Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking In Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and President to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Christian Smith is the William R. Keenan Jr. Professor of Sociology, and he’s director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame. Prior to joining the faculty there at Notre Dame, he was professor of sociology for years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his MA and PhD in sociology from Harvard University. He is the author of more than 20 books, his book, Soul Searching, and then the subsequent work Souls in Transition were the topic of previous conversations on Thinking in Public, but today it is his most recent book, Why Religion Went Obsolete that is the topic of our conversation. Professor Christian Smith, welcome to Thinking in Public.
Christian Smith:
Thank you for having me.
Albert Mohler:
Well, we’ve had conversations before. I greatly appreciate so much of your work, and as a matter of fact, you and your team contributed one of the major, I think, intellectual tools for understanding religion and in particular Christianity in America over the course of the last generation or so. That is the category of moralistic therapeutic deism. It’s a thing and you very powerfully defined it. And your work in terms of the spirituality of teenagers and young adults is still very influential as is much of your larger work in the sociology of religion. But your latest book, Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America is a little bit different, I would argue, than what you have done here to fore. So is it a different mode? Are you in a different mode here? How does it come about?
Christian Smith:
Yeah, so much of my work in the past has been focused on religious people who are still religious and what they’re doing, what parents are doing, what’s going on with teenagers and so on. This book came out of a big project that arose from conversation I had with some funders who told me that they, and this was my sense too, but they told me that a lot of people on the ground that they talk with in religious communities were just really struggling and feeling sort of like their message wasn’t getting traction like it had in the past. And I said to them, yeah, I think that’s probably happening. I said, if you really want to understand what’s going on inside religion, you have to look harder at what’s going on around religion—the context. So this project was really trying to explain something we already know pretty well. There’s a lot of data already on decline in numbers organizationally and belief, but I’m trying to make better sense of what has happened over recent decades at a cultural level that outside of religion that has really had a big impact on the life of churches and people of faith.
Albert Mohler:
Well, you actually go so far as to argue and to cut to the chase here that substantial religious faith, and you’re really talking about Christianity and its various forms in North America, is now obsolete—culturally obsolete. It is no longer socially useful. I mean, that’s an astounding claim.
Christian Smith:
So a lot of my colleagues in sociology talk about religious decline and decline usually is something that’s quantifiable. You do surveys, you find out or you find out how many, what’s the membership of a denomination, et cetera. I have had a feeling all along here that there’s more than just numerical decline, like meanings have changed, sensibilities have changed. The spirit of the age in the broader culture has changed. So, I’m trying to move up from the focus on individual beliefs or numbers of people sitting in pews to what’s going on at a macro cultural level that shapes the plausibility, especially for post-boomers. This is mostly focused on people younger than you and I, millennials, gen-Xers, gen-Zers, and the best word I could come up with to describe it was obsolescence for those generations. Not for every person. Obviously a lot of them are still religious, but at a cultural level, religion has just gone obsolete. It’s been kind of passed by or superseded by other things either in function or style. So yeah, I’m trying to change the terms or the framework of how we even think about this to expand what I think a lot of people intuitively sense. Evangelicals have been talking about what’s going on in the culture for as long as I’ve been alive. So yeah, I’m trying to, as a sociologist, I’m trying to name some things I think that have been going on.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, I think we’re also going to read a work like your latest book from a particular place, and then I’m reading it as an evangelical theologian and someone who’s been very active in terms of evangelical Protestantism and religion in the public square for my entire adult lifetime. And so I am reading your book with an inherently theological lens, and by that lens, I don’t think the Christian faith can ever be obsolete, but I do want to grant that the cultural conditions have fundamentally changed and for a large percentage of people in our larger population, something has definitely shifted in the course of the last generation or half generation. And so I think one of the helpful parts about your book is that you do look at it kind of in a periodization. So, in other words, I think if you’ve just taken it conceptually—concept by concept—it might not have held together so well. But you are tracking an historical narrative here.
Christian Smith:
Yeah, well, first I think it’s important to clarify exactly what I mean by obsolescence. I don’t mean that it’s useless or that it’s false or that it’s extinct or that nobody uses it anymore. I’m talking about the general cultural vibe of most post-boomers. So lots of people are still religious. Lots of people probably still use electric typewriters even though they’ve been made obsolete by computers. But it’s just sort of the main spirit of the age again. But that also has implications for people that still want to be religious because it’s to practice religion in a church from a sociological point of view, to practice religion in the church. It’s a collective good. It’s something people do together. You can’t just say, “Well, I’m going to do it.” You need other people participating and supporting it. So the more obsolete religion becomes, you’ll still have a minority of people that are seriously committed, say Christians, but they just have less social support around them to make that happen.
Now this book is fundamentally historical. The majority of it is given to trying to explain historical developments, most of which have nothing to do with religion. They have to do with economy, technology, organizations, changes in family structure, lots of things that—lo and behold—I’m trying to show how they affected religion nonetheless, and how they brought into being this what I call millennial zeitgeist that really doesn’t have a place for much place for religion in it may be spirituality, but not traditional religion. So there’s a strong historical element to this.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, I think a narrative helps your thesis to unfold. And so one of the points that I think I would share with you in agreement is that if you look at the situation, for example, in the late fifties and the early sixties, it certainly appeared that you added social capital by associating with brand name Christianity: Protestantism, Catholicism, or something close. And at some point that became something neutral. Now, I think you probably pay social capital in many cultural circles for associating with that. Again, brand name Christianity or confessional Christianity, any kind of traditional Christianity—it’s now no longer a cultural benefit, it’s a cultural cost. But as you say, a lot of these things happen without respect to anything internal to Christian churches.
