Why Religion Went Obsolete, page 15
So far, we have focused on the “supply” side of religious discourse, which for my argument matters most. Before moving on, however, let us briefly examine the “demand” side of the issue in more recent years. In our 2023 Millennial Zeitgeist Survey, we asked two questions measuring American adults’ interest in immanent versus transcendent concerns (see Table 5.2). Respondents do not agree in valuing immanent matters versus transcendent ones. Every generation, however, leans toward valuing immanence over transcendence. That leaning also increases noticeably with each younger generation. Only about half (52%) of early Boomers say life on earth, this world, today, and nature are more important to them than God, eternity, heaven, and a transcendent realm. Nearly two-thirds of Millennials (64%) say the same.
Table 5.2 Immanent Versus Transcendent Interests by Generation (%)
Early Boomers Later Boomers Gen Xers Millennials
Which of the following is more important to you personally?
Life on earth, this world, today, nature 52 55 60 64
God, eternity, heaven, a transcendent realm 49 45 41 37
I am more concerned with a good life here and now than what comes after death.
Strongly agree 23 20 23 30
Somewhat agree 28 25 29 24
Somewhat disagree 19 26 20 18
Strongly disagree 27 23 19 16
Don’t know 3 6 9 12
TOTALS (unweighted n’s): 100 (n = 341) 100 (n = 358) 100 (n = 485) 100 (n = 677)
Source: Millennial Zeitgeist Survey, 2023 (N = 1,861). Percents may not add to 100 due to rounding. “Don’t know” answers to the first question are negligible so not reported.
The bottom half of Table 5.2 shows results on the same issue using a somewhat different question wording. There we see that respondents express diverse views about whether they are more concerned with a good life here and now or with what comes after death. With each new generation we observe a gradual shift toward an interest in life now. Millennials especially lean toward a concern with life here and now. A significant difference (besides “Don’t know”) concerns those who strongly disagree with the statement, those who are definitely more concerned with what comes after death, which declines from 27% to 16% from the oldest to youngest generation.
These differences may reflect an age effect (younger people of every generation being less concerned about death) or a generational effect (younger cohorts being less interested in life after death at whatever age than older ones) or some of both—we cannot tell from these data. What we can say, however, is that more than half of Millennials are more interested in their lives now than possible eternities. They are also noticeably more likely not to have an opinion on the matter. There is more than one way to interpret these findings. We should remember that a survey conducted in 2023 tells us nothing about historical processes at work during the 1990s and 2000s. One takeaway, however, is that well after traditional religion went obsolete, the US adult population still expresses a not-insignificant concern with things transcendent, although that decreases among younger people. I suggest that this interest helps fuel the rise in the popular re-enchanted embrace of “spirituality” and “occulture,” which I discuss below. To the extent that traditional religion has over time downplayed transcendence, spirituality and occulture helped fill the vacuum.
Traditional religion’s declining attention to matters of transcendence and eternity matters sociologically. When religion becomes a “concept,” as Eisenhower put it, rather than one’s identity, life, and salvation, it generates less commitment and investment. In this way, the moralizing of religion and its sidelining of transcendent themes are analogous to a disease sapping religion’s strength as a species. Viewed in terms of Abbot’s struggle among competing occupations to control as professions socially legitimate knowledge and problem-solving, downplaying transcendence has been a tactical error, making religion vulnerable to losing ground.
The Rise of Televangelism and the Religious Right
While American mainline Protestantism and Catholicism were suffering big losses in the 1960s and 1970s, American evangelicalism was growing ever stronger and more confident. The 1970s witnessed an astonishing “resurgence” of religion in public and political life all around the world, the most important expression of which in the United States was the resurgence of evangelicalism.40 Especially as liberal Protestantism faded from view, evangelicalism rose—despite its own common perception of being marginalized and oppressed—to become the primary public face of “religion” in the United States.41
Some brief historical context will be helpful. In the four decades straddling the turn of the twentieth century, modernist and fundamentalist Protestants engaged in fierce struggles to control denominations, seminaries, and doctrine.42 Most of those battles were settled by the end of the 1920s, and, while each side had won victories, the fundamentalists came out looking bad and beaten. Fundamentalist groups retreated from those theological and institutional wars into insular circles, focusing on policing boundaries and building separate institutions. The 1930s and wartime were a period of religious malaise in the United States generally. At war’s end, however, a cadre of visionary young fundamentalists—including Billy Graham, Charles Fuller, and Carl Henry—launched a “neo-evangelical” movement to rehabilitate conservative Protestantism. They sought to leave behind fundamentalism’s doctrinal and behavioral legalism and its obscurantism about science and higher education. Instead, they emphasized evangelism and making the traditional gospel and “biblical worldview” intellectually defensible. The old fundamentalists saw them—like the modernists before them—as liberalizing turncoats. The neo-evangelicals nonetheless managed to carve out a significant space in the American religious field, one situated between fundamentalists and liberals, and from there expanded their boundaries and territory.43
Many secular Americans assumed that American fundamentalists and evangelicals had disappeared after the 1920s since they were hardly visible in public life. When they did begin to reappear in the 1970s, most initially viewed them as backwater anti-moderns. In fact, entrepreneurial fundamentalists and evangelicals had since the 1920s been developing radio and later television programming that would appeal to large audiences and could support itself financially in the media market.44 Their audiences were limited to their subculture and thus invisible to outsiders. But they were very large and made paid religious broadcasting financially viable.45
