers and 58% each of Gen Xers and Millennials. Since younger generations are as a baseline already less religious than older ones, this means that, if they stick to their expectations, they will remain at those lower levels of religiousness. Five percent of Boomers said they would become less religious, compared to 8% of Gen Xers and 10% of Millennials who said the same. As to becoming more religious, 24% of Boomers, 26% of Gen Xers, and 21% of Millennials said they thought they would. And, again, the younger the generation, the more likely to answer “Don’t know.”
Predictions such as these are of course not necessarily reliable. For example, in a national study I conducted in 2005, 53% of Millennials said that they expected to be attending religious services when they were thirty years old, but, in 2023, only 21% of Millennials were attending religious services twice a month or more often. Young emerging adult Millennials grossly overestimated how religious they would be two decades into the future. In short, the vast majority of Americans are not expecting to become any more religious in coming years. And the minority of post-Boomers who do think they may become more religious are starting from relatively lower levels of religiousness. Even if they do become more religious, that might only move them into the “somewhat” religious range, hardly enough to return American traditional religion to anything like its former glory. In short, the best guess about what the coming decades may look like for traditional religion is what recent decades have actually looked like, only more so.
Less difficult than predicting religion’s future is anticipating some of the likely social consequences of religion’s obsolescence. Observers have already noted an increase in Americans’ feelings of isolation and loneliness, which can be attributed to many factors, including decreased participation in religious congregations. Social capital and trust in the United States will likely grow thinner as the consequences of religion’s obsolescence play out, not generally in ways most consider good for people and societies. In the past, religion has served as a key resource for many people’s mental and emotional coping, meaning-making, and social support—even if for some others “religious trauma” and “spiritual abuse” have been damaging.
So we should not be surprised if religious obsolescence leads to increased mental health problems—which is already reported to be happening in “epidemic” proportions among younger generations. Sociologists have demonstrated that religion has numerous prosocial effects, so other socially deleterious results will also likely follow the declining vitality of American religion. Having said that, it would be futile for “society” to try to bolster traditional religion just to sustain these benefits. Embracing such instrumentalist ways of legitimizing itself is part of what set religion up for obsolescence in the first place.
Forecasting the future is not in the sociologist’s job description. History is full of surprises. But nothing on the sociological radar screen suggests anything but the continued obsolescence of traditional religion in the coming years, along with the growing influences of re-enchanted spirituality and occulture. Religion will not go extinct. But it will likely remain a marginalized species in an unfavorable American sociocultural ecosystem.
Among the more unlikely but not impossible of history’s surprises would be if American traditional religions turned their difficult predicament into an opportunity for self-critical soul-searching. What, finally, are they trying to do and why? What are essential to their traditions’ core identities and missions—without which they would not be themselves—versus cultural positions that may seem non- negotiable but are actually liabilities? Viewed sociologically, scrambling to keep the status quo intact while still somehow becoming more “relevant”—especially according to standards of relevance defined not by the religious traditions themselves—is a losing proposition. So are defensive retrenchments and the staking of “faithfulness” on the fighting of culture wars, not to mention religious nationalism. And simply “liberalizing” traditional religion does not have an impressive track record of success.
Present conditions would seem instead to commend a more brutally honest “Come to Jesus” (if I may) confrontation with the extent of traditional religion’s current predicament. As James Baldwin once observed, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” What might come of such deep soul-searching is anyone’s guess. Any kind of major transformation would be risky, would certainly produce further numerical losses in the short term, and might very well fail. Still, to borrow from a biblical parable, perhaps a season has come for traditional religion’s remaining seeds to fall into the ground and appear to die so that some much more fruitful life might be born.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted with permission from Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America by Christian Smith. Copyright @2025 by Oxford University Press.