Christian Smith:
Yeah, I think most of the most powerful forces, nobody was intending to harm traditional religion, but inventing the internet, the internet, it turns out, I argue it can help churches in some ways, but for the most part, I think it has pernicious consequences for a serious Christian discipleship and attention to the right things. So, people that invented the internet weren’t trying to hurt religion, but there are a lot of forces that have unintended consequences and sociologically, that’s really interesting. But it also makes history hard to know what’s coming down the pike and what will be the long-term consequences of things. Oftentimes, we have to look back and understand what’s already happened.
Albert Mohler:
So lay out some of these massive social changes for us.
Christian Smith:
So I mean, this goes back to mean, first of all, religion was already weakening organizationally, not evangelicalism so much, but Catholicism and mainland Protestantism for a long time. But then you have everything I’ve talked about in the book, everything from the massive entering of women into the workforce to what we call the deinstitutionalization of marriage and family—that is divorce, voluntary childlessness, cohabitation, delayed marriage, et cetera—declining participation in organizational face-to-face memberships, the spread of eastern religion and new age movements. What’s interesting to me is that a lot of the groundwork for what I discussed happened in the nineties and 2000s I think was laid in the sixties and early seventies, sort of new age movements, cultural revolution, sexual revolution movements by the parents, by what turned out to be the parents of those who then went on and raised the millennials who carried it on much further in a different context. But the end of the Cold War was important, the ascendant, neoliberal capitalism, the digital revolution, I would say is probably the most important pieces of all this, what the internet and now social media do here, geographical mobility, mobility hurts, and settling down into a church, the rise of emerging adulthood, which I’ve discussed in earlier works. September 11 ended up having a tarnishing effect on all religions, not just radical Islam…
Albert Mohler:
Okay, let me just interrupt you. I find that to be the weakest of your arguments, but let’s come back to that, and I concede you may be right, but that’s not the one that’s most self-evidently true to me. So let’s kind of begin with the massive changes in the economy and in society you document. So if you go into the sixties and seventies, this massive entrance of women into the workforce—and by the way I want to say as a conservative that I think it’s very interesting to see how many big corporations and even neo-liberal profits of the economy saw this as an inevitable and good thing. In other words, all the consequences of displacing marriage and the family to the side, this was just going to be a good thing. It has led to a massive change. I’ll give you one example. I think that as a boy growing up in a very solid Southern Baptist, small town context, I’m pretty sure I spent 12 to 15 hours a week at church. I think very close to that. And so that was a completely different world—a world in which quite honestly, that’s incomprehensible. Even two hours a week is incomprehensible to some.
Christian Smith:
So again, so much has changed in the course of one lifetime, less than one full lifetime that it’s just really incredible. But again, I think a lot of people out there who care about this stuff have a lot of intuitions and insights about what has gone on. What I’m trying to do here is to pull it all together to systematize it, to tell us a single story, to make greater sense of it so that people can say, “Oh, okay, I get it. Yeah, that makes sense.” I just had a pastor actually write me who just finished reading the book, and he said that he felt like I told his entire life spiritual narrative in this. He’s lived through all this and it resonates with him.
Albert Mohler:
But with that change in the displacement of marriage and the family, even the displacement of time and available family time to be invested in a church. Nobody planned that as a way of weakening Christianity, but it has turned out that way.
Christian Smith:
There again, a lot of these things are unintended consequences. What people’s actual interests were, we need more income for our family to survive in this economy or women should have equal rights as men and so therefore should be able to work. They had their own individual reasons for it, but when it all adds up, what it means is there’s less housewives to help make the church run, to give free labor, so to speak. And families, we’ve known this for a long time, family forms that are not two married people with children are much less likely to attend religious services and there’s a lot of reasons for that. They feel less at home. Maybe they feel judged or they judge themselves or they’re not living up or whatever. The reason many, I would say most traditional religious organizations or congregations cater to, even without even trying, it’s just normally it’s our inheritance. We’re set up for the traditional nuclear family. So as that declines, so will participation.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Well, I would say that’s a creation order issue, and we should expect there will be that displacement, but I don’t think evangelical Christians, or for that matter, Roman Catholics, were really anticipating this. But let me ask you a question. So, is that trend more accelerated and more manifest in the social circles where those trends, number one, first emerged and, number two, have gone the furthest? I would think that would certainly help to explain mainline Protestantism.
