Why Religion Went Obsolete, page 6
A mostly rural Black district conference leader in a mainline Protestant denomination reported that
I see new complexities related to ministry. Before, church was the staple of communities in my area, not optional, so they put some fear into younger people. Now people are more aware, do their own research, don’t need the church, feel they can have community on their own, not in a building. People now have ways to explore other faith traditions, not Christianity, and struggle to understand who God is and identify more as agnostic or atheists. The church has done a disservice to our witness too, with its own failings, creating a dark shadow over why anyone would want to be Christian, which affects foundational pillars of church work. People are ashamed, afraid to share their faith, keep it to themselves. We don’t have adequate words for sharing faith, people do not share out loud, it’s hidden, so then fewer others hear and know about it. Society as a whole has also contributed. Younger generations do not look to church as a primary place to be, don’t value going to church except on holidays. They don’t see how following Christ is a value-add to living lives. “Spiritual” is more popular, expressed in forms that don’t require church. People do want community, to impact the world, that’s still important. But not in church. Church now after COVID is like Netflix, you can binge watch on your schedule or tune it out. Why dress up and go Sunday morning when you can do what you want when you want? So the church needs to reimagine how to meet people where they are, not require Sunday mornings. But it’s not clear we will do that.
More concisely, one pastor participant in an evangelical pastoral education class I monitored online observed simply, “There is nothing in the culture anymore that supports or reinforces what we are doing in Christian ministry.”30
These observations and others reported to me suggest that a new cultural zeitgeist has emerged within which religious institutions are struggling to operate successfully. The winds have shifted, and it is no longer clear how best to sail. None of these observers provides a systematic analysis—they emphasize different features of the new context and specific difficulties it poses. Beyond the specific challenges, however, one detects a general groping in the dark for a clearer understanding of that bigger, inhospitable environment and what to do about it. Religious institutions lack any clear strategy or roadmap for renegotiating this new cultural terrain. These voices express not only loss but also being at a loss—the very kind of thing we would expect to hear from leaders whose institutions are suffering obsolescence.31
Conclusion
This chapter set out to establish an empirical fact; namely, that traditional American religion has in recent decades suffered major losses on multiple fronts, primarily among younger generations.32 The evidence suggests that at least some of these losses built on longer-term trends, which appear to have paused in the 1980s, but which picked up again in the early 1990s and have accelerated since. Generation X was the pivot point that sent the culture off in new directions, forging an initial shift that Millennials self-assuredly embraced and have carried forward. Evidence suggests, too, that Boomers may be increasingly following the path first cleared by their children.
I take the multiple survey measures and reports of religious workers on the ground, discussed above, as indicators of a larger, latent cultural fact: that traditional religion in the United States has gone obsolete. Every indicator I have seen supports this interpretation. This is not just a story of declines in various sociological measures of religiousness: something bigger and more pervasive has occurred at the macro-cultural level. For younger generations especially, traditional religion has gone the way of the electric typewriter. Somewhere around the turn of this century, traditional religion shifted from being merely disfavored to being obsolete.
Do we have reason to believe that measurable religious decline indicates cultural obsolescence? We directly asked Americans their views on the matter. Table 1.1 shows the results of a question we asked on the 2023 Millennial Zeitgeist Survey about religion’s relevance (“Which of the following comes closest to your view about the relevance of traditional religion in the US today?”). Cultural obsolescence, remember, involves much more than summations of survey opinions. But surveys can be useful indicators. Non-religious and less-religious Americans are the ones who have driven religious obsolescence. Regular religious service attenders, we can infer almost by definition, assume that religion is relevant. Table 1.1 thus presents findings both for “lower attenders” (those who attend religious services less frequently than once a month) and for the full sample. We see there that, among the 71% of Americans ages 25–77 who attend religious services less than once a month, 51% of Millennials report that they think US religion is obsolete (25+26%). Another 15% say they do not know, which suggests a disconnection from or lack of interest in the issue itself. About one-quarter grants that religion is somewhat relevant. Only 8% of lower-attending Millennials say that traditional religion is highly relevant—a minority that is highly disproportionately “born again” Protestants. (Exactly what this minority of respondents has in mind about religion being relevant we do not know. It is possible that some, likely not the “born again” group, are simply acknowledging that religion drives important political conflict—culture wars by the Christian Right and religious nationalists, for example. That, however, would not necessarily be an affirmation of the religion’s value, since they may hate the religiously driven conflict that makes it socially relevant.) The bottom line is that two-thirds of the Millennial generation view religion as either obsolete or not a matter they have an opinion about, which is arguably an indirect expression of obsolescence.
