Christian Smith says that traditional religion hasn’t merely lost adherents — it’s become culturally obsolete. That’s the claim at the heart of his 2025 book, Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America. Smith spoke with me over Zoom from St. Petersburg, Fla., after recently retiring as the University of Notre Dame’s William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology. “Religion hasn’t just declined in organizational or numerical terms,” he tells me. “It has undergone something deeper — something at a cultural level.”

When we talk about religion’s fate, Smith observes, we almost always reach for the language of decline. It directs attention to measurable outcomes: attendance numbers, membership rolls, survey results. Those measures matter, he says — in fact, his case is built on data analysis and hundreds of interviews — but they capture only a sliver of the story.

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He urges us to shift our gaze from church stats to the cultural currents shaping everyday life. “In the current zeitgeist, traditional religion just doesn’t make sense,” he says. By “traditional religion,” Smith means the institutional faiths that have long shaped American life, like Catholicism, mainline Protestantism, white evangelicalism, Black Protestantism and Mormonism. And the problem isn’t simply about belief, or lack thereof. “It doesn’t fit ordinary life — not in a cognitive or theological way, but in a cultural vibe way.”

In the United States, the cultural shifts Smith identifies began in the early 1990s and accelerated through the 2000s. Their effects are generational: each cohort — from baby boomers to gen X, millennials and now gen Z — has been progressively less religious than the one before. Millennials, he notes, are the “pivot generation,” coming of age in a world where traditional religion no longer resonated as it once had. (The Canadian case suggests a parallel dynamic unspooling on an earlier timeline.)

To illustrate his point, Smith turns to metaphor. Take vinyl records, he says. Vinyl didn’t fail, and it wasn’t inferior. In terms of sound quality, he notes, it may even be better. But it was overtaken by new formats that fit better with changing habits. Streaming music, for all its compression and loss, is easier to fold into everyday routines.

 So when Smith calls traditional religion “obsolete,” he’s careful to strip the word of judgment. “I’m not saying it’s........

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