Christian Smith:
Yeah, I mean, mainline Protestantism’s decline. There’s a lot of controversy about it, but there’s some sociologists who say, one of the reasons is mainline Protestants adopted birth control much earlier in the 20th century and just have had fewer kids. You have three generations of lower fertility, you’re going to have less people around. It’s not even theological yet. So yeah, these family forces, even before you get to any other of the causal forces I’m talking about simply the change in the family would’ve had a noticeable effect. And pretty much anybody that studies family and religion would tell you that.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah well, I think your honesty and candor in connecting what it gets back to. Because you put it one way, you can also express that same truth the opposite way: Which is that the more likely you are to find what you call the nuclear family—I’d prefer to call it the natural family, because I don’t think it’s just nuclear—the husband, the wife, and their children, the more likely you find that family structure, the more likely they’re in church. But it works the other way. The less likely that picture of the family is, the less likely it is those people are to be in church. And I think it’s interesting to say that this affected even the churches that were stalwartly trying to buck that tide. And I guess one of the lessons, I hope, not inferring from your book or imputing to it, is that these social forces were more powerful in social terms than even the doctrinal tenacity of mid 20th century Catholicism or the strength of Protestant Christianity when we thought it was America’s established religion more or less.
Christian Smith:
Well, of course, I’m taking a sociological point of view here, and we are trying to translate back and forth between sociology and theology, but from my point of view, and one of the lessons I want this book to convey is that these social forces, not all the time, but there are times in history when they add up. I actually use the language of converging perfect storms. A perfect storm is two or three storms that meet together and get really intense. It was like five different perfect storms that met together. It was just a period that had really profound consequences, and it worked its way through culture, in my opinion. But there’s a deep background to this. I mean, what I’m trying to say is the explanation takes us back in history. It’s historical, it’s complex. There’s multiple factors involved. And again, most of them weren’t out to kill religion. Some of them were, yeah, when after 9/11 happened, that spawned the new atheists and they were out to hurt religion clearly, most of them.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. So let’s go ahead, and that’s where I said I wanted to kind of pull that thread with you a bit because I wrote a book responding to the new atheists back when they were new and tried to define how this new atheism and its assertiveness and the form of his arguments, particularly making a moral argument against Christianity, rather than just some kind of metaphysical, ontological argument. Yet it’s not clear to me they had much effect in terms of converting people to atheism. I want to test a theory with you, and that is that their real effect was to mainline certain forms of atheistic thought in the larger culture’s toolkit.
Christian Smith:
Yeah. So a couple points here. The first is the new atheism wouldn’t have happened without September 11. They were reacting to that, and in my original manuscript I wrote, if September 11 hadn’t happened, the new atheist books would’ve been on sale for 5 cents at the local library within a year. But 9/11 gave it a kind of an energy that they capitalized upon. What they had to say was historically and in terms of history, ideas pretty misled and pretty shallow, and they got blasted by lots of scholars of religion and people, not just people of faith, but nevertheless, they had an impact. At first, it’s not that, what I argue is it’s not that they converted everyone to become atheists like them, but they threw religion into doubt. They took people who were maybe inclined to be skeptical of religion and gave the impression that, wow, there are really solid intellectual reasons not to be religious.
So it kind of shifted the needle, so to speak, in a certain direction. It wasn’t decisive. And in the book, I say the new atheists don’t deserve that much credit for all this, but in combination with the impact of September 11, it kind of polluted, the word I use is they helped to pollute religion generally. Of course, there’s no such thing as religion generally. There’s specific traditions, there’s specific faiths, but that’s not how Americans think. They think “religion,” so they help to pollute it. And so once you’re polluted, it’s very hard to figure out how to become unpolluted. Another thing I should say though is a lot of the post-boomers we interviewed, we came away with the definite impression that there was a change At first, in the first phase of new atheists, a lot of people were impressed and sort of followed this, but then they stepped back and thought, “Wait a minute, this doesn’t totally really make sense.” And a lot of the new atheist attitudes and spirits for a lot of Americans came across as just as zealous and fundamentalist as the reason they didn’t like religion in the first place. So I think there’s been a big backing away. It’s not new anymore, but there’s sort of not taking so seriously official atheism or activist atheism.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, I think functionally, one of the things you point out—I read an autobiography years and years ago in which someone growing up in England said all their basic pattern of unbelief, they finally had a footnote for it when they read Bertand Russell. In other words, there are people who are looking for an authority now you can cite for Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, et cetera. The other point I tried to make when I dealt with this early on and what struck me, and you’re implying this, I’m going to ask you to direct to it because I get ties to one of your later chapters. I don’t think the strongest case that any of these new atheists made was rational in terms of going after the truth claims of Christianity. I think the most frustrated of all of them was Sam Harris in this regard. But where they were most effective was in their moral argument, and that was new. You did not have Bertand Russell and Anthony Flu and people like that arguing that Christianity was toxic. It’s untrue. Now it’s toxic according to the new atheist.