Mainline Protestant programming was also on the air, but its privileging proved fatal in time. Around 1928, the Federal Radio Commission began assigning stations to radio frequencies, forcing many independent religious radio stations to the margins. Soon both CBS and NBC stopped airing paid religious broadcasts. The Federal Council of Churches arranged to sponsor “mainline” broadcasts not considered “sectarian” with free airtime donated by major stations as a public service. Meanwhile, the fundamentalist broadcasters were forced to compete in the market by building distribution networks of myriad local stations that charged for airtime. In this way, they mastered the entrepreneurial production of programs that appealed to sizeable audiences willing to donate money to keep them on the air. Most popular was Charles and Grace Fuller’s Old Fashioned Revival Hour, which was carried on the new Mutual Radio Network and, by the 1940s, had more listeners tuning in during Sunday evening prime time than the popular comedian Jack Benny. By the 1940s, in contrast, having never learned to compete in the media market with programming that was actually popular, most mainline Protestant productions went off the air when the networks pulled the plug on free public service programming. The original blessing of free airtime for mainline preachers proved a liability. Far from being anti-modern hillbillies, fundamentalists and evangelicals had become proficient at modern media technologies and markets while mainline media withered.46
Fundamentalist and evangelical radio programs began to switch to television broadcasting in 1949, starting with Jack Wyrtzen, Percy Crawford, and Rex Humbard. Oral Roberts began televising his evangelistic ministries in 1954. In 1961, Pat Robertson founded the first Christian television channel, the Christian Broadcasting Network, which began producing The 700 Club in 1966, hosted by Jim Bakker.47 Billy Graham also launched major television evangelism crusades in the 1960s and 1970s. The spread of cable television in the 1970s and 1980s facilitated the proliferation of “televangelism” by popular hosts such as Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Rex Humbard, Robert Schuller, James Robison, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson.48 By the 1980s, such programs were being broadcast on hundreds of channels and garnered tens of millions of viewers in the United States.49 They were also broadcast in many scores of languages in more than 100 countries around the globe.50 By the 1980s, mainstream America had become well aware of the televangelism industry, and the general reaction from those outside was incredulity and disparagement.
The Cold War boom in American religion spurred growth within evangelicalism as well as in mainline Protestantism and Catholicism. Evangelicals, however, remained mostly under the public’s radar during that era—Billy Graham being one exception. The revolutions of the 1960s and widespread unease in the 1970s, however, “woke up” evangelicalism and moved it in new directions. The Eisenhower-era religious atmosphere had enabled many Americans, including most conservative Protestants, to suppose that the United States was not only founded as a Christian nation but also remained Christian in some general sense. The 1960s counterculture, sexual revolution, Vietnam War protests, the rise of the New Left, drug culture, and movements for women’s liberation, student free speech, civil rights, and gay rights upended that easy supposition. The federal government’s racial desegregation of the South and passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 also troubled many white evangelicals.51 In the 1970s, the Vietnam quagmire, urban race riots, Watergate, Roe v. Wade, the OPEC oil embargo, rising divorce rates, spreading Soviet influence in the Third World, and the Iranian hostage crisis seemed to validate evangelical fears that America was crumbling because it had turned away from its Christian heritage.52
In 1979, Lynchburg, Virginia, Baptist minister Jerry Falwell Sr. and collaborators founded the Moral Majority. Its goal was to mobilize conservative Christians as a political force to counter what Falwell believed was national moral decay. Similar organizations also sprang up across the nation around this time, including American Christian Cause, Christian Voice, and the Christian Coalition. Falwell had previously been a fundamentalist who believed in saving souls, not political activism. But his distress over the state of the nation, which he believed to be founded on Christian principles yet secularizing and as a result degenerating, propelled him into politics.53 Falwell, who had previously identified as a fundamentalist, began calling himself an evangelical, tapping into that movement’s energy, and he led sectors of it into conservative political activism and a decades-long romance with the Republican Party. That movement, the so-called Christian Right (or Religious Right, as sometimes culturally conservative Jews and Mormons joined the cause), helped to elect multiple Republican presidents and proved influential in the politics of abortion, gay rights, education, drugs, school choice, and the state of Israel.54 Christian Right organizations proliferated at the national, state, and local levels. Pat Robertson even campaigned, unsuccessfully, for the GOP nomination for president in 1988.
The rise of conservative Protestant televangelism in the media and the rise of the Christian Right in politics were distinct but overlapping and mutually reinforcing movements. The most prominent early leaders of the latter—Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson—were already major players in the former. That gave them popular media platforms from which to launch and promote their political activities.55
Much more could be said about the Christian Right. For present purposes, however, what matters most for our question is the backlash. The rise of the Christian Right was shocking to many politically moderate and liberal Americans, to whom it seemed a regressive violation of the separation of church and state. Political activists bringing religious motivations and arguments into the sphere of public debate and policy was, to many, offensive and unacceptable. The liberal political tradition says that everyone is entitled to their personal religious beliefs, but they ought to be kept private, not brought into politics.56 For many Americans, fairly or not, the Christian Right looked early on like a return to medieval theocracy and the religious wars of early modern Europe. In time, many realized it had mobilized a voting bloc big enough to become a power-player at all levels of politics.
