Why Religion Went Obsolete, page 2
Certain of these practices—not just major world religions but paganism, magic, and astrology—descend from traditions that are countless millennia older than some I am counting as “traditional,” like Mormonism, which is less than 200 years old. But, in the United States, culturally speaking, I would argue that Mormonism now belongs to traditional religion whereas paganism does not. That paradox illustrates the cultural relativity partly determining such categorizations. Access to mainstream cultural capital is part of what makes a religion “traditional.” You might call this a tautology—a “traditional American religion” is a religion that Americans consider traditional—but that is because cultural stature is part of what we are attempting to address, which is critical if we are to understand the seismic shift that has occurred in the past 30 years.
To avoid repetition, I will not often use the full phrase “traditional American religion.” When I say simply “religion” or “American religion,” I will always mean traditional religion as defined here.
Unplanned Obsolescence. This book argues that traditional American religion has become obsolete among younger generations and, increasingly, older ones. Something becomes obsolete when most people feel it is no longer useful or needed because something else has superseded it in function, efficiency, value, or interest. Obsolete connotes outdated or old-fashioned, in the sense of being “put out of business” or style by some innovation, incompatible larger trend, or perceived change in functional need.6 The invention of the automobile made the horse and buggy obsolete. Electronic calculators made the slide rule obsolete. Electric typewriters suffered the same fate with the arrival of desktop computers. When something becomes obsolete, however, it is not simply that it is rarely used. There is also a mental shift. Obsolete items are simply less likely to cross anyone’s mind. When people can ask Alexa to play any song, they rarely think about vinyl records. And so obsolete items become decreasingly familiar to most people and, in time, associated with bygone eras.
Some clarifications are crucial for what follows. First, obsolete does not mean “useless” or “failed.” It just means having been superseded by alternatives that most users deem preferable. Existing electric typewriters can still type letters as well as they ever did. Most people just prefer computers. Analogously, traditional religion still works well for some Americans. Most people simply prefer alternatives. Second, obsolete does not mean totally abandoned or extinct. Some people still can and do use obsolete items because they are familiar, less expensive, viewed with affection, or as a matter of principle. At this very moment, some people are no doubt happily listening to music on cassette tapes or watching DVDs, just as many Americans are still practicing traditional religion.
Third, most tools, ideas, products, and practices depend on other items and support systems to be useful. A humming electric typewriter is useless if one cannot buy the ink ribbon it requires or find a repair technician when it breaks. The model of a stay-at-home mother with a breadwinning husband doesn’t work so well when all the other wives in the neighborhood are away at their paid jobs every workday—it’s lonely. Lots of things go together in “packages,” so even obsolete items that are still functional become harder to maintain when others have moved on to alternatives. That adds extra “systemic” pressures, making increasingly obsolete things more definitely so. Similarly, some functional items are only useful when many other people are also using or joining them. Think about telegraphs, two-way pagers, community choirs, fax machines, social networks, even email—their usefulness depends on the participation of a critical mass of others. This is called a “network effect.” Obsolescence is thus determined partly by what most people prefer, aside from the wishes of any specific user.
Finally, not all obsolescence is about perceived improvements in function. Some items go obsolete simply as a matter of fashion. There are few functional differences among, for example, boot-cut, flare, skinny, or bell-bottom jeans. Yet these have all gone obsolete across the decades, sometimes within single years, when “everyone” knows not be caught dead wearing the wrong style. The reasons behind non-functional fashion obsolescence are various, including industry profit motives and the human desire to belong. Once such shifts start gaining momentum, people notice and can be pulled into such trends—some more consequential than clothing styles, like ones that affect religion.
To capture the “feel” of the kind of obsolescence that I argue has beset American religion, consider changes in the popularity of different genres of films. Specifically, think about Westerns. Over time, different genres increase and decline in popularity and thus production. Some genres enjoy long, steady growth and sometimes spikes of popularity. Others endure long downward trends. Bo McCready, who works for Apple analytics and is a public ambassador for the interactive visual data analytics platform Tableau, used genre tags on IMDB, the Internet Movie Database, to track the number of films of different genres released between 1910 and 2018. Figure I.1 shows the results of his analysis. We see there that some genres—including Action, Crime, and Fantasy—have enjoyed sustained popularity. Others, especially Thriller and Horror, have seen long-term growth. Documentaries have become popular in recent decades. Still others, like War and Musicals, tell their own interesting stories. But the most illustrative for our purposes is the Western. The Western never dominated film production, peaking at just above 10% of all releases around 1950. More noticeable, however, is the Western’s drastic decline since then, interrupted only temporarily by a modest revival in the late 1960s and early 1970s. After that, Westerns virtually disappeared.
Figure I.1 Film genre popularity, 1910–2018.