Christian Smith:
I actually think you’re totally right about that. And I was actually using those very words in my head when we were talking earlier, and that is, well, first of all, most Americans don’t figure out who they want to be in how they want to live in philosophical terms. I mean, most people are just not intellectuals. They don’t have the background. They don’t think through the existence of God. In this way, people’s lives are formed much more by their relationships, by their experiences, by their moral sensibilities. And again, that’s what changed with the zeitgeist. So the new atheists gave people, as I said, it gave people ammunition if they were looking for it. It sort of backed them up to think, “Well, yeah, I’m right. See these smart people, these smart people are against religion, so I should be too.” But that was just one among very many factors. So again, a philosopher of religion may get into the fine details of the intellectual questions involved in theology, but sociologically, that’s not where most of the action is. People are sorting out their lives in other terms, and especially moral terms, as you say. So when somebody hears a bad story about a pastor who was nasty to a congregant or they experience it or not to mention later in the book, the scandals with the Catholic priests and a lot of others that moves people more than a Sam Harris argument.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, I think it’s certainly—let me put it this way—I don’t think that there’s many people I’ve ever talked to‚—no, that’s obviously a limited set, I don’t talk to everybody—but most of the more liberal, progressive secular people I talk to, none of them have said to me, “Look, I was an orthodox Christian until the pedophilia crisis in the Roman Catholic Church.” So I don’t think it worked that way. I think it did work as a basic stone rolling down the hill. It certainly added a lot of velocity to the stone, and it also gave people a public reason, maybe even a private satisfying reason to say, “I’m done with religion because of this.”
Christian Smith:
So one of the general arguments I make in the book is no one factor would’ve had this consequence, no single storm. It’s one thing added to another thing, added to another thing. And of course, the way it plays out in individual lives is unique and different for each person, but they’re these sort of ramifying or concatenating effects. I use the image of an avalanche in which it starts off with a little thing at the top. Once the gravity starts pulling the snow down, it picks up all kinds of other things along the way that otherwise would’ve stayed put. So yeah, the whole picture has to be understood as one big historical process. And not a lot of times people want to say, “Well, here’s the magic bullet that explains everything.” But it hasn’t worked that way. So any one of these factors you could pull out and you would have the same outcome, probably. Maybe not the internet. But any one of these factors alone wouldn’t have brought this outcome.
Albert Mohler:
So if you are in a conversation with fellow sociologists, did any of them see this coming or is this evident only in retrospect?
Christian Smith:
Yeah, this is retrospective. I mean, it’s a little humbling, but in the 1990s, sociologists of religion were really talking about the… secularization theorists were on the defensive, and in the nineties there were Roger Finke and Rodney Stark saying, “Competition is good for religion. American is a story of ever increasing religious affiliation. America’s an exception.” That’s where we were. So it wasn’t until our way through the nineties, we even started to notice, “Oh, look at this growth in the non-religious in surveys.” But then you have to give it more time and make sure it’s not a blip. And then later on everyone starts saying they’re spiritual but not religious. It takes time to realize, “Wow, something really real is happening,” and then have enough evidence to make a claim about it that’s worth making. That’ll stick. From my point of view, it’s really retrospective. I don’t think any of us had a clue what was happening. I think by the 2000s there were increasing suspicions like, “Oh, something big is afoot here.”
Albert Mohler:
One of the people that’s kind of always in my brain talking to me is Peter Berger, and it’s because I started reading his stuff so early. And he really was one of the prophets and designers of secularization theory and in his early work. And then he wrote a pretty famous piece for First Things on secularism revisited, and came back and said, “Well, the theory, as he said, it’s not that it didn’t work, it’s that it didn’t work in different places the same way.” And so as he said, secularization theory worked perfectly to explain Western Europe doesn’t explain the United States. And so he said, there appears to be this intactness resilience, continuing theism that he said is not happening, is not eroding according to secularization theory. But I had one of these conversations with him, and by the end of his life, I think he was ready to revise his revision to say, something big is happening. We just don’t know what direction it’s going to take. But it’s not secularization, in other words. So that’s what I want to test with you now and forgive my diversion into Peter Berger, but in other words, secularization can happen more than one way.
Christian Smith:
So, Berger, by the way, his book, Sacred Canopy was also crucial in my undergraduate learning in sort of affirming me as a sociologist studying religion. But yeah, I think part of the problem is that sociology as a discipline comes out of 19th century evolutionary positivist thinking. And for the longest time, and it still haunts our halls today, looking for a law of social life, something that will be true across the board in every setting. So secularization theory was one of those, every time a society becomes more modern, it will become more secular. Okay, well, that’s just grossly simplistic. Secularization happens. It has happened. There are forces of secularization, there’s no doubt, but it’s not the only thing going on. It’s not inevitable in China, religion has had a resurgence in the global South—Pentecostalism has. So there’s different things going on in different places all the time.
I mean, that was part of Berger’s realization, I think in the first thing piece, looking at the globe instead of just the Atlantic world. So what I’m trying to do in this book is to convince my colleagues to stop looking for generalized laws of social life and to focus instead on what we call causal mechanisms. So in my view, there are a number of forces that cause secularization. There are a number of forces that cause religious strength and people to be interested and committed to religion. There are a number of forces that are neutral to those things. So it’s much more complicated and interactive. And so that requires a change of thinking about how to explain the world. The other big change I’m trying to make in this book, and maybe you were going to raise it soon, but the traditional model in the U.S. and in Western civilization actually about religion and secularization is it’s a binary.
