Why Religion Went Obsolete, page 3
It must immediately be noted that social scientists and historians have for very long been averse—virtually allergic—to the concept of zeitgeist, so much so that the term is essentially obsolete in scholarship. One reason is that “zeitgeist” comes tainted by a genuinely problematic intellectual history shaped by thinkers like Georg W. F. Hegel and Karl Mannheim. Another is that it feels amorphous due to its evocation of metaphors like “spirit” and “atmosphere.” How can we scientifically measure anything “in the air?” Is this not merely undisciplined amateur history-speak and simplistic pop cultural memory?
These objections can be answered. For starters, it is possible to reformulate the concept of zeitgeist to strip it of the problematic features of its intellectual legacy and make it a useful analytical category for contemporary social science. The work of Monika Krause mentioned above does just that, rehabilitating zeitgeist as a concept for analytical purposes so that the empirics of any given case, rather than a preconceived philosophy of history or tightly constructed social theory, drives its uses.14 To discard the concept as useless because zeitgeists are amorphous and difficult to measure also exhibits a scientistic positivism that we ought not to accept in the first place. Certain real features of human social life are simply less clear and measurable than others, yet these are often the most crucial. If there are such things as zeitgeists—as our phenomenological experiences of history tell us there are—we must do our best to study and understand them, however challenging that may be. Refusing concepts like zeitgeist, furthermore, seems to betray a “flat” view of history as merely so many chains of causal events and results. Judgments about the boundaries of historical eras and analyses of the significance of their key events, figures, symbols, sensibilities, and even geists require interpretation. But so does every other method and procedure in social science, however “objective” they may seem. I therefore proceed to use zeitgeist as a central analytical concept, leaving its validity to be judged by how illuminating it proves to be. For convenience, I will call the one we have recently been living through the “Millennial zeitgeist.”
Generations. The story here is not about all Americans but primarily the experiences, interests, and identities of younger generations—of the coming-of-age teenagers, emerging adults, and younger adults who reached midlife in the 1990s and 2000s. Like zeitgeists and their historical eras, generations are culturally meaningful groupings that can be analytically useful ways to understand big social transformations.15 They map especially well onto the religious changes of interest here. I deploy the conventional categories of Generation X and Millennials, bookended by Baby Boomers and Gen Zers. When it comes to religious obsolescence, Baby Boomers (born 1946–1964) are the backdrop scenery. The real action starts with Generation X (born 1965–1980) and takes off with Millennials (born 1981–1996). Gen X was the transitional hinge of cultural and religious change, breaking with the old order and signaling new directions. Millennials picked up that lead and substantially developed and advanced the new zeitgeist. Gen Z (born 1997–2012) is now carrying forward and working out the details of the new normal. Boomers helped prepare the ground for religion’s growing obsolescence. But it was Americans in their teens, 20s, and 30s in the 1990s and 2000s who really made it happen.
Two Decades of Converging Perfect Storms
All of the evidence about traditional American religion’s recent troubles points to two crucial decades of decisive change: the 1990s and 2000s. Little of the upheaval that was about to occur was evident before 1990. Fifteen or 20 years later, most everything about the new zeitgeist was evident and normalized. And everything since the late 2000s has essentially been extension, fallout, and mop-up. I can be even more precise. The pivotal year marking the launch of the new zeitgeist that remade religion was 1991. None of us knew that at the time. But, looking back, we can see that 1991 was the year the cultural tide turned on American religion’s fortunes. Why and how so I explain in chapters ahead. And the year the momentous changes were completed? That is less clear, but I will say 2009. By that year, nearly all that mattered for our story—the causes of religion’s obsolescence—had happened or at least been set in irreversible motion. Most by then had also become aware that things were not looking good for traditional religion.16 So, nearly all of the important action actually happened during the two decades straddling the turn of this century. Or so I shall argue the evidence tells us.
Stepping back, as a prospective summary, my account here as a whole concerns big cultural transformations resulting from huge historical events and institutional changes driven by developments in technology, economics, politics, the media, education, business, social networks, law, marriage and family, and even warfare, all of which have played crucial though mostly unintended causal roles in driving religion into obsolescence. The reasons for these transformations were largely institutional. But the decisive changes affecting traditional religion were mediated through culture—across widespread, transformed assumptions, beliefs, values, norms, expectations, and aesthetics, as those shaped young people’s life experiences, interests, identities, and commitments.
Those cultural transformations altered the sociocultural landscape that religion occupied, generating a new cultural zeitgeist that proved inhospitable to traditional religion. Religion became a species struggling mostly unsuccessfully to reproduce itself in a profoundly altered ecosystem featuring scarce resources and fierce competitors. Young people were coming of age in the face of new outlooks and opportunities for meeting their functional and existential needs. Religion’s title to whatever piece of life’s goods that it had once “owned” was disappearing. That spelled its obsolescence.