These kinds of attitudes showed up in our focus groups when we asked participants to respond to photos of televangelists and Christian Right leaders. Here, for example, were the responses to an image of Jerry Falwell Sr. and Jr. together: “Hypocrite, don’t like him,” “It’s a corporation, like they probably run like a big church,” and, “I don’t trust them, they look like politicians.” In response to a photo of Pat Robertson in his prime, people said this: “Pat Robertson, no, I don’t like him,” “It’s just another one you see when you wake up at night and he’s on TV,” “The 700 Club, it’s just annoying to me,” “He wants to use my money to buy himself a new watch,” and, “Association of business and religion, which I feel is evil.”
The backlash against the Christian Right, which I explore further in Chapter 8, turned out eventually to have sweeping consequences, alienating even previously religious Americans from traditional religion generally.57 It was one of the crucial disturbances that triggered what would become a massive avalanche of cultural change. This was another irony: the movement to save Christian America for God ended up pushing many Americans away from Christianity, God, and the church.
The Spread of Eastern Religions and the New Age Movement
The 1960s in the United States saw a dramatic surge in interest in “Eastern” religions, like Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. Westerners’ curiosity about and explorations of Eastern religions had a long history, coming and going in waves.58 The crucial event in the 1960s, however, was the passage of the US Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. That Act reformed the previous immigration law, which had privileged western and northern European immigrants to foster US racial homogeneity. The new system opened up legal immigration from other parts of the world, notably, for our purposes, Asia. The years thereafter saw a dramatic increase in Asian immigrants to the United States, particularly on the West and East Coasts. The number of Asian immigrants to the United States in 2019 was 29 times greater than in 1960.59 Many of those Asian immigrants naturally brought with them their religious practices and beliefs, thus exposing increasing numbers of Americans to them.60
The cultural consequences of the arrival of Eastern religions on American shores—along with related influences, such as the Beatles studying Transcendental Meditation with its founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, in India—were profound. Some Americans studied and converted to traditional Eastern religions.61 Members of the 1960s counterculture were often attracted to Eastern religions as a contrast to mainstream Western faiths.62 Others began following gurus. Still other Americans became gurus and masters themselves.63 Concepts from Eastern religions, like karma, were dislodged from their original meaning systems and popularized in the broader culture—as in, “Karma’s a bitch” and “Karma will get you” (another example of cultural particulate matter diffusing in the atmosphere).64 We will see in Chapter 9, in fact, that most adult Americans say they believe that the force of karma is real. Eastern religions also provided a wide palate of ideas and images that many spiritual entrepreneurs used to develop new religious philosophies and movements, usually called “cults” at that time. The New Age movement of the 1970s was particularly influenced by the reworking of Eastern religions.65 Many of our interview respondents referenced “Eastern” religions in a positive light and professed more than a few ideas drawn from New Age thinking.
This American upsurge of interest in Eastern religions and the various offspring and hybrids it fostered was a hugely important development for the religious field prior to the 1990s, which helped prepare the way for the zeitgeist that emerged then and the accompanying obsolescence of traditional religion. Suddenly, there were several ancient religions and a number of new belief systems competing for the attention and affections of Americans.
The Ersatz “Warfare of Science and Religion” Narrative
One of the debates that bedevils American religion is the alleged inherent conflict between religion and science. The popular cultural assumption is that science and religion are two distinct claimants to trustworthy knowledge holding mutually exclusive and innately conflicting views from which only one—always science—can emerge as the winner. Nearly all Americans presuppose that science possesses proven facts, while religion requires leaps of faith. Science is based on empirical methods, religion on ancient books. Science is modern, open-minded, and leads to a brighter future, whereas religion is ancient, benighted, and burns people at the stake. Scientists agree about their established knowledge, while religious teachings are contradictory and irreconcilable. Science has given us electricity and antibiotics, while religion has produced the Dark Ages, the Crusades, and the Inquisition. The contrasts are clear, according to this narrative, and their implications are obvious.
It turns out, however, that this common view of science and religion is historically wrong. The idea that they are inherently incompatible kinds of truth claims ever battling for human allegiance turns out to be not a reflection of historical or logical reality but an ideological frame promoted by certain late-Victorian academics. Especially important were New York University chemist John William Draper who, in 1884, published his influential History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science; and Cornell University’s first president, Andrew Dickson White, author of the much-read A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.66 However, University of California sociologist Stephen Shapin noted in his landmark book, The Scientific Revolution, that “it has been a very long time since these [‘warfare’] attitudes have been held by historians of science.” Rather, the history of science reveals an “intimate connection between science and religion.”67 According to University of Wisconsin historians of science David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers, by the 1980s, we had seen “a developing consensus among scholars that Christianity and science had not [historically] been at war.”68