You have religion, you have secular, and it’s like an American football game. There’s two teams. They’re pushing back and forth. Every yard, one wins, the other loses. What I’m trying to say is the world has become—that may have been the case up until recently—but the world has become much more complicated. There are other players, other ways for people to pursue spirituality: the sacred, the holy, et cetera. So another way to put that is one of the punchlines in my book is just because religion has been in decline or become obsolete doesn’t mean the secularists have won. Most Americans are not interested in secularism, in my opinion. I actually have a survey that shows that. So people are heading off into other spirituality: esotericism manifesting crystals, new age, paganism, whatever. That’s where the growth area looks like to me now.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah well, I certainly did want to go there and we will, it appears to me however, that this is where the sociology of religion as a discipline or sociology itself as a discipline is you have some tools that aren’t accessible to the theologian here—I’ll put it that way. And so you can talk about religion, religion in a way that it’s very difficult for a theologian, certainly a confessional theologian to do. And so, I look at a lot of what you describe as kind of this third space as saying, I’m not sure how religious any of that is. And so at least a part of me looks at the individual, and I want to say, I think that individual can be far more secularized than he or she knows, and there can be all these kinds of spiritualities, but there is no ought and there’s no ontology to virtually any of it.
Christian Smith:
When I’m talking about this third space of a culture or a re-enchantment, sociologists disagree vehemently about whether it’s serious or not, whether it’s having an effect in the world or not. I take a position on it and some of my colleagues disagree with it, so we’ll see where it goes. But I think there are some cases, compelling cases to be made, and the more I study it, the more I see it that there is, even if individuals don’t study it like theology and embrace a system, there are still general ideas running in the background of most of it around monism. The world is not dualistic. There’s not a transcendent God in creation. It’s this monistic whole. The divine shards of the divine are to be found in each individual. So you and I are divine. Instead of focusing on the sinfulness and the brokenness of the will, and we need our wills transformed, it focuses on the mind.
We need to think differently, we need enlightenment. These kind of ideas, I think they’re cobbled together from everything from Buddhism to theocracy and lots of different traditions. But there’s a British sociologist called Colin Campbell. He talks about the easternization of the West. He’s a little much for me, but he thinks there really is an underlying worldview here that’s displacing the traditional Western Christian worldview. I’m trying to sort it out and more realistically show the diversity, the incoherence in it. But I do think that there are profoundly alternative ways of understanding reality going on there that don’t have short-term consequences, but would have long-term consequences if that sphere of life continues to grow.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. I’m fascinated by the fact that you started there with monism because if you were just looking at the history of Western thought, not from any confessional standpoint, just looking at the history of Western thought, that’s like the last thing you would think would be coming down the pike.
Christian Smith:
Yeah, there’s a few people out there knits and whoever who would’ve endorsed that, but it’s not a typical Western way of thinking. And so if this is true, and I always want to be tentative and history’s unfolding even as we speak, but if it’s true, it indicates some really deep cultural transformations that we don’t see on the surface. It’s not evident. Again, we may look back in 20, 30 years and say, “Wow.” But usually when things are happening, it’s hard to understand what’s happening. It requires hindsight.
Albert Mohler:
Well, you’ve been at this a while, and that’s a part of the strength of your work is that you’ve been making contributions kind of brick by brick. And I can see a consistency, but it does lead me to ask you a question. I don’t know if you’ve been asked this before. And so again, I credit you and your team with helping over the course of the last 30 years in particular, looking at emerging adulthood, adolescents and college students. Of course, now they’re headed to be grandparents as a matter of fact. But the idea of their actual theology, their actual worldview being reduced to MTD, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. I just want to ask you the question, is the deism still there? In other words, you mentioned monism. I think about that concept of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, and I just have to wonder how much deism is even left.
Christian Smith:
Yeah, no, that’s a really interesting question. The MTD was originally describing teenagers, and they had a pretty tight, simple way of understanding things. What we learned following them as they grew older is that life was more complicated. MTD didn’t work out the way necessarily it was expected. So what I would call where we are now is sort of MTD grownup after a lot of hard knocks, and for some it’s abandoned. For others, it’s revised or complicated or adjusted. I don’t think the deism, I think that there’s still wide. Well, there is widespread belief in something like a divinity or a God. I don’t think it’s anything more like the 18th century enlightenment deist God. But again, back to this, a cultural space. The God is a universal energy or cosmic force or the divine feminine within, or there’s a lot of nature spirits. There’s a lot of ways that people describe it, but it’s certainly, it’s absolutely not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Albert Mohler:
Well, but I would make the argument that in the history of Western thought in general and in the English speaking in the Anglosphere, particularly deism was a way of maintaining God as a moral judge and an anchor of moral truth while abandoning all the sticky doctrines about Christology and Trinity and all the rest. And so just thinking of that category, I just have to say, I think an awful little, what you described in the book is not only post-theistic, it’s post-deistic.
Christian Smith:
Yeah. I would say that people want to believe—I would say this—people still want some larger framework that provides meaning and purpose to life, that gives history something from beyond history, that gives history meaning, and direction. It’s not just all this random nihilism. So it’s become much more diversified, however, since even MTD. So basically, I’m agreeing with you here. Yeah, it’s not just deism. Their moral relativism is pretty strong, but people still in the end want to believe certain things are right and wrong. But what’s interesting is it’s not that in this new space of the re-enchantment, it’s not about, “Well, God commands this, or this is God’s will, or God loves you and wants you to live in a way that will cause your flourishing.” It’s more that this, it’s just, it’s almost impersonal: “This is the way the universe is set up. If you do bad, karma will repay you.” It’s almost like impersonal laws of the cosmos, but there’s no external authority or accountability. It’s more just like, “Well, you’ll suffer the consequences or you’ll be rewarded.”