The Empirical Evidence
This book draws on a wide range of kinds of evidence to make its argument, summarized here and available in detail online.17 First, the project team I led conducted 209 personal interviews with a diverse sample of 18-to-54-year-olds living in the United States. The vast majority of these interviews were conducted in 2022, sampled from a nationally representative survey fielded by AmeriSpeak of the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. On that survey we asked a set of questions about respondents’ religious histories and commitments that enabled us to target certain kinds of people for follow-up, in-depth interviews. Those included people who had declined religiously since their highly religious youth (called Decliners here), those who were raised religious and continued as adults to be religious (Maintainers), those who increased in religion since youth (Increasers), and those who had always been low and not religious (Nevers).18 We also targeted “cultural creatives”—that is, those who worked in culture-producing occupations such as journalists, internet content creators, writers, and teachers. This produced interview data from respondents most relevant to our empirical and theoretical concerns yet drawn from a nationally representative probability sample of Americans. We also did pilot interviews in 2021 and 2022, designed to test the usefulness of our interview questions, which relied on convenience sampling and were conducted with mostly Millennials. These pilot interviews proved so interesting and useful that I include them in the larger interview dataset. Figure I.2 shows the locations of those we interviewed for this study.
Figure I.2 Locations of the 209 interviews conducted for this study.
In addition to the 209 interviews, we conducted four focus groups with an average of six participants in each. Focus group participants were mostly Millennials who had declined in religiousness since growing up, lived in Indiana and Michigan, and were recruited using online ads and indirect word of mouth. The focus groups, rather than asking participants to respond to verbal questions about their ideas and experiences, asked them simply to express and then explain their emotional reactions to a series of 50 visual images of American religious and non-religious people, social settings, and objects that we showed them without commentary. Assuming that people’s relation to religion is based at least as much on affective feeling as conceptual beliefs, we wanted the focus groups to tap into emotional responses to visual representations rather than replies to verbal prompts. We recorded the focus group discussions digitally and in research notes, which we transcribed, and then systematically analyzed them together as a research team.
For data that could speak to historical changes in cultural discourses, I conducted multiple systematic searches of hundreds of keywords by individual years in book titles, online references, scholarly publications; various news, business, and political publications; television news coverage; and US newspapers going back to the early twentieth century. I first identified broad conceptual categories of theoretical and explanatory relevance potentially represented in these media. I then generated lists of every conceivably culturally relevant keyword or phrase for each of these categories. With the help of a digital data search expert, I systematically searched various digital corpuses of relevant bodies of data, counting per year the number of hits for each keyword or phrase. I aggregated those counts to sum the total number of hits for all keywords and phrases related to the broad conceptual categories across the years observed. The results are presented in figures and tables in many of the following chapters.
Fourth, after the main lines of argument for this book were developed and drafted, I conducted a second nationally representative survey on a host of beliefs and practices, religious and otherwise. The purpose of this survey was to assess popular views of many of the key issues and claims I raise in the chapters that follow. AmeriSpeak at NORC conducted this survey in November 2023, completing a sample of 2,009 US adults ages 18 to 77. I report results from the survey throughout the following chapters. Younger Gen Z respondents (ages 18–24) proved still too connected to their teenage years to offer valid comparisons with older generations on many of the questions, so I exclude all but the three oldest years of Gen Z (ages 25–27), which I merge with Millennials for analysis.19
Fifth, this book presents findings from my secondary analyses of multiple existing survey datasets, focusing especially on the General Social Survey (GSS). I also draw on many findings from the Pew Research Center, the Gallup Organization, and other reputable data sources. And I rely on the existing empirical research of countless colleagues and scholars whose names appear in the endnotes.
Finally, beginning with the planning phase of this project in 2021 and continuing thereafter, I engaged many conversations with a wide variety of persons who one way or another had their fingers on the pulse of American religion and possible cultural changes shaping it—mostly clergy and denominational leaders. These conversations were with Christians in mainline, evangelical, Black Protestant, and Catholic circles. They were meant to be sense-checking inquiries, not systematic data gathering and are not reported here except for occasional quotations. For the same reason, throughout this project, as opportunities presented themselves, I also struck up conversations about the issues in this book with various strangers and acquaintances under the age of 50. In many cases, what people had to say was striking, although, again, I systematically analyzed none and only mention a few in the chapters below. No single kind of data I bring to this book is conclusive, but altogether I believe they add up to evidence that makes a convincing case.