Source: Bo McCready, using IMDB genre tags, on Tableau public, used with permission. Note: vertical axis ranges are unstandardized but can be interactively standardized for comparison on the source website, https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/bo.mccready8742/viz/FilmGenrePopularity-1910-2018/GenreRelativePopularity.
The fate of Western movies in the late twentieth century can, I think, help us grasp the subjective feel of obsolescence as I mean it here. The obsolescence of Westerns cannot be described or explained as merely a decline in quality that increasingly sophisticated audiences grew tired of. Many tacky Westerns were produced over the decades, but that is true of all film genres. Many outstanding Westerns were also produced. Furthermore, some of the most beloved American entertainers have starred in Westerns, including John Wayne, Gary Cooper, James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Elvis Presley, Paul Newman, and Clint Eastwood. Western roles were not second-class acting jobs. So, aside from the puzzle of exactly why Westerns became obsolete, the question for present purpose remains: What are the qualities that subjectively strike viewers so they just feel or know something to be obsolete? What exactly about cowboys, Indians, outlaws, sheriffs, and chases on horseback feels passé, outmoded, and worn out? Considering such questions helps provide clues about the subjective character of obsolescence. This book attempts to understand and explain how religious obsolescence feels.
Finally, what do I mean by emphasizing unplanned obsolescence? A good deal of product obsolescence is intentionally engineered by design. An appliance that could, for a slightly higher cost, be built to last three times longer is purposefully designed to break in, say, four years, forcing the consumer to purchase another. Cell phone software updates are intentionally designed not to work well on “old” models in order to prompt upgrades to new phones. That obsolescence is planned. However, we will see, very few of the causes of religion’s obsolescence in recent decades were like that. Nearly all were unplanned.
I have argued elsewhere that in other eras and spheres of American life, religious secularization was the result of purposeful anti-religious activism.7 It sometimes happens. But not in the present case. Some religious leaders claim that purposefully anti-religious actors (“secular humanists”) have intentionally wielded ideologies (“secular humanism,” “wokeism”) through institutions they control (“The Media,” universities) to attack traditional religion and morality. That is not absolutely false, but it grossly exaggerates the power of anti-religious activism. It also ignores the many ways that religion has been the agent of its own demise (more on this later). The bottom line: very little of what caused American religion’s obsolescence was planned or intended by anti-religious agents. That is a crucial point.
Culture. This is a book about religion. But more broadly, it is a book about culture. The idea of “culture” is central to my argument and so requires some explanation. My account does not depend on one particular theory of culture nor am I offering any theoretical innovation. Most standard social science definitions will do as long as we maintain some crucial conceptual distinctions.8 I take a general cognitive and practice view of culture, conceiving it as a stock of learned human knowledge—both knowledge about things and knowledge of how to do things—acquired through socialization and modified through creative reconfiguration, which people deploy to live functional and meaningful lives. In this view, culture per se consists of the categories, assumptions, beliefs, values, skills, and other practical know-how possessed in minds and bodies.9 Culture provides descriptive “models of” reality and prescriptive “models for” living in that reality. Culture’s “models of” supply representations of the way things are. Culture’s “models for” prescribe how one should act within those realities. In short, “culture” is learned knowledge about reality and how to live in it.
Cultural models do not always map well onto the actual realities of life, society, and the world. Cultural models are social constructions largely inherited from the past, which often lag behind lived experience on the ground. Major cultural changes often occur when there are significant mismatches between received cultural models and experienced reality. When enough people find their models no longer describe the realities they see or fail to help them navigate those realities, they may question and revise those models. This was one of the major reasons that traditional religion became obsolete. Younger Americans’ expectations of religion clashed with their lived experiences in a dramatically changing society. A number of external developments fostered that mismatch, including technological developments, economic transformations, and cultural innovations. The assumption that religion was credible and valuable gave way.
Culture is in many ways self-reinforcing. We humans use culture (the knowledge we have accumulated) to create products or objects— clothing, graffiti, dance performances, recipes, parties, rules of etiquette, myths, computers, you name it—that we collectively call “culture.” Culture is thus, in complex ways, subjective and objective, mental and material, internal and external, personal and public. It does not suffice to view culture only as what individuals think and believe or only as some collective property of a group—both are necessary, and observing the mutual causal interactions between them is crucial.10 Complicating matters, people can also internalize external cultural objects and turn them into personal culture as knowledge. For instance, memorizing your grandmother’s handwritten apple pie recipe (a cultural object) turns it into part of one’s own internal culture (how-to knowledge).
The entire external social world of cultural objects that people generate, inhabit, and sustain by living constantly “acts back” on them, primarily reinforcing their internal culture as knowledge but also sometimes revising it. The production of cultural objects in the external, physical world imbues that world of products with an apparent “objective facticity.” A cultural object no longer seems like a mere creation of human cognition and activity but instead an independently existent fact of reality impinging from the outside. An organization founded by a group of people (a cultural object), for instance, takes on an institutional independence that can then use its bylaws to expel those same founders and alter their beliefs (culture as knowledge) about such organizations. So, while people use culture to produce cultural objects, those same objects in turn produce and influence one’s internal notions about culture. The causal effects flow in both directions. This book tells the story of how sociocultural developments over the past 30 years acted on post-Boomer Americans in ways that made most of them believe that traditional religion was not relevant, valuable, or attractive.