Albert Mohler:
Right. Well, that’s one of the problems with nihilism as any kind of an attempt at a comprehensive worldview is that you can’t live consistently that way. So then you have to come up with some kind of provisional morality, and pretty soon that provisional morality has some kind of binding authority. And so I would make the argument that among the very people you’re talking about, there’s some very clear common moral judgments that may be few, but they seem to be rather clear.
Christian Smith:
Yeah, I mean, I absolutely think so. Part of it is people, even if they’re not religious, they’re still living, very many are still living with the moral inheritance that was instilled in them. Maybe they went to Sunday School or they read the Bible or whatever. And many of them think, “Well, those are positive. That’s one way to articulate what’s good, and I’m glad I had those teachings,” even if they don’t adhere to them now. But it’s very, people want to say they’re relativistic. It’s impossible to live that way practically. You can’t say there’s nothing that’s true or there’s nothing that’s right or wrong.
The thing is though, in sociology, I value as a social theorist, intellectual integrity, coherence, noncontradiction, and you as a theologian value the same things you want it to add up. You want it to make sense. Most ordinary people, and I don’t mean this in elitist, condescending way, it’s just descriptive, most ordinary people, how they think, what they value, it doesn’t really have to add up. It’s more pragmatic. It helps them to get through the day. It’s kind of what works for them. It’s what they were taught. And if some parts don’t work so they can assert and part of their life or part of their discourse, moral relativism, it all depends on your culture, et cetera, et cetera. But then five minutes later, turn around and be judging. This is part of the moralism of MTD too: judging people for not being nice or for being judgy or whatever else that they don’t like.
If you point out, well, that’s just your personal inclination according to your own standards, you shouldn’t even be allowed to have those judgements is rational, or they’re just emo expressions of the flavor of choice. Most people do not think that: How does this all fit together? Is this coherent in my mind? So it takes a lot of training and education and work to push those kind of toward coherence people can do. So in the end, the bottom line, what you have is relativism is flourishing in some way alongside of moral commitments and judgments and not a felt need to figure it all out.
Albert Mohler:
Well, a very European, condescending look at the United States, even in the early Republican era, you had people saying, look, in the United States, they’re just cobbled together. To be American is evidently to cobble together whatever parts of anything you want. And I am not saying that’s entirely wrong. That is kind of a part of the American experience is people cobble together what they think works for them and is affirmed by their peers. And I think that goes on.
Christian Smith:
And one of the very few original American philosophical traditions is pragmatism, which in its strongest form says, “Truth is just whatever works.” So really getting through the day, making things work according to your values, nevermind why you should have those values. Values is for a lot of people, good enough.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Well, one of the central maximum of pragmatism was that the truth happens to an idea. And I do think that explains the way a lot of Americans live and think, and that is that they hear something and the next thing they know, they’ve kind of incorporated it into their worldview and in their view, it just kind of works. A screwdriver does what his job, the screwdriver doesn’t have to be supernatural. It just has to do the job with the screw.
Christian Smith:
And so unfortunately, and this goes back to my chapter two in the book. A lot of Americans, including I think people sitting in all kinds of churches have a very functionalist view of religion. It’s good if it does X, Y, and Z for me or us in this world. Now it’s focused on the imminent, not the transcendent, and it’s focused on practically what it achieves for us, not is this really true? Is this ultimately reality? And once you get a population that has that orientation, it’s very easy for them to subsequently decide, I’m not religious because it’s not living up to my criteria of what is good.
Albert Mohler:
And because there’s not a stable definition, I can define that the way I want it anyway.
Christian Smith:
Yeah.
Albert Mohler:
So let me just tell you as a theologian that I think your category of moralistic therapeutic deism has more lasting value than you may think, because I want to tell you where it is now found in my view. And so I’ll get in trouble here, but here I go in a great deal of Protestantism, and that means right now in a great deal of evangelical Protestantism, I think what is the basic theological worldview? The basic theological worldview framing the way so many people think and what they think Christianity is, and even in some sense, what they think their church teaches is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. And so I would say in that suburban belt, and especially in mega churches, in consumer Christianity, I think MTD is a standard fair.
Christian Smith:
Yeah, I wouldn’t disagree with you. I would say I’m a sociologist, but I would say from the vantage point of historically orthodox Christianity, MTD is really insidious, especially if you want to connect with the culture to be relevant for the culture, to meet people where they are. We had a case after I published the book in which we described MTD, where a whole church in this area, the pastor loved it, and everyone on the board read the book, and they were absolutely committed to root out MTD from their way of life and to preach the authentic gospel. And then subsequently, maybe a year or two later, we were doing some research on youth ministry, and some of my grad students sat in, spent some time hanging out with the youth group, and basically what they came back saying is everything they’re talking about in the youth group is totally MTD. It’s like, how do you feel? So even in a context where there’s conscious, intentional efforts to do something different, it shows up.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I think I would submit for your sociological analysis. The fact that the ambient culture that is the enforced orthodoxy, or it might even be that the most theistically inclined worldview that you can get by with in the American on the American college campus.
