In my first decade of ministry, not many writers shaped my thinking more than Christian Smith did with his research on young adults and their emerging new religion, “moralistic therapeutic deism.” Even with this move away from historic Christianity, and rapid decline of church affiliation in the last 25 years, the United States still bucked the trend of secularization in the rest of the West.

Not anymore, Smith argues in his new book, Why Religion Went Obsolete. In his opening line, Smith writes, “Americans have lost faith in traditional religion.” Orthodox religions have become obsolete, like typewriters cast into the landfill during the age of personal computers. No one is angry at the typewriters for not being computers. We just don’t need them or even think about them any longer. Likewise, religion no longer suits America’s “deep culture,” defined by Smith as “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.”

If you’re looking for hope and encouragement, look elsewhere. Analyzing deep culture is hard enough. Redirecting it is nearly impossible. Smith writes, “Conscious ideas and arguments may not matter as much as often-ineffable experiences, aesthetics, impressions, sensibilities, feelings, styles, tastes, gestures, and moods—things vastly harder to recognize, assess, articulate, and engage.” Take mass-consumer capitalism, for example. This culture runs so deep in the United States that few even considered the consequences for religion in the shift from Depression-era values of delayed gratifications to today’s “limitless desires, continual accumulation, and the legitimacy of hedonic pleasure.” The solution to the 21st-century crises of 9/11 and COVID-19? Not a return to religion, but first to the mall, and then to Amazon. Echoing his Notre Dame colleague Patrick Deneen, Smith observes that the U.S. political system “accentuates individualism, downplays collective identities, and emphasizes procedural rights over substantive goods.”

The tectonic plates of culture began to shift with Generation X and Millennials at the beginning of the 1990s with the end of the Cold War. Like prophets born before their time, Protestant liberals Harnack and Fosdick finally prevailed in the America of the Bushes and Clinton. Americans realized they didn’t need religion to be good. They didn’t want religion to challenge them. They didn’t really want community, or at least accountability. And they didn’t want families, at least until later. They wanted to work, make a lot of money, and buy a lot of stuff. They knew “the self is one’s primary concern, personal authenticity is paramount, and subjective experience is authority,” according to Smith. And if traditional religions fought back, they only undermined their value as cultural peacemakers. Not that religion had much credibility anyway, as Boomer megachurch peppiness failed to match the Gen X angst of Nirvana. Not to mention the abuse crisis first exposed in the Catholic Church in the early 2000s. “Religious scandals were not the straw but the log that broke the camel’s back,” Smith writes.

If the deepest assumptions of American politics, economics, and culture preclude traditional religion, what can we do? Not much, Smith says. “Religious institutions lack any clear strategy or roadmap for renegotiating this new cultural terrain,” he writes in a summary of why Tim Keller and I started The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics in 2023. Smith goes as far as to say, “It can sometimes seem remarkable, in fact, that any younger Americans remain religious at all.” Put Smith squarely in the pessimism camp on Gen Z and religion. “Some may hope that a post-Gen Z generation will in time revival traditional religion. But, at present, nothing on the sociological horizon indicates this as likely. Quite the opposite.”

Compared to some of my colleagues, I’m not as skeptical of sociology and statistics. I’ve employed Smith’s observations in the past, and I’ve already used this book in teaching about Western secularism. Still, we must be discerning about how writers select and deploy statistics. For example, you’ve probably heard, even in a sermon, that half of marriages end in divorce. It’s a sobering, even scary statistic. But you don’t often hear how the number is skewed upward by the same people who get divorced multiple times. And you don’t always hear that when you control for factors such as regular church attendance, the number declines dramatically.

The same discernment must be applied to Smith. The best sociology researchers still depend on their intuitions and presuppositions to make selective interpretations. Notably, former Protestant Smith devotes a section of his book to faulting the “evangelical biblicist foundational epistemology” for the decline of traditional Christianity. Just before he converted to Catholicism, Smith published a book on this same subject. Yet as fellow sociologist Ryan Burge has shown, self-identified evangelicals have held steadier than other religious traditions as share of the American population. So from a sociological perspective, why devote sections to “evangelical” mission drift, “evangelical” spirituality, and “evangelical” purity campaigns when evangelicals have been more effective than perhaps any other religious group in retaining and converting younger generations?

Smith might be surprised that any younger Americans remain religious. He might see nothing on the sociological horizon that portends hope for Gen Z and traditional religion. But the whole premise of his book is that times change. Even in the time of writing his book Smith missed the surge of distrust for science after COVID-19. He found a stigma on judgmentalism during an era that included the rise and fall of the Great Awokening. If younger generations have abandoned traditional religion, they haven’t yet landed on any foundation more secure.

“This is how cultural meanings often shift—less through conscious belief formation, more through the repetition of concepts and images that evoke powerful emotions,” Smith writes. Yes, Christians who write weighty apologetic tomes in response to TikTok deconstruction videos will likely waste their time. But the larger point Smith makes is that no one can really predict or control the shifts in deep cultures any more than we can predict earthquakes. The wise still build foundations on the rock. The winds will blow. The rain will fall. The waters will rise. But they will not be shaken.