Why religion went obsolete - Part 4
This is Part 4 in a blog series I’m calling “Why Religion Went Obsolete,” a synopsis of and reflection on Christian Smith’s 2025 book by the same title.
Smith argues that a multitude of macro and micro forces coalesced in the 1990’s and 2000’s to form a cultural “perfect storm” that effectively put traditional religion out of business. It isn’t that most people today are anti-religion. Quite the contrary. The dominant cultural view today is, “if religion works for you, go for it.”
It’s just that religion doesn’t seem to be working for most people.
But not because they’ve tried it and found it wanting. That is no doubt true for some. Western culture has seen a dramatic increase in the number of people who identify as “dones,” meaning “I’ve tried religion and I’m done with it.” Most young people, however, and this is becoming truer with each new generation, have no experience with religion because they’ve grown up in a post-religious culture, perhaps raised by “dones.”
If traditional religion went obsolete in the 1990’s and 2000’s, most young people today have simply never experienced it. Again, it’s not that their anti-religious. It’s simply that religion has never been a viable option for them. If you are a religious person that may be hard for you to get your mind around, which is why Smith spends an entire chapter offering his readers a number of metaphors that help those of us who take traditional religion for granted appreciate the cultural waters people are now swimming in.
For instance, traditional religion’s decline in the cultural world might be compared to “species decline” in the natural world. In the same that that species decline can typically be traced back to causes such as pathogens, parasites, diseases, invasive species, habitat loss, pollution, overharvesting, or climate change, we might trace traditional religion’s decline to analogues in the cultural world. What “invasive species” have moved into traditional religion’s “territory,” competing for resources? Are there “pollutants” in the cultural air making everyone “sick?”
Just as an avalanche is the result of snow, ice, and rock breaking off a mountain at just the time and coalescing to produce a movement with inertia and momentum capable of sweeping up everything in its path, Smith argues that the perfect combination of cultural factors “broke off” from a previously stable reality creating an avalanche that simply changed the cultural landscape.
What that means is today we have what theorists refer to as “cultural mismatch.” Cultural mismatch is a theory that seeks to explain why certain students underperform in certain environments relative to their objective intelligence. The idea is that culture plays a major factor. If my native culture is communal, “disorganized,” and loud I may struggle in an educational environment shaped by cultural values such as individualism, independence, and self-direction.
My wife, Kari, is an 8th-grade math teacher. She did her student teaching at a school where most of the students came from cultures different from her own. They planned to take a field trip to a local concert hall. To help prepare students, she told them they wear nicer clothes than they might typically wear to school. She told them to wear “church clothes.” She expected khakis and polo shirts. She was shocked when all of her students showed up to school the day of the concert wearing suits and formal dresses.
That’s cultural mismatch.
If traditional religion is the “student,” it flourished when cultural values, norms, assumptions, and expectations matched its own. That is no longer the case and traditional religion is struggling to perform. Not because it isn’t “intelligent” or “talented” but simply because it is being asked to perform in a world that operates according to different take-for-granted assumptions and speaks an entirely different language. And Smith argues that because most people are now growing up in that cultural world, a culture mismatched from the values, norms, and expectations of traditional religion, traditional seems entirely foreign to them and therefore a non-thought.
If you’re a Christian person, for instance, have you ever seriously entertained the idea of becoming Muslim or Hindu? Probably not. You may have considered an alternative form of Christianity but probably not joining a different faith altogether.
That’s what it’s like for most people growing up in western culture today. They’re not anti-Christian anymore than you’re anti-Buddhist. They simply haven’t grown up Christian, and due to cultural mismatch, they entertain the prospect of becoming Christian about as seriously as you entertain the prospect of becoming Wiccan.
Culture today is shaped by what Smith calls the “Millennial Zeitgeist,” taken-for-granted norms, values, assumptions, and expectations that are mostly at odds with traditional religion so that traditional religion simply does not “vibe.”[1]
In my next post of this series I’ll highlight some of what makes up this Millennial Zeitgeist before spending my last post reflecting on what traditional religion ought to do in a moment such as this, but I find this concept of cultural mismatch both helpful in explaining my experience as a traditionally religious person (and cleric) in contemporary western society, and hopeful.
Christianity has been adapting to different cultures, many of which have been hostile, for 2,000 years. This is our specialty. It’s what we do. It’s just that American Christians have never had to. We’re looking at the changing cultural landscape and crying “the sky is falling,” but the truth is the comfortable reality we once knew is simply changing. We may not like that, but instead of trying to get culture to return to whatever “stable” condition we thought it once had, which I suspect will only make the current avalanche move down the mountain with greater force, we have to adapt.