Christian Smith:
Yeah, I’m not sure I like the word enforced. In some contexts it is enforced. But I think it’s almost self-enforced sometimes, or it’s implicitly enforced. But I think it’s just, I go back to this idea of cultural, it’s just what resonates and what doesn’t resonate, what seems to fit, what doesn’t fit, that there’s a mismatch between the traditional Christianity, if I can use that phrase. And what’s out there, and young people especially who have to navigate worlds that they’re still trying to figure out, and that their social relationships are very much tuned into these things. And they may not be able to articulate it. They may not have the language to express it, but they feel it. They feel it, and they try to do the best they can to sort it all out. But a lot of times that ends up not with what the church would like them to believe in practice.
Albert Mohler:
One of the seminal books in American Conservative thought in the 20th century was God and Man at Yale by William F. Buckley Jr. from the mid-1950s. And I actually thought of that book reading one of your chapters, because Buckley is making the point that at Yale at the mid-century that, for the vast majority of the faculty at Yale, Christianity was only important for its social utility, and basically it had lost that social utility. So I was thinking, just looking at that argument, that the process may have begun even earlier than your book here in different elite circles.
Christian Smith:
I mean, this stuff has been long in the making, and I don’t go back. I mean, what I say in the book is you can go back for millennia and look at, find the roots of this stuff. It’s just a matter of what you want to focus on. So I try to focus on more proximate events, but clearly these forces have been developing. I have another book called The Secular Revolution that focuses on the transformations of religion in public institutions, and it’s focused on 1870 to 1930. So yeah, the groundwork for this stuff has been laid for a long time. Another anecdote, when I gave a presentation on MTD at Wheaton College and Mark, Noll, the historian said, we’ve always been MTD. I mean, Huckleberry Finn was as MTD as you can get. So historians would have to do this work to trace back those kind of roots. I do think that certain things like this come and go in waves. I think the fifties had a certain religious superficiality, but at least there was sort of an interest in religion and a taking seriously of religion, maybe for the wrong reasons. But my parents became Christians during the postwar revival, and they were raised not religious. So that’s had an effect…
Albert Mohler:
That’s one of the points you make in the book. Excuse my interruption. That’s one of the points you make in the book is that the Cold War was in a sense, a major factor of defining good and evil that seemed to require theism, but by the end of the Cold War that disappeared.
Christian Smith:
Yeah. So I think one of the larger implications of that kind of analysis though is to what extent are religious traditions allowing others to define the criteria of what success looks like or what faithfulness looks like? And it’s easy to say during the Eisenhower era to think, “Wow, we’re popular, we’re valued now,” and to not realize we’re valued, not for the reasons our tradition would say we should be for. So yeah, whenever you, I mean, this is as a generalization, it’s always good to, to keep in mind your criteria of what faithfulness looks like, not somebody else’s. Otherwise, you end up like a puppet on their strings.
Albert Mohler:
I think that’s an incredibly important word. I want to address you now in a way I normally don’t in this kind of context and to say: So, okay, Professor Smith, let’s say you have an opportunity to speak to conservative evangelical Protestants. You get to speak to the Southern Baptist Convention, you get to speak to conservative Protestants in America. What are you going to say to us?
Christian Smith:
Yeah. Well, so let me step back and avoid that question by saying this…
Albert Mohler:
Not asking you to tell us what to do. I’m asking you to tell us what we are not seeing that we should see?
Christian Smith:
Yeah, I think one thing is to take, I think a lot of people in most religious traditions understand, “Oh yeah, we’re kind of in trouble. We’ve suffered decline. Things are not, the tide is not in our favor, so to speak.” I think I hope that this book helps people to understand the profundity of that, the gravity of that, and that it’s not just a matter of numbers, we lost X percent, but that this whole surrounding context is presenting whole new sorts of challenges. On the one hand, the other thing I think needs to be taken more seriously is what I’m calling a culture or enchantment. It’s growing. There are more pagans in the U.S. than there are Presbyterians. I could give you a lot of statistics. They’re coming out in my next book actually, about how many, but it’s a lot of, it’s underground. And it happens in ways that are different from traditional religious denomination.
So a lot of it’s invisible. There’s also a tendency to dismiss it, like, “Oh, that’s just a bunch of, doesn’t amount to anything. Those people are marginal crazies.” But I think it’s more than marginal crazies. So I would say not quickly reacting against it, but to better understand what’s going on out there in this third sphere that rejects secularism, but also is not interested in traditional religion. And what does that mean? Not what can we learn from them, but why are people attracted to that? One of the arguments I make in the book that relates to this or that illustrates this, is that in my view, most traditional American religion have lost references to the transcendent, like eternity, salvation, heaven and hell… And I try to show empirically this is the case, people may want transcendence, they may want mystery. They may want more supernatural and eternal and whatever than churches even realize.
So, another point is this whole cultural world is a very dark side: vampires and blood and evil, and there’s a light in the dark side. And I think to some degree, American, even though religion should have the theological resources to deal with evil and darkness and depravity and lostness. I think so much of American religion has become this kind of happy feel, help improve your life, voluntary association that people that want to grapple with darkness more profoundly don’t find that in churches. They find it in the world of a culture. So I’m not saying religion should be chasing this other thing. I’m saying I think an intelligent learning about and reflecting on what’s going on there, what would be attractive about it can help churches rethink what are we doing and why are we doing that.