Table 1.1 Views of Traditional US Religion’s Relevance or Obsolescence by Generation
View of relevance of traditional US religion Early Boomers Later Boomers Gen Xers Millennials
Lower attenders
Totally obsolete 11 9 11 25
Somewhat obsolete 26 28 34 26
Somewhat relevant 33 29 30 26
Highly relevant 22 23 11 8
Don’t know 9 11 14 15
Full sample
Totally obsolete 8 7 8 20
Somewhat obsolete 19 24 27 23
Somewhat relevant 28 28 29 27
Highly relevant 39 30 26 16
Don’t know 6 11 11 14
TOTALS (unweighted n’s): 100(n = 341) 100(n = 358) 100(n = 485) 100(n = 677)
Source: Millennial Zeitgeist Survey, 2023 (N = 1,861).
Notes: Percents may not add to 100 due to rounding. Lower attenders attend religious services once a month or less often.
As expected, older generations tend to view religion as more relevant than do Millennials, trending up from Gen Xers to Boomers. This means that, absent an unlikely future transformation in Millennials’ views of religion, generational change will mean that more Americans will view religion as obsolete with each passing year. Also as expected, adding in the balance of survey respondents who attend religious services once a month or more often (the lower half of the table) increases reports of religion’s relevance a little. The overall patterns are the same for the full sample as for the 71% of lower attenders, but the distributions shift a bit toward relevance. All of this comports with my argument about obsolescence: it does not mean total extinction or abandonment. Clearly some younger Americans still practice religion and view it as relevant. They are a distinct minority, however, whose share more in common with older generations than with their peers who are driving a different attitude about religion. Behind these basic survey numbers lie multiple layers of shared, influential cultural meanings, movements, and institutions—as we will see in the chapters that follow—that reinforce these trends. In short, for the majority of Millennials, religion has simply become obsolete. In the rest of this book, I will try to explain why and how that happened.
2
Religion Is Good When . . .
To understand why the social changes examined in the following chapters worked to make traditional religion obsolete, we must begin by understanding how Americans think about what religion is good for. Religious leaders may hope that people are religious because they believe the doctrines are true. Surely that’s the case for some people. But Americans also value religion for reasons beyond theology—indeed, for reasons that are just as important, or even more important, to them than theology. Most Americans have a set of criteria for what proper religion should be and do, principles that make religion not just right but also good and useful. When they see religion validate those principles, they tend to affirm and support it. When they see religion violate those principles, they doubt, distance, and detach themselves. Explaining changes in Americans’ interest in religion, therefore, requires understanding what Americans expect of religion and whether they see religion living up to those expectations.
In addition to the religious doctrines that Americans may or may not care about, they also evaluate religion by six imminent goods they believe it ought to deliver. People need not be consciously aware of these expectations and standards. Nobody articulates these assumed expectations systematically. But when people talk about why religion is good or bad, valuable or problematic, it becomes clear that these assumptions are running in the background of their minds. They help comprise the “cultural models” that govern what most Americans expect from religion and what they use to determine their evaluations of it.1 These six goods are as follows.
1. Morals: Religion is good when it helps people to be good, moral, and nice and to make good choices in life—especially by teaching children the basics of ethics and decency.
Religion’s primary job, in the minds of most Americans, is to make people good. Good people make life nicer for everyone and help society to function better. As one person told us bluntly, “A lot of religion is the practicality of how to get along with others so we can operate without killing each other, without disrupting the safety and security of people, so we can go about and be productive in some sense. Kind of offers an antidote to anarchy, I suppose.”
Religion, most Americans assume, is at heart about teaching people to be moral and providing motivations to behave well. The Ten Commandments, Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan, the command to love thy neighbor—all are tools for making people moral. As one person we interviewed told us, “Religion is one cultural tool useful for instilling values. If you look at the Golden Rule or other codification of kindness in various religions, you can see that is often a principle of religion, and religion can be a great tool for that.” But the details do not matter much since most Americans consider all religions ultimately to offer essentially the same core moral teachings: be kind, forgive, do not steal or cheat, do not be mean or hurtful, do your best to be ethical and caring.2 One of our interview subjects expressed this clearly: “Most religions are similar in style, basically the whole point in treating your neighbors as your brother, just being an overall good person, don’t steal or harm, so on. A lot of religions are very similar. They have basic codes of conduct.” Another put it more pithily: “Same stories, different deity.”