[1] To use a word that expresses one of the components of the Millennial Zeitgeist, how truth is more felt than intellectually worked out.
Smith argues that a multitude of macro and micro forces coalesced in the 1990’s and 2000’s to form a cultural “perfect storm” that effectively put traditional religion out of business. It isn’t that most people today are anti-religion. Quite the contrary. The dominant cultural view today is, “if religion works for you, go for it.”
It’s just that religion doesn’t seem to be working for most people.
But not because they’ve tried it and found it wanting. That is no doubt true for some. Western culture has seen a dramatic increase in the number of people who identify as “dones,” meaning “I’ve tried religion and I’m done with it.” Most young people, however, and this is becoming truer with each new generation, have no experience with religion because they’ve grown up in a post-religious culture, perhaps raised by “dones.”
If traditional religion went obsolete in the 1990’s and 2000’s, most young people today have simply never experienced it. Again, it’s not that their anti-religious. It’s simply that religion has never been a viable option for them. If you are a religious person that may be hard for you to get your mind around, which is why Smith spends an entire chapter offering his readers a number of metaphors that help those of us who take traditional religion for granted appreciate the cultural waters people are now swimming in.
For instance, traditional religion’s decline in the cultural world might be compared to “species decline” in the natural world. In the same that that species decline can typically be traced back to causes such as pathogens, parasites, diseases, invasive species, habitat loss, pollution, overharvesting, or climate change, we might trace traditional religion’s decline to analogues in the cultural world. What “invasive species” have moved into traditional religion’s “territory,” competing for resources? Are there “pollutants” in the cultural air making everyone “sick?”
Just as an avalanche is the result of snow, ice, and rock breaking off a mountain at just the time and coalescing to produce a movement with inertia and momentum capable of sweeping up everything in its path, Smith argues that the perfect combination of cultural factors “broke off” from a previously stable reality creating an avalanche that simply changed the cultural landscape.
What that means is today we have what theorists refer to as “cultural mismatch.” Cultural mismatch is a theory that seeks to explain why certain students underperform in certain environments relative to their objective intelligence. The idea is that culture plays a major factor. If my native culture is communal, “disorganized,” and loud I may struggle in an educational environment shaped by cultural values such as individualism, independence, and self-direction.
My wife, Kari, is an 8th-grade math teacher. She did her student teaching at a school where most of the students came from cultures different from her own. They planned to take a field trip to a local concert hall. To help prepare students, she told them they wear nicer clothes than they might typically wear to school. She told them to wear “church clothes.” She expected khakis and polo shirts. She was shocked when all of her students showed up to school the day of the concert wearing suits and formal dresses.
That’s cultural mismatch.
If traditional religion is the “student,” it flourished when cultural values, norms, assumptions, and expectations matched its own. That is no longer the case and traditional religion is struggling to perform. Not because it isn’t “intelligent” or “talented” but simply because it is being asked to perform in a world that operates according to different take-for-granted assumptions and speaks an entirely different language. And Smith argues that because most people are now growing up in that cultural world, a culture mismatched from the values, norms, and expectations of traditional religion, traditional seems entirely foreign to them and therefore a non-thought.
If you’re a Christian person, for instance, have you ever seriously entertained the idea of becoming Muslim or Hindu? Probably not. You may have considered an alternative form of Christianity but probably not joining a different faith altogether.
That’s what it’s like for most people growing up in western culture today. They’re not anti-Christian anymore than you’re anti-Buddhist. They simply haven’t grown up Christian, and due to cultural mismatch, they entertain the prospect of becoming Christian about as seriously as you entertain the prospect of becoming Wiccan.
Culture today is shaped by what Smith calls the “Millennial Zeitgeist,” taken-for-granted norms, values, assumptions, and expectations that are mostly at odds with traditional religion so that traditional religion simply does not “vibe.”[1]
In my next post of this series I’ll highlight some of what makes up this Millennial Zeitgeist before spending my last post reflecting on what traditional religion ought to do in a moment such as this, but I find this concept of cultural mismatch both helpful in explaining my experience as a traditionally religious person (and cleric) in contemporary western society, and hopeful.
Christianity has been adapting to different cultures, many of which have been hostile, for 2,000 years. This is our specialty. It’s what we do. It’s just that American Christians have never had to. We’re looking at the changing cultural landscape and crying “the sky is falling,” but the truth is the comfortable reality we once knew is simply changing. We may not like that, but instead of trying to get culture to return to whatever “stable” condition we thought it once had, which I suspect will only make the current avalanche move down the mountain with greater force, we have to adapt.
[1] To use a word that expresses one of the components of the Millennial Zeitgeist, how truth is more felt than intellectually worked out.
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