Albert Mohler:
Back in the 1970s, the controversial book by Dean Kelly, Why Conservative Churches are Growing, and I think it’s been often too simplistically summarized. But basically, his argument was that strong high demand churches are actually growing when lower demand churches are not just in an honest reckoning. I’m in a high demand church, not a shock.
Christian Smith:
16 hours a week as a boy would say.
Albert Mohler:
That’s right. And right now we are filled, and so this is what we probably have 800 seats and 850 people, and it’s a population explosion. It’s babies everywhere. My wife and I are among the old people in the room. So, you look at that and you say, “Man, Christianity in the United States is a conservative confessional Christianity.” In the United States is just such a growing force. Look at this. And thankfully it is. It’s just that I want to keep saying to my colleagues, but the vast majority of people outside these walls have absolutely no reference for even what we’re doing here. And that doesn’t make what we’re doing less important theologically, it makes it more important. But I do think the displacement of Christianity in the US and frankly in the larger world and the way you use the term obsolete, I want to say even where I don’t know that every reader will be in total agreement with every argument. I think it’s very hard to argue with your social category here.
Christian Smith:
Yeah. Again, obsolete doesn’t mean extinct. It doesn’t mean it’s not working. For some people, it is a term that tries to describe a zeitgeist, a general sensibility among post boomers. And of course within that there are thriving congregations. There are people with very strong trade. They’re having their lives changed. Those aren’t incompatible. So I think it’s sorting out how they relate to each other, why certain things thrive and others don’t. How much of that is going on? How many churches are there like that? There’s more churches closing doors than opening up, and this gets into so many complex topics about pastoral leadership and charisma. There’s just so many topics, but…
Albert Mohler:
Overall, more books to write.
Christian Smith:
Yeah, I would put it this way. Well, the other factor, again, not to overly complicate it, but there are different kinds of Americans who want different things. Some people want easy, some people want demanding. So there are different audiences or markets, almost so to speak here. But yeah, to think one thing we know for sure is just to liberalize your church just to say, “Well, let’s move closer to anything goes.” There aren’t any standards here that is a strategy for utter self-implosion that doesn’t work. We know that. So, at the end of the book, I’m not trying to tell anybody what to do, but I do remind people, just in order to impress the millennial zeitgeist, just to sort of go the root of liberal Protestantism. No, except for a few people going to Unitarian churches, that’s not going to do anything for you.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. I think one of the realizations that came to me chapter-by-chapter in your book was just, and I knew this, I even had a cognitive framework for it. But still, just even emotionally, and I think this is hard for many evangelicals, so I’ll put it on the light. I think it’s very emotionally difficult for evangelicals to realize that we are, insofar as we are confessional evangelicals, we are really a subculture within a subculture within a subculture in the United States. And when I was a boy, the Protestant establishment seemed to be the big reality in America. And I think Professor Smith, for younger Christians, that’s probably not even a part of their framework. But for older ones, yeah, we can sense what you’re talking about here in the book and our own timeline.
Christian Smith:
Yeah. Well, one of the criteria of having done good work, if you have, is when people read it, they can see themselves in it. They don’t feel like, what is he talking about that they can realize like, “Oh yeah, I lived through that. Oh yeah, I have my own version of that.” So as I told you, when that pastor wrote me and said, your book totally resonates. That helps to validate. I think I’m onto to something then.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I really appreciate this conversation. You mentioned your current research project, so tease it out for us a bit. What are you working on now?
Christian Smith:
Yeah, so when I went into this project, I was also one of those sociologists who thought Pagans and Satanists and Wicca and all that, even spirituality, whatever, crystals, doesn’t matter. That’s all peripheral. And this project really changed my view of that. I’ve really come to see Europe was much farther ahead, England and so on. In this growth of those things, I’ve really come to see that matters culturally, numerically, it hasn’t taken over, but it matters culturally. So for a while I thought maybe I should work that story in much more fully into the book that’s sitting in front of you. And then I realized then it would be a 670 page book. So I’m not going to do that. So that book is published now.
I’m working on a book. Basically, the working title is The Re-Enchantment of American Culture, trying to explain what this other area is, what it’s about, why people are attracted to it, what cultural work it does, why it’s increasingly attractive to people. And again, to reiterate the story that comes across in this book, I hope. And that is, it’s not that secularism that’s winning people’s interest in things, spiritual and migrating to new places, not becoming all these unbelievers. So I just find that fascinating sociologically and culturally. So that’s the book I’m working on now. It’s kind of a follow-up or sequel to the first one.
Albert Mohler:
Well, Professor Smith, I appreciate your candor and the opportunity for this conversation. Appreciate your research. And again, I want to say thank you for some very important categories you’ve given to my tribe for understanding things around us, and when your new book comes out, I will hope we get a chance to do this again.
Christian Smith:
Excellent. Thank you so much for having me on. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Albert Mohler:
Well, thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public.
Christian Smith:
Alright, take care.
Albert Mohler:
Many thanks to my guests, professor Christian Smith for thinking with me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you will find well more than 200 of these conversations at Albertmueller.com under the tab, Thinking in Public. For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com. Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public. Until next time, keep thinking.