Is Religion on the Decline? Q+A with Sociologist Christian Smith

"Some of what we are observing is genuine religious decline and some is simply religious transformation.”

CHF: You open your book Religion: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters with an interesting claim: “Anyone who wants to understand the world today has got to understand religion.” This is a big question, but can you explain why religion is such an enduring part of human existence?

Christian Smith: For most of the twentieth century, academic secularization theory predicted that religion would decline with modernity and retreat to the furthest margins of society. Since the late 1970s, the empirical facts have made it clear that religion is far more enduring than secularization theory understood.

Religion persists and in many cases exerts significant causal powers in public life, for better and worse. There are many reasons for this. Two that I examine in my book are that religion is an easier and natural way for the human brain to think than, say, scientific methodology (an argument that recent cognitive scientists have advanced) and that religion provides people with a lot of help and support for coping with the difficulties of life when human means hit their limits.

So humans are built in a way that makes religion come easily to them, and life is such that many people find religion to be helpful for coping with their problems, not to mention providing meaningful beliefs and practices with which to order life.

CHF: How do you define religion? And why did you attempt a new definition? After several millennia, one would expect the matter to be settled.

Christian Smith: Far from being settled, religion scholars continue to disagree about how to conceptualize and define religion. That is partly because religion itself is a really complicated and highly varied phenomenon, and it is not always easy to know where its boundaries lie.

There are all kinds of problems with the traditional definitions of religion as belief in spirits, transcendence, the sacred, and so on. I follow the approach of former University of Chicago Divinity School sociologist, Martin Riesebrodt, which focuses on culturally prescribed practices seeking access to superhuman powers. That, I think, resolves the old problems best and opens up fruitful ways of understanding religions around the world.

CHF: Recent studies show that religious affiliation in the United States is on the decline. How do we account for this shift?

Christian Smith: Secularization theory has proven invalid as a general prediction of religion’s fate in modernity. But powerful secularizing forces are still at work in the modern world. In the U.S., strong evidence suggests that Americans’ participation in traditional religious forms is indeed declining and the number of Americans who describe themselves as not religious is growing dramatically. This is especially true about young people, whose distance from religion is the greatest.

Various forces help to explain this. One is that a lot of people have been turned off by religion by what they see as a judgmental and politically intrusive Christian Right since the 1970s. Another is the repulsive violence of some forces within militant Islam, especially the attacks of 9/11. Yet another factor is demographic, namely, the deinstitutionalization of the “traditional” nuclear family, in that religion and family are very tightly connected in the U.S. Family life has been transformed by the divorce and sexual revolutions, single parenthood, cohabitation, delayed childbirth, increased voluntary childlessness, and so on. Traditional religious institutions and practices have suffered as a consequence. The sex abuse scandal and cover-ups of the Catholic Church are a contributing factor, too. And an aggressive movement of New Atheists has capitalized on much of this to not only create space for unbelief but to proselytize for the extinguishing of all religions.

To be sure, many post-religious Americans still hold religious beliefs and engage in religious practices such as prayer, but their religious forms and expressions are more individualistic and personal. So some of what we are observing is genuine religious decline and some is simply religious transformation.

“Most U.S. youth seem frenzied with the challenges of succeeding in our increasingly competitive neoliberal capitalist society.”

CHF: In a polarized political landscape, what advice can you give to ease the tensions between people of faith and non-believers? It seems that many of the cultural issues that flame up come election season have a way of dividing us beyond reconciliation...

Christian Smith: These are very hard and distressing times. The old Enlightenment ideas of reason, tolerance, freedom of conscience, and pluralistic civility have clearly been eroding. Sometimes I wonder what holds America together anymore other than hyper-consumerist capitalism.

Anyway, I’m not an advice columnist. But sociologically, part of the problem is that changes in residential patterns, voluntary association memberships, and digital media have increasingly concentrated together people who tend to assume, think, and believe alike. Fewer people routinely come across and have a chance to interact at a human level with others who are very different from them—religious and secular, liberal and conservative.

It then becomes easier to trash and demonize those who are different without really having to face and engage them. That would suggest that those of us who are interested in sustaining a respectful and civil politics and culture, instead of simply yelling at each other and power-grabbing, would do well to get to know some real humans who are different, to try to understand from their perspective how and why they see things as they do, and to learn to have civil if not mutually horizon-expanding conversations.

You know, most of the time people are not as bad face-to-face in conversations as they seem from a distance or over the Internet. That approach, however, presupposes that we in our culture have the resources of openness to learning, some humility, and a greater commitment to happy coexistence than just winning.

I hope that as we pass through this very difficult present moment, we can come out on the other side with some of that still available to draw upon.

CHF: As an educator in the sociology and theory of religion, what sorts of questions do you typically encounter from your students? What’s the chance that Generation Z will return to religion to find meaning in their lives?

Christian Smith: Most students naturally process religion conceptually in light of their own personal experiences of it growing up. And even the majority of Catholic students at Notre Dame are quite diverse. So the questions vary.

Most students I encounter hold very ill-informed and simplistic ideas about religion. Most know very little about other religions around the world—indeed, many know little about their own religious traditions. And when they actually learn some about Buddhism, Sikhism, and Islam, they find it fascinating.

Religion is not taught much or well in high school, partly because of misinformed fears about the separation of church and state. So we are a nation of mostly religious illiterates. And that does nothing, speaking to the previous question, to foster mutual understanding across our differences. So teaching students about religions is a good and rewarding vocation.

As to youth and the next generation, I see nothing on the cultural horizon leading me to think they will “return” to religion in any significant way. A small minority of American millennials is devoting itself to highly traditional religious vocations and practices—becoming Catholic nuns, for example. But most U.S. youth seem frenzied with the challenges of succeeding in our increasingly competitive neoliberal capitalist society.

I think it would take some catastrophic environmental or military upheaval for that to change. Meanwhile, in other parts of the world—from sub-Saharan Africa to China—religion is enjoying a big resurgence.

HEADER PHOTO CREDIT: NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS | STEPHANIE LEBLANC

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