Adults, most Americans think, may need some reminding about these moral teachings. But it is children who really need to learn basic morals because they are training for life and highly impressionable. Parents, most Americans believe, should be the primary moral teachers of children, but it can be smart for parents to draw on the aid of religious traditions to reinforce what they impart. Americans do not agree about children’s innate morality. Some believe that children are naturally good but can benefit from having their innate moral decency reinforced by religion. Others think that children have both good and bad tendencies that can lead them down very different paths so they can definitely benefit from the positive ethical teachings of religion to steer them toward the correct path. Either way, if parents opt to draw on religious resources to help their children turn out to be good people, then religion is performing its proper function. As one person told us, “Growing up in the church, there were a lot of things I felt were really good teachings. Nowadays I completely disagree with the majority of it, but having the church as a child and it being a positive experience was a good way for me to tell good versus bad.”
Sunday school, Bible school, Hebrew school, religious summer camps, religious day care, and hearing scripture read by clergy: these are valuable resources for early childhood moral education. For minority religious traditions with strong ethnic ties—such as Indian Hindus or Thai Buddhists—cultural clubs organized by temples also help to keep children tied to family identities and moral and cultural values. Teenage youth groups are also a good reinforcement of moral teachings for middle schoolers and, if parents can keep them attending that long, for high schoolers. Plus, these religious activities surround young people with peers from families who share their religious backgrounds and, presumably, moral ideals—thus reducing the time they might be exposed to less-positive influences.
Religion is also a good place for adults who have strayed from the path of moral living to get back on track. In the words of one interviewee, “I believe people can change, they just need to find some sort of guidance.” That may involve attending a 12-step recovery group sponsored by a religious congregation. It may mean seeking healing and forgiveness in a religious counseling or support group. It might mean confession and guidance from clergy, elders, deacons, or other religious leaders. It could require becoming part of an “accountability group.” Or it may simply be the renewed involvement in religion by adults who know in their heart that they need a life reset and could use the support of other good people. Whatever the circumstances and needs, the background assumption is that religion stands ready to help any person with the right intentions to acknowledge what is good and turn away from the bad.
Religion, according to this framework, is also expected to approach the teaching of moral goodness with persuasion, gentleness, and grace. Law enforcement, schools, justice systems, workplaces, and other secular social institutions cannot simply let all kinds of bad behavior go. They must be prepared to punish wrongdoing and failure as justice requires. American religion, however, is almost unique as an institution (families are the other example) in that people expect it to combine the serious promotion of good conduct with a generous acceptance of wrongdoing, at least when some version of confession and remorse is forthcoming. When someone violates a rule, members of the clergy, Bible study groups, and fellow believers should not behave like the police. Rather, people expect that, in religious contexts, people will deal with moral transgressions more gently. For Christians, for example, “God is gracious and forgives all transgressions,” “Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone,” and “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” should be guiding principles. When that attitude is deployed as expected, most Americans approve.3
Two caveats. First, although most Americans see making people good as religion’s primary purpose, few believe that religion holds a monopoly on training people in good morals. Many people and social institutions—families, parents, relatives, schools, teachers, sports teams, coaches, clubs, mentors, and more—teach and promote ethical living. That just happens to be one of religion’s primary functions and values. Nearly all Americans say that the primary incubator for good values is the family and the primary teachers are parents. Religion, as most see it, is a more or less useful supplement. Some may want or need it, others might not. The choice is voluntary and depends on circumstances. To anticipate a key point that will emerge more fully below, this essentially means that, in the view of most Americans, the most important task religion specializes in—making people good—is not something that requires religion. That is, religion holds no “patent” on its most important “product,” it enjoys no monopoly on the leading “service” it offers. By simple logic, then, most Americans see religion as a non-essential—an option, a supplement, a life accessory from which someone may or may not benefit. The position that religion holds in the larger field of social “goods and services,” as many essentially see it, is clearly not strong.4
Second, nearly all Americans know that, realistically, not all religious people are good. Common is the assumption that, while in any given group or organization there will always be some bad apples, these need not spoil the whole barrel. Americans, in other words, do not expect perfection from religion. At the same time, most Americans also recognize that plenty of non-religious people are morally good. Religious and non-religious people and groups contain both good and bad. For many Americans, that itself does not condemn religion to irrelevance. Religion can still help many people to live good lives, even if some in religion are bad and religion is not required to be good. But this realistic recognition makes religion vulnerable in two ways. First, it adds weight to the idea that religion holds no monopoly or patent on its leading product. Second, there is a limit on the number of possible bad apples people will tolerate in the barrel. If religion ends up having too many bad people, then its reason for existing—and its credibility—is lost. Religion, in other words, faces a threshold for internal problems that, if crossed, discredits it. In some ways, most Americans, even if they are not personally religious, have big expectations of religion. And, as the saying goes, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. We will see the results of this framework of thinking engaging lived experience in the 1990s.
2. Positive psychology: Religion is good when it helps people cope with life, sustain a positive outlook, and feel calm, happy, affirmed, and encouraged.