A few notes on my use of interview quotes in this book. First, while we sampled our in-depth interviews from a nationally representative survey, we intentionally oversampled those whose religiousness declined or were always low. Our sample of those types are thus representative of these categories of adult Americans, but our complete interview dataset overrepresents them. This means that the quotes in the following chapters are not a proportionate cross-section of all Americans but come especially from those who are less religious and often alienated from religion—exactly what we needed to answer the question of this book. Second, our interviews produced enough quotable evidence that, if included here, would inflate this book into a massive tome. In the interest of keeping this work a reasonable length, I limit interview quotes to only a handful per point they illustrate. The many more supporting quotes that could have also been included I gathered into a document that readers can download online to explore further the way the post-Boomers we interviewed talk about these matters.20 The best way truly to grasp the character of the Millennial zeitgeist is to take the time to read those myriad interview quotes available online. Finally, I do not give demographic details (age, sex, state of residence, etc.) about each person quoted in this book despite gender and sexual identity figuring importantly in the argument. That is because those details about individual interview respondents—which in any case have to be general enough or altered to prevent deductive disclosure—are usually not crucial to the points they make regarding shared generational experiences of macro-cultural change.21
On Interviews, Culture, and Historical Causes
This is a work of historical cultural sociology. Its central question concerns how macro-cultural changes occurring across decades led to the demise of traditional religion. But how can personal interviews conducted in the early 2020s with younger generations provide evidence for an argument about culture preceding and including the 1990s and 2000s? Is there not a temporal disjuncture here? That crucial methodological question requires a response. The answer has three parts. First, interviews are only one piece of the larger assemblage of data supporting my argument, which I use primarily when they speak appropriately to specific points. Whenever possible I triangulate interview data with survey and public discourse data collected and published during the earlier periods in question. Personal retrospection is only one means I employ to understand the past.
Second, many (but not all) of the people we interviewed for this project lived through the key decades in question. They belong to the generations that were crucial in religion’s obsolescence. Memories and retrospective accounts suffer known reliability problems, but they are far from worthless. Interpreted with appropriate caution, interviews can provide valuable evidence of people’s lived experiences and outlooks and, indirectly, of cultural assumptions deemed widely acceptable. Third, interviews can provide valuable data not only for the things people remember and say, but also for what they do not say or remember and how they say what they do say. Delivery matters, not only content. Absences are just as real and telling as presences. Facial expressions, emotional reactions, inflections of speech, patterns of talk, and ignorance and neglect of certain topics and facts matter as much as words on transcription pages. Thus, my research team’s recurring group analytical processing of interviews throughout the course of the project was just as valuable as our formal text analyses. Bottom line: while it would be foolish to rely on contemporary interviews alone to build an argument about historical cultural change, it would be equally unwise not to draw from interviews what useful evidence they have to offer.
Having said that, a few other key points need mentioning. While on an individual level people’s reasons are important causes of their actions, the causes of social outcomes are more than just the sum of people’s reasons.22 Reasons and causes are related in human social life, but they are not identical. People are often not fully aware of or honest with themselves or others about why they do what they do. What they report to themselves and to researchers is often partial and potentially misleading. People are also usually only dimly aware of the larger sociological contexts and forces that shape those motivations. Yes, people lived through the end of the Cold War, 9/11, the invention of the internet, the Great Recession, and so on. But that does not mean they clearly perceived and understood how such events shaped their lives and choices, either at the time or afterward. If they did, we would not need the discipline of sociology—all we would need to understand and explain anything would be simply to ask the people who were involved. But we do need sociology to carefully and systematically fit together the pieces of the big picture that people normally don’t see or understand. Even then, the task is immensely difficult and the result always incomplete. So, we can ask people why they left their religions, but that by itself cannot fully explain “the rise of the nones,” for example. We need in addition to supplement this with richly informed sociological accounts of why those reasons would even be intelligible and motivating to those people in the first place.
This presents particular methodological challenges for macro-social analyses. In the best case, one hopes the influence of the contextualizing sociological forces show up in people’s reports in a way that validates and illustrates the causal powers shaping their choices and actions. “Yes, when the internet was invented that affected me in ways A, B, and C such that I decided to do X and become Z.” When that happens, people’s accounts validate the macro-level arguments. But the limits of people’s perceptions, recollections, interpretations, and articulations mean we are rarely capable of such analytical feats. Instead, we must grapple with gaps between the sociological forces that contextualize people’s activities and whatever goes on in their thoughts, feelings, and desires that they can express in interviews. It usually sorts out quite imperfectly, but there is no way around the problem. Even so, what sociology can produce is immensely more illuminating than what only asking people yields.
In the following chapters, I attempt to bridge the gaps between big-picture sociological contexts and interview accounts in various ways. In the end, readers can judge whether they are convinced or not by the overall argument. Which leads to my final point: all of sociology is interpretive (and quantitative and qualitative). Every good sociological explanation describes qualities, counts quantities, and interprets them within some narrative in order to offer a satisfying explanation. A sociology missing any of those dimensions is impossible. This book is one interpretation of American religion’s recent fate, one centered on the idea of obsolescence. I believe it offers a good and illuminating interpretation, providing insight into what is true about reality. But it is also incomplete and partial. There surely are other ways to narrate stories to capture important facts and features I have missed here. Still, every narration is accountable to the best available evidence. If I succeed, my account should also resonate with the personal experiences of readers who lived through the era I examine. If others disagree, I look forward to hearing their evidence and narratives. That is how good social science progresses.