People must share culture at least somewhat within and across their social groups in order to function. But culture also varies between people and groups, especially in large, diverse, pluralistic societies. The traditional idea of culture as systems of ideas commonly embraced by all members of tribes or societies is inaccurate. As much as cultures can seem like orderly systems, they are also often internally disjointed. People understand culture as knowledge about what is real and how to live, and they measure its worth more by its pragmatic effects than by its philosophical coherence. Often, people assume and believe things that are logically contradictory, but rarely does that bother them as long as it all helps them get by in life. Furthermore, as much as culture can foster social solidarity, cultural differences also organize status distinctions and conflicts. Culture is the central medium by which social processes determine winners and losers. To understand American religion’s demise, we need to attend to sociological issues of cultural identity, solidarity, conflict, competition, and transformation.
Another key distinction concerns different levels of people’s conscious awareness of culture. Important here is the concept of “deep culture.” Humans vary in how much of their culture they consciously reflect on. Some parts of culture occupy people’s awareness only when they focus directly on them. Other parts people consider attentively only when circumstances force them to do so. Many other parts of culture, however, are so “obvious,” so taken for granted, so “natural” that they rarely, if ever, are brought to mind. “Deep culture” refers to knowledge that is so well established, widely shared, embedded in institutions, and taken for granted by nearly everyone that it need never come up for conscious inspection or affirmation.11 In the United States, for example, the right of individual self-determination belongs to deep culture—being axiomatic, invisibly sacred—but the same does not in collectivist societies like China. Simply subjecting deep culture to questioning can be unnerving and threatening to the “existential security” that such culture normally provides. The obsolescence of American religion was in part the outcome of long-term shifts in deep culture.
People learn most of their basic culture knowledge and practices as children, adolescents, and emerging adults, and their cultural values and outlooks normally remain stable across their adult lives. Some individuals do change dramatically, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule. This means that generations of populations who come of age during the same times and experience the same historical events not only tend to share cultural sensibilities but also retain them through life. That leads us to expect that much historical cultural change occurs not within generations but between them. That is clearly true in our case of religious decline, as we see in the Chapter 1. To explain such changes sociologically, we need to examine the larger social transformations that drove key cultural shifts that impinged most upon younger generations. That is the strategy of this book.
Zeitgeist. I mentioned above that this book will explore the cultural zeitgeist that developed in recent decades to help explain religion’s losses. “Zeitgeist” is a German-derived word that means “spirit of the age” or “times” (geist, spirit, like ghost + zeit, literally, time). Johns Hopkins University sociologist Monika Krause defines zeitgeists as “patterns in meaningful practices that are period-specific, cross over different areas of social life, and extend across geographical contexts.”12 Zeitgeists emerge and represent particular “stand-out” moments in history. They involve different institutional spheres of social life and groups of people. And they transcend specific locations and situations. We can analyze a zeitgeist, Krause writes, by investigating the formal properties of its particular time duration, the social scope of involvement or influence, the narrative course it follows, and the characteristic media and groups that “carry” it. I add that zeitgeists are also defined by specific embodying public figures and celebrities, crucial events, representative artistic and symbolic expressions, shared slogans, and other types of meaningful cultural markers present in real time (then) and in collective memory (later).13
Three examples of zeitgeists in American history that help to illustrate this are the Wild West, the Roaring Twenties, and the Sixties. Each of these readily evokes specific examples fitting the analytical categories above for anyone who was part of or knows about each period. The Roaring Twenties, for instance: the end of the First World War, economic boom, lavish parties, speakeasies, flappers and libertines, The Great Gatsby, bobbed hairdos, jazz, the Charleston, Art Deco, sexual license, organized crime, Coolidge, Hoover, moving pictures, the Golden Age of Radio, and the era’s sudden collapse with the 1929 Black Tuesday crash of Wall Street. Readers can generate their own zeitgeist associations for the two other examples—which would no doubt include shared themes, images, events, symbols, slogans, and representatives for each. The point is not that any zeitgeist, whether experienced or remembered, fully describes most of what happened during its era. The Wild West was experienced very differently by Native Americans than it was by white settlers. And the Twenties were hardly Roaring for African Americans in the South. A zeitgeist rather captures and represents the defining spirit of an era—the dominant cultural “atmosphere” “in the air” of a particular period, which characterizes what the era was or is most definitively understood to be about. Zeitgeists are not about the typical experience of the average person during the era, but instead are the leading and most visible movements of people who are defining the cutting edge of cultural developments and the feeling of